>>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.

The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>I Ready, Dave Ante with David Nicholson. We're back at UI Path forward. Five. We're getting ready for the big guns to come in, the two co CEOs, but we have a really special analyst panel now. We're excited to have Daniel Newman here. He's the Principal analyst at Future and Research. And Andy Dai, who's the Vice president and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for making some time to come on the queue. >>Glad to be here. Always >>Good. So, >>Andy, you're deep into ai. You and I have been talking about having you come to our maor office. I'm, I'm really excited that we're able to meet here. What have you seen at the show so far? What are your big takeaways? You know, day one and a half? >>Yeah, well, so first of all, I'm d AI because my last name has AI and I >>Already talk about, >>So, but, but all jokes aside, there are a lot of good things I heard from the conference, right? I mean, one is the last two years because of the pandemic, the growth has been phenomenal for, for a lot of those robotic automation intelligent automation companies, right? So because the low hanging through position making processes have been already taken care of where they going to find the next growth spot, right? That was the question I was looking answers to. And they have some inverse, one good acquisition. They had intelligent document processing, but more importantly they're trying to move from detrimental rules based RPA automation into AI based, more probabilistic subjective decision making areas. That's a huge market, tons of money involved in it, but it's going to be a harder problem to solve. Love to see the execut. >>Well, it's also a big pivot for the, for the company. It started out as sort of a a point product and now is moving to, to platform. But to end of the macro is not in UI pass favor. It's not really in any, you know, tech company's favor, but especially, you know, a company that's going into a transition transitioning to go to market cetera. What are you seeing, what's your take on the macro? I mean, I know you follow the financial markets very closely. There's a lot of negative sentiment right now. Are you as negative as the sentiment? >>Well, the, the broad sentiment comes with some pretty good historical data, right? We've had probably one of the worst market years in multiple decades. And of course we're coming into a situation where all the, the factors are really not in our favor. You've got in interest rates climbing, you've got wildly high inflation, you've had a, you know, helicopters dumping money on the economy for a period of time. And we're, we're gonna get into this great reset is what I keep talking about. But, you know, I had the opportunity to talk to Bill McDermott recently on one of my shows and Bill's CEO of ServiceNow, in case anybody there doesn't know, but >>Former, >>Yeah, really well spoken guy. But you know, him and I kind of went back and forth and we came up with this kind of concept that we were gonna have to tech our way out of what's about to come. You can almost be certain recession is gonna come. But for companies like UiPath, I actually think there's a tremendous opportunity because the bottom line is companies are gonna be looking at their bottom line. A year ago it was all about growth a deal, like the Adobe Figma deal would've been, been lauded, people would've been excited. Now everybody's looking at going, how are they paying that price? Everybody's discounting the future growth. They're looking at the situation, say, what's gonna happen next? Well, bottom line is now they're looking at that. How profitable are we? Are you making money? Are you growing that bottom line? Are you creating earnings? We're >>Gonna come in >>Era, we're gonna come into an era where companies are gonna say, you know what? People are expensive. The inflationary cost of hiring is expensive. You know, what's less expensive? Investing in the cloud, investing in ai, investing in workflow and automation and things that actually enable businesses to expand, keep costs somewhat contained fixed costs, and scale their businesses and get themselves in a good position for when the economy turns to return to >>Grow. So since prior to the pandemic cloud containers, m l and RPA slash automation have been the big four that from a spending data standpoint have been above the line above all kind of the rest in terms of spending momentum up until last quarter, AI and RPA slash automation declined. So my question is, are those two areas discretionary or more discretionary than other technology investments you heard? >>Well, I, I think we're in a, a period where companies are, I won't say they've stopped spending, but you listened to Mark Benioff, you talked about the elongated sales cycle, right? I think companies right now are being very reflective and they're doing a lot of introspection. They're looking at their business and saying, We hired a lot of people. We hired really fast. Do we need to cut? Do we need to freeze? We've made investments in technology, are we getting a return on 'em? We all know that the analytics, whether it's you know, digital adoption platforms or just analytics in the business, say, What is all this money we've been spending doing for us and how productive are we? But I will tell you universally, the companies are looking at workflow automations that enable things. Whether that's onboarding customers, whether that's delivering experiences, whether that's, you know, full, you know, price to quote technologies, automate, automate, automate. By doing that, they're gonna bring down the cost, they're gonna control themselves as best as possible in a tough macro. And then when they come out of it, these processes are gonna be beneficiary in a, in a growth environment even more so, >>Andy UiPath rocketed to a leadership position, largely due to the, the product and the simplicity of the product relative to the competition. And then as you well know, they expanded into, you know, platform. So how do you see the competitive environment? A UI path is again focusing on that platform play Automation Anywhere couldn't get to public market. They had turnover at the go to market level. Chris Riley joined a lot of, lot of hope left Microsoft joined into the fray, obviously is having an impact that you're certainly seeing spending momentum around Microsoft. Then SAP service Now Salesforce, every software company the planet thinks they should get every dollar spent on software. You know, they, they see UI pass momentum and they say, Hey, we can, we can take some of that off the table. How do you see the competitive environment right now? >>So first of all, in in my mind, UI path is slightly better because of a couple of reasons. One, as you said, it's ease of use. >>They're able to customize it variable to what they want. So that's a real easy development advantage. And then the, when you develop the bots and equal, it takes on an average anywhere between two to maybe six weeks, generally speaking, in some industries regulated government might take more so that it's faster, quicker, easier than others in a sense. So people love using that. The second advantage of what they have in my mind is that not only they are available as a managed SA solution on, on cloud, on Azure Cloud, but also they have this version that you can install, maintain, manage any way you want, whether it's a public cloud or, or your own data center and so on so forth. That's not available with almost, not all of them have it, Few have it, but not all of the competitors have it. So they have an advantage there as well. Where it could become useful would be one of the areas that they haven't even expanded is the government. >>Government is the what, >>Sorry? The government. Yeah, related solutions, right? Defense, government, all of those areas when you go, which haven't even started for various reasons. For example, they're worried about laying off people, worried about cost, worried about automating things. There's a lot of hurdles to overcome. But once you overcome that, if you want to go there, nobody's going to use, or most of them will be very of using something on the cloud. So they have a solution for version variation of that. So they are set up to come to that next level. I mean, I don't know if you guys were at the keynote, the CEO talked about how their plans to go from 1 billion to 5 billion in ar. So they're set up to capture the market. But again, as you said, every big software company saw their momentum, they want to get into it, they want to compete with them. So >>Well, to get to 5 billion, they've gotta accelerate growth. I mean, if you do 20% cer over the next, you know, through the end of the decade, they don't quite get there. So they're gonna have to, you know, they lowered their forecast out of the high 20 or mid twenties to 18%. They're gonna have to accelerate that. And we've seen that before. We see it in cloud where cloud, you know, accelerates growth even though you got the lower large numbers. Go ahead Dave. >>Yeah, so Daniel, then how do we, how do we think of this market? How do we measure the TAM for total addressable market for automation? I mean, you know, what's that? What's that metric that shows how unautomated are we, how inefficient are we? Is there a, is there a 5% efficiency that can be gained? Is there a 40% efficiency that can be gained? Because if you're talking about, you know, how much much of the market can UI path capture, first of all, how big is the market? And then is UI path poised to take advantage of that compared to the actual purveyors of the software that people are interacting with? I'm interacting with an E R p, an ER P system that has built into it the ability to automate processes. Then why do I need 'EM UI path? So first, how do you evaluate TAM? Second, how do you evaluate whether UI Path is gonna have a chance in this market where RPAs built into the applications that we actually use? Yeah, >>I think that TAM is evolving, and I don't have it in front of me right now, but what I'll tell you about the TAM is there's sort of the legacy RPA tam and then there's what I would sort of evolve to call the IPA and workflow automation tam that is being addressed by many of these software companies that you asked in the competitive equation. In the, in the, in the question, what we're seeing is a world where companies are gonna say, if we can automate it, we will automate it. That's, it's actually non-negotiable. Now, the process in the ability to a arrive at automation at scale has long been a battle front within the nor every organization. We've been able to automate things for a long time. Why has it more been done? It's the same thing with analytics. There's been numerous studies in analytics that have basically shown companies that have been able to embrace, adopt, and implement analytics, have significantly better performances, better performances on revenue growth, better performances and operational cost management, better performances with customer experience. >>Guess what? Not everybody, every company can get to this. Now there's a couple of things behind this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to close my answer out cause I'm getting a little long winded here. But the first thing is automation is a cultural challenge in most organizations. We've done endless research on companies digitally transforming and automating their business. And what we've found is largely the technology are somewhat comparable. Meaning, you know, I, I've heard what he is saying about some of the advantages of partnership with Microsoft, very compelling. But you know what, all these companies that have automation offerings, whether it's you know, through a Salesforce, Microsoft, whether it's a specialized rpa like an Automation Anywhere or a UI path, their solutions can be deployed and successful. The company's ability to take the investment, implement it successfully and get buy in across the organization tends to always be the hurdle. An old CIO stat, 50% of IT projects fail. That stat is still almost accurate today. It's not 50% of technology is bad, but those failures are because the culture doesn't get behind it. And automation's a tricky one because there's a lot of people that feel on the outside rather than the inside of an automation transformation. >>So, Andy, so how do you think about the, to Dave's question, the SAPs the service nows trying to, you know, at least take some red crumbs off the table. They, they're gonna, they're gonna create these automation stove pipes, but in Automation Anywhere or, or UI path is a horizontal play, are they not? And so how do you think about that progression? Well, so >>First of all, all of this other companies, when they, they, whether it's a build, acquire, what have you, these guys already have what, five, seven years on them. So it's gonna be difficult for them to catch up with the Center of Excellence knowledge on the use cases, what they got to catch up with them. That's gonna be a lot of catch up. Just to give you an idea, Microsoft Power Automate has been there for a while, right? They're supposedly doing well as well, but they still choose to partner with the UiPath as well to get them to the next level. So there's going to be competition coming from all areas, but it's, it's about, you know, highlights. >>So, so who is the competition? Is it Microsoft chipping away an individual productivity? Is it a service now? Who's got a platform play? Is it themselves just being able to execute >>All plus also, but I think the, the most, I wouldn't say competition, but it's more people are not aware of what areas need to be automated, right? For example, one of the things I was talking about with a couple of customers is, so they have a automation hub where you can put the, the process and and task that need to be automated and then you prioritize and start working on it. And, and almost all of them that I speak to, they keep saying that most of the process and task identification that they need to do for automation, it's manual right now. So, which means it's limited, you have to go and execute it. When people find out and tell you that's what need to be fixed, you try to go and fix that. But imagine if there is a way, I mean the have solutions they're showcasing now if it becomes popular, if you're able to identify tasks that are very inefficient or or process that's very inefficient, automatically score them up saying that, you know what, this is what is going to be ROI and you execute on it. That's going to be huge. So >>I think ts right, there's no shortage of, of a market. I would, I would agree with you Rob Sland this morning talked about the progression. He sort of compared it to e R P of the early days. I sort of have a love hate with E R P cuz of the complexity of the implementation and the, and the cost. However, first of all, a couple points and I love to get your thoughts for you. If you went back, I know 25 years, you, you wouldn't have been able to pick SAP out of a lineup and say that's gonna be the leader in E R P and they ended up, you know, doing really, really well. But the more interesting angle is if you could have figured out the customers that were implementing e r p in, in a really high quality fashion, those are the companies that really did well. You buy their stocks, they really took off cuz they were killing their other industry competitors. So, fast forward to automation. Will automation live up to its hype and your opinion, will it be as transformative and will the, the practitioners of automation see the same type of uplift in their markets, in their market caps, in their competitiveness as did sort of the early adopters and the excellent adopters of brp? What are your thoughts? Well, >>I think it's an interesting comparison. Maybe answer it slightly different way. I think the future is that automation is a non-negotiable in every enterprise organization. I think if you're a large organization, we have absolutely filled our, our organizations with waste too much overhead, too much expense, too much technical debt and automation is an answer. This is the way we want to interact, right? We want a chat bot that actually gives us good answers that can answer on a Tuesday at 11:00 PM at night when we want to know if the right dog food, you know, and I'm saying that, you know, that's what we want. That's the outcome we want. And businesses have to be driven by the outcome. Here's what I'm not sure about, Dave, is we have an era where over the last three to five years, a lot of products have become companies and a lot of 'EM products became companies ended up in public markets. >>And so the RPA space is one of those areas that got this explosive amount of growth. And you look at it and there's two ways. Is this horizontally a business rpa or is this going to be something that's gonna be a target of those Microsofts and those SAPs and say, Look, we need hyper automation to be deeply integrated at the E R P crm, hcm SCM level. We're gonna build by this or we're gonna build this. And you're already hearing it in the partnerships, but this is how I think the story ends. I I think either the companies like UiPath get much bigger, they get much more rounded in their, in their offerings. Or you're gonna have a large company like a Microsoft come in and say, you know what? Buy it rather >>Than build can they can, they can, can this company, maybe not so much here, but can a company like Automation Anywhere stay acquisition? Well, >>I use the, I use the Service now as an, as a parallel because they're a company that I thought would always end up inside of a bigger company and now you're like, I think they're too big. I think they've they've dropped >>That, that chart. Yeah, they're acquisition proof. I would agree. But these guys aren't yet Nora's automation. They work for >>A while and it's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes getting bit bought is good, but what I mean is it's gonna be core and these big companies know it cuz they're all talking >>About, but as independent analysts, we want to see independent companies. >>I wanna see the right thing. >>It just makes it fun. >>The right thing >>Customers. Yeah, but you know, okay, Oracle buy more customers, more >>Customers. >>I'm kidding. Yeah, I guess it's the right thing. It just makes it more fun when you have really good independent competitors that >>We >>Absolutely so, and, and spend way more on r and d than these big companies who spend a lot more on stock buyback. But I know you gotta go. Thanks so much for spending some time, making time for Cube Andy. Great to see you. Good to see as well. All right, we are wrapping up day one, Dave Blan and Dave Nicholson live. You can hear the action behind us, forward in five on the Cube, right back.

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

>>from Miami Beach, Florida It's the >>Q covering >>a Cronus Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by a Cronus. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here in Miami Beach of the Blue Hotel. I'm John Kerry. Hosting the Cube for Cronus is global Cyber. Summit 2019. We're here with the chief marketing officer CMO Guide. Our magnet. Nora. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having us. And thanks for coming on. Thank you for talking to me. Not a bad venue. Miami Beach People like it here. It's got a good vibe. >>Yes, a lot of entertainment, actually. For an event perspective, having people in such a nice place is very tough because you have to keep them inside somehow. And you cannot lock their doors. So we have to have really good content. >>People are feeling good. I can see a lot of people smiling people very happy. Congratulations. Take us through the event. Why the event here? What's the main theme? What's the top story that you're telling here at the global Cyber summit? 2019? Sure. So >>way were talking about cyber protection for quite a while. And cyber protection is simple. Terms is combining data protection of cyber security because what we see is happening in the digital world is that traditional data protection, not enough anymore cannot really protect you against all of the threats that you have out there and the number of messages growing. So cyber protection super important and we're developing and selling it for quite a while. But now it is time to keep off really a big push for cyber protection because we have the products that can enable our partners, resellers, service providers, enable and customers and enterprise I t. To deliver seven protection to their work clothes. What we do here at the Summit way, announcing three major things One is a furnace cyber infrastructure, which is a secure, hyper converged infrastructure for running cyber protection. That's external port on the edge workloads because when you run something in the data center, you have the perimeter security. You can protect you with moment. You get out of the data center, you need something really secure and easy to use and also cost efficient because the number of foreclosures growing outside of data center rapidly. So we have this cyber infrastructure way prevented here. Second piece is cyber platform. Cyber is the way for any third party to customize, integrate or extend cyber protection so they can take parts and pieces and integrated into their applications, for they can integrate an application support for customers so they can expand the portfolio of solutions. So that's another picnic. It's a huge thing. No, everybody can integrate cyber protection in any solution and support any type of work. And the third thing going on here is the product, according Cyber Protect, which is basically combination off back up, just a recovery. Cyber security. We have a non to virus. We have anti malware capabilities, but we also have vulnerability assessment, Hatch management, remote management. So it's a combination of multiple tools into one package. So that's really designed for a guy who is already tied off agent for teeth. They don't lots of obligations and doing different things. Tired of managing many things so way, offering them a tool that combines everything that they need to manage outside of the data center. >>You know, I've been really impressed with you guys and do my research for this. Two things jumped out at anyone recover cybersecurity, most from the enterprise space, but also from a data space. You guys have been around for a long time. Great growth, a lot of customers. Great channel relationship with Go to market, which has been successful for you guys in cyber. So cyber security has been your wheelhouse is company, but it's interesting. This theme of the enterprise is coming into focus. So to me, I think it's a huge opportunity. From a market standpoint on the enterprise, you're Tim has traditionally been cyber security. But story is interesting. Your since you're telling an i t story with cyber telling a data story in context to cyber these air coming together, these worlds are here. Talk about that dynamic in the market because that's a market you're targeting specifically. >>So, first of all, a little correction. We do cyber protection, and it's an important difference between several protection of several security, because what we do wait combined data protection so traditional backup disaster recovery file, sink and share all those tools with security. That's vision what is needed for the border protection. So Christ was a traditional data protection company for quite a while, and then we realized that there is this need for security integrated with data protection way started to implement that. So now we're introducing to the market a new type of solution that everybody now recognizes integrated solution between data protection and cyber security. So the market without solution is virtually anybody. But when you talk about the enterprise, the key workloads where you really need that is the edge. So everything outside of the data center edge and end points. And the thing here is that you have just a tiny fraction of all of the devices in your data center. Everything is outside and protecting it, managing it. It's really complicated. That's what we offer now. So you can start protecting those workloads and the edge, what it's like for clothes and >>talk about the product specifically because this platform enabling is interesting. You have a P eyes. You're opening up your developer network of S, V S and M S P's and your customer base. How is that platform going to help that EJ problem and simplify the protection has taken years. >>That helps in a different expects. So in one hand, way as a company would never be able to support all types of work clothes because there's so many different applications and people want to have application and wear protection. So any third party, any eyes via have the expertise with a particular application, they can develop their own workload support so they can support more loads that can support different type of stores. Destinations they can create. Different service is on top off the data so they can process the data. So, for example, they can deliver a malware scanner on top of the back of that will be integrated in the backup solution right so they can extend the platform in that sense. But also it's an opportunity for service providers because full service provided they trying thio differentiate. They all look for something that I will help them to tell the story that they different from the others because the major problem is that if you a service provider you have multiple customers for them, it's very easy to switch to another service providers. So the old for those differentiators and without blood when they can customize they can integrate it with a particular systems and they can focus on specific application. So let's say electronic medical records they can support that for their particular customers. And the customers are going to switch to another provider because they have this customization. And they have a lot of expertise that they can implement through the platform and create a custom my solution, that only them can develop and deliver. So that's That's another aspect of the platform. Only four eyes, these wonderful service providers. Then we talk about resellers and distributors. They can integrate the plot, thicken, integrated with their market places they can. Cell service is directly from the tools that they're building already or the solution marketplace ability. >>Talk about the difference between data protection and cyber protection, because those are kind of now coming together. As you're pointing out target persona for I t. Has been C i o or T buyer on, then you have a C so chief of security from large firms way, Who's buying? Who's using the product, is it? See I owe with staffers in the sea so and because it's like a data protection the old way, it's like, OK, storage, that's the I t. Fire down the list. Five. Storage, both on data protection. That's the old way. The new way is kind of bring it together. Who's that? Is a very good >>question. So I would think about the traditional data center, and we think about the rows of people who work with the data center, their storage guys, working guy, security guys. They may have different goals, different budget. They can be separate. Organization may not even be talking to each other. So selling a combination integrate solution to the data percent. It's complicated, and we've seen that stories many times. C'mon taken very. They try to sell security together. They failed just because it's very difficult to do that. But what we do is we go to the other type of person to the edge guy, the guy who's responsible for the whole infrastructure outside of a data center. Usually it's one team of one person, and they cover everything and they have a problem. They have multiple solution. They have to manage more solutions. You have people, you have to hire more training you have to make, and the reliability of this is just going down because you have to manage multiple tools. Update on different schedules and it's a disaster for a lot of companies. So we go to that guy with the department and tell them, Hey, here's a solution. Now we'll cover most of your knees >>and the number one problem you're solving. What? What's the problem? Statement. Take the high order bid on the promise the >>protection of the device So you protect data application and system that device. Talk >>aboutthe. Range the platform protection. Get the core platform protection infrastructure. Cloud backup. You've got core areas in the model, which one is the most popular in terms of where customers start to rethink their architecture when they start thinking platform versus tools? Because a lot of custom that we talk to and we pull in our community are all in the sea, so specifically are hard core way Don't want another tool way have a lot of tools in the tool shed, so to speak way want to get data horizontally scalable? We don't want to have an enabling platform software, but they have a machine learning and may I be very specific in service is that we use so trying to balance that architecture is what's on there. That's essentially what you guys are doing. So why that's important and why it's important for the customer. >>Exactly. And I I would take a step back here. So a lot of people want to think about protection of data, sleeping in traditional terms, data protection back up. I have a coffee somewhere. So in case something bad happens, I will be able to get back to that coffee. But now people started to understand it's not enough. First of all, they want to get value from the data, so data should be available. It should be fresh, and it should be authentic, So they want to make sure that they have the data they can trust. So the moment the shift from traditional having a coffee to having data that I can use and get Mellie from the data we start thinking about how they can make it work in a way that you always have data available. You don't wasting time, you know, losing anything. And you have a proof that you have that regional data thistles where we play. So we come to them and tell them that simple story. So in the past, you hit by run somewhere for you hit by malware. Attack somebody. A Texas system. You would say, OK, I'll go back to my backup, I'll find those files. I'll recover them. I would hope that they're not too old way offer them is the automatic recovery. They get everything back and they have everything. That was the most fresh data that they need. And we have guarantee that this is the original data they have because what's happening now in the cyber security market? And there were a lot of people Aquino they were talking about it and security experts. Is that the hackers Not on Lee, corrupting a day of stealing your data, the old so mortifying in a way, to influence your decisions. So they do like small, tiny modification, and you're sending your paychecks to somebody else. That's what they basically trying to do all the time. So you have to be able to trust the day of the job. So the moment you think about the chocks enough in the city of the Data, you think, OK, it's not just back up anymore. I need cyber protection. I need something that will actually help me to trust my data. >>You see in the examples everywhere you pointed out visual threats, you know the automation of cyber crime. You're seeing Ransomware. That's killer. And then just personal attacks. This is a really key area. I gotta ask you a question that came up on Twitter the other day. We were talking to folks. This comes up a lot with C. Sosa's well on. This is a quote from acute conversation I had with C. So said, Lookit my environment becoming more complex and costly going up. So that's one killer problem that he has in terms of what he's dealing with his environment. So complexity is going up. You mentioned the edge. It's a big one, right of other things out there wearables and then costs too many vendors, not enough sharing data. So again, this is a very complex and nuanced point. But how did you guys answer that question? So I see it costs. I want cost to go down. I want Plus, he's never gonna go down your abstract thataway. >>Yeah, even more. It's only complexity and cost is also security. More complexity that surfaces. Attack of attack is getting bigger, so you have to find a way to protect it. So answer is integrated type of protection. So what we do. We address five acres of protection and in the digital world, way we call him a Comsat passes safety. You have a copy, you can recover accessibility. You have a copy that you can access when you need it, where you need it. On privacy. You have control where your data is and who can access the data. That authenticity. You have a way to prove that. This is your reach, Dana. And then security. You have protection against external attacks. So we combine it all together into one solution. So you deploy one single agent that will provide backup just recovery. Crossing in. Sure. Hold the service that you need to work with your data Creative copy of the data to share your data, but also its integrated security. So we'll ensure that we passed your system. You have up to date Aly update installed. You have everything up to date. Everything's protected. Then we have an antivirus we have on tomorrow where we have the ability to manage the system. So everything is packed, packaged into one solution. So you don't have multiple agents that are incompatible. Multiple agencies have to update on different schedules multiple people who have to support different types of agents. Everything is combined. So that way we decrease the complexity and then increase the security because security is already integrated. And then the last final piece of the cost is the infrastructure solution that way. So what? We have a current seven infrastructure. It's either a softer applying to heart of our clients that is designed specifically for cyber protection were close, so it can't replace your standard H c I. But it gives you an ability to store data in the mosque obstetrician way. You get our appliance like in the hardware. You have a cheap stories for your secondary data for disaster. Recovery you can do that is to recover that appliance, or you can take our soccer appliance and deployed to commodity hardware. You don't have to buy a very expensive story track. You just deployed to the hard way that you have and use it on there. So that way we sold. It caused problems >>to get multiple options basically on that. Okay, so I gotta ask you the hard question that's going through everyone's mind is okay. I hear this story is too good to be true. Everyone must be. It must be a platform from wars are out there, sees this. They're pandering to customers. What makes you different? Prove that you're valuable to me. Show some evidence Where your differentiation How do you answer the differentiation? What makes you guys different? >>I would say the answer to that is innovation. So everybody has a platform. Everybody's building a glass from I. D. C was proclaiming its in Europe platforms probably three or four years ago. So everybody's talking about it, right? So way do they have the platform about the core differentiation is the innovation that we have Where the first company to use Blockchain for authenticity so we can record way hash coats Oh, files to change And then you can use it to get the verification that you have the original copy of the file in a time step where the 1st 1 to integrate the anti ransomware protection into the back so you don't really have to recover after my run somewhere you get all the files back, it will be the most recent files that you had. So you're getting it all back and it works there, So those innovation they already implemented off platform. So the moment you get a lot from you have all that you need. Old basics. You have user management quarter management so you can deploy and feel for you. Can you? Can? >>Was interesting is you have a holistic view on data, not just narrow view on day that Zach Lights and the I think the integrated is killer customer success. Anecdotal sound bites you can share. What are some of that? Some of feedback you hear from customers on this >>so feedback from customers. The best feedback is that we're hearing from our customers have issues, right? That's the best thing to d'oh. So when things go right with customers happy and you can go online and check out the mosque. Interesting case that >>we have with our scores partnerships because sports of becoming digital so >>everything's difficult depends on data. When you think Formula One isn't data, they lose data, they lose the race, so they have a tremendous amount of data and they have to transfer to a different location to transfer from the track to the headquarters. So we had implemented our cyber protection for a few teams in Formula One and you can just go online and check out that way. Ken Story, Williams Formula One. Great story. They actually tell people how they use it, how it helps them way. Have a bunch of those stories. >>You know, industrial I o. T. Is a huge area. I think you guys have a great opportunity there. People talk about digital threats and getting hacked as individuals. Equipment, machinery can get back to a device on your car. Certainly sports betting on it. Certainly someone's gonna want to manipulate it everything >>now, because we have our separate protects Operation center. We have engineers and security expert watching What's going on. We're collecting feedbacks from our customers and partners. We kill some crazy story all the time. Like what hikers now do. They would have into your email start fortifying your e mails and your documents that you had there because it's digital. There is no trace. You don't really know what was their original documents, so they eventually it will get you to transfer money to wrong account or do something with your assets. You will not going todo and it's just becoming more and more prominent because every digital. Now you don't even have a cocky or a document that's stating how much money you have in your bank. What if you wake up tomorrow instead of $1,000,000? You see $1000 you have no proof that you actually had something else, right? >>Cyber protections of data problem. You guys tackling with creative platform? Yes. Congratulations. Better. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Thanks for your insights. It's a cube jumper. You're watching us here at Miami Beach of the Crows Global Cyber Summit 2019. More coverage after this short break.

>> Live from Washington DC. It's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well good afternoon and welcome back to Inform18, we are live in Washington DC, the nation's capital for this year's show. Joining Dave Vellante and me is Corey Tollefson, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for retail at Infor. Corey good to see you today sir. >> Good to see you, good to be seen. >> Yeah, right (laughs) it is, under any circumstance right. >> Absolutely. >> So retail, you talk about a world that's kind of upside down now. The brick and mortar guys are, they aren't brick and mortar anymore. So talk about the state of the industry if you would a little bit since it's moved to the digital platform and how that's changing your work with it. >> It certainly was simple 20 years ago. Manufacturers manufactured things, wholesale distributors distributed things, and then retailers sold things. Right, and so the whole business model has been disrupted. Mainly because of the advent of the mobile phone, a mobile device. I said it last year it feels like everyday you wake up and it's very chaotic and there is a lot of disorder. And I think it's an amazing opportunity for retailers to reinvent themselves into a modern 21st century retailer. Everyday is a challenge but we're working on it. >> So what's it like, I mean, every retailer I talk to has this sort of Amazon war room. They're trying to use their physical presence to drive online. They're really getting creative. Amazon continues to do super well. There are those who are predicting the end of of retail stores because of AI etcetera. What's your take? You're knee deep in this business. >> Well I feel, I mean Amazon certainly is bringing a lot of downward pressure. It's the first digital, retail is the first industry to be digitally disrupted. It is happening in healthcare, its happening in manufacturing, but retail brought on the initial wave so to speak. And what I'm seeing is a lot of the middle of the road retailers that don't have too much of an online presence, their legacy brands that maybe had their following 20 years ago. They're going to get squeezed out because the middle in this group is going to get squeezed out. The high end brands that control their own brand image, they brand manufacture their own products, they also have their own retail stores. Those are the companies that are uniquely qualified to compete and thrive against Amazon because the last I looked having stores and having an outlet for immediate gratification of getting products and services is a good thing. The retailers that we are working with are combating that against pure plays like Amazon. >> But there's some consumer friction there right, and it's generational, so how we shop is different then how our kids shop. They look at retail in a very different, through a very different prism then we do. So how do you address that in terms of, how do you help your clients address that through different segmentation of their audiences and addressing those unique problems? >> Well even as a kid I remember that the retail shopping was a destination shopping experience, so we'd load up the family truck, and we'd go to a mall, and spend the whole day. There would be entertainment there, there would be restaurants to eat at. We'd shop and then we'd come home, it was a destination. Try doing that when it is 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year on your phone, suddenly the social engagement, with social media, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook is a little old for a lot of the younglings now, but the moral of the story is social media takes on everything and that's where the influence is. And that whole shopping experience it used to be, well I'm just going to get some product information and then I'm going to go into the store. That's been completely disrupted as well. One other aspect of this is the whole concept of consumerism is disrupted. There is a lot of, you know you look at a lot of the cool brands that are in other adjacent industries whether its Uber or Airbnb, they don't own any of their assets. Same thing is happening in retail, a lot of the new emerging brands are going to have disruptive business models. Like you go into a store and they don't even have any inventory. It's all made to order right. So there's a lot of disruption that's happening and we're working with a lot of brands to help. >> So talk about the next big thing NBT, next big thing in retail is that one of them? I go into a store and say that's what I want send it to my house, what else? >> Well I think one of the next big things that we're working on is the whole concept of machine learning. I think you guys have heard about this before, but the whole technology singularity where its the point in which there is no differentiation between engaging with a customer. Oh sorry engaging with a human versus engaging with a computer. We're not that far away and its a little bit scary. I think we talked about it a couple years ago but the whole concept is why do I need to interact with a human being for my shopping experience? I can just interact with a chat bot, for example. As long as I the customer gets the information I need to make an informed decision, I don't really feel weird talking to a computer anymore. >> Yeah so that's the idea of systems of agency, right, where the machine is taking action on behalf of the brand, and the consumer either doesn't know or doesn't care. >> Right that's right. >> So do you have customers that are on the precipice of doing that? >> Yeah we do. In one of the areas I have talked about this before, machine learning-based demand forecasting. So getting better at forecasting the right product, the right skew on a store-by-location basis. And what we do is we leverage a lot of the inherent capabilities of the internet. A lot of companies talk about cloud as simply a cost reduction. We view cloud as taking advantage of the world's greatest super computer which is the internet. And so, that's one of the areas in which we've been using machine learning. >> So what's the, you say the company, that mid-lane, or middle range, what are they to do now? Because they are kind of stuck, they have their challenges, they have this legacy approach that they are kind of in a tough spot. >> The die has been cast, if I was in their shoes, a lot of these middle of the road retailers. I would look at finding ways to optimize what I have. So whether that's optimizing your inventory, optimizing your labor. That's another thing we talked about, Charles this morning mentioned the whole concept of unleashing maximizing human behavior and unleashing human capital. For years we've been on shows like this talking about products, instead it's about engaging your customer. Everybody's a customer, if you're in healthcare you're a customer. In manufacturing distribution, you have customers. To look at it more from a human element around store associates, I think there's are a lot of middle of the road retailers that have an old iconic brand that could reinvent themselves with time and enough patience. >> How do you deal with the inevitable, well first of all how do your customers deploy your software? It's in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> It's in the Amazon cloud right? >> Well three years ago we made a fundamental decision that we were not going to be an on premise company. So we are a cloud-only applications provider. The second decision point we made was, do we want to be suite or best-to-breed. And when we say suite that was our decision. The third point was, how do you want it to be able to be deployed? So when I started off in this industry which felt like yesterday. I feel like I'm super old now, I started off as a software developer for a company called Retech out of Minneapolis. You know I was doing batch forms, and Oracle PL/SQL and everything was tied to the database, and the user experience was basically a graphical depiction of a database. (Dave laughs) But back in those days-- >> And it still is in a lot of apps. >> Yeah. In those days it was pretty much all about developing that individual code. I kind of lost my train of thought on that. The way you can deploy our assets is on an individualized basis. You can deploy our demand forecasting engine for example. You can deploy our allocation and replenishment engine. And when you tie it all together, you can have a suite that doesn't need to be deployed like it used to be in the old days is where I was going. Which is you have to deploy the whole data model to get all the information that you're looking for. >> Okay so in retail you've got the inevitable, oh well, I'm going to run this in Amazon, they're my big competitor, they're disrupting me. What's the conversation like with customers? How do you guarantee we're protecting their data, you point to Netflix and say hey it's working for them? What do you say? >> Well I think, I mean we're Infor, we're a big company. It's on a case-by-case basis. Yes we have a relationship with AWS and yes they are a strategic partner for us. That doesn't preclude the fact that we work with Google we work with Azure. We are cloud agnostic in retail so, it hasn't been as big of an issue as a lot of industry critics and analysts have made it out to be. >> So if there were an issue, you'd could run it anywhere you want. >> Yeah you just swap it out yeah. >> Alright I want to change gears here. Announcement on the stage today, keynote Van Jones from CNN was talking about #YesWeCode, an organization he has an affiliation with. You've created this, well launched an initiative NextGen. First off explain what that is but fill us back up to the genesis of that because as we found out just a few moments before it's a pretty interesting journey. >> Yeah. >> That you personally were involved in. >> Yeah, I know I am sure a lot of friends and family that know me well are going to be tired of hearing this story. I will give you the condensed version, which is-- >> Take your time. >> Growing up in Minneapolis, I was a huge Prince fan like most Minneapolis people are. And through serendipity I met Prince's brother, and Prince's brother pre-social, pre-internet, pre-mobile, put me on Prince's private guest list for parties at Paisley Park. And so here I am I had a loving family, and I can't believe my mom and dad would let me do this, but I am 16, 17 years old going to parties with Prince. And when I say parties I mean these were intimate parties, maybe the most was 50 people in his house. Sometimes there's like five of us, and what happened at these parties were he would play new music. If we danced and got up there and jammed with him, then he'd put it on an album. If it wasn't very good, or he felt like there wasn't a good strong reaction he put it in his vault. So we were a test case, a Petri dish so to speak, for his music. And I got to build a relationship with him as much as anyone that could. He was a very stand-offish person, but a brilliant artist, and a brilliant human being for that matter. I got to build that relationship and through that relationship I met Van Jones. We hooked up again at one of Prince's memorials a couple of years ago after his death, and we looked at each other and we connected and I said I'm in the technology industry. And he goes we got to talk because there's some things related to Prince's legacy we should really talk about. Which ties us back to #YesWeCode and the announcement we made today about GenOne. >> For GenOne excuse me I said NextGen. >> Yeah GenOne. >> My fault. >> Yeah no, no worries. And the genesis of this was Prince, Rogers Nelson, and Van Jones had a conversation right after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed. And a lot of people suspect the main reason was he looked suspect because he had a hoodie on. And here is an African American kid wearing a hoodie, they follow him and bad things happen right. Van Jones asked Prince directly he goes, you know clearly that guy was racist. And Prince said, think again, maybe if that was a white kid in Silicon Valley wearing a hoodie he'd be a dot.com billionaire, but because we haven't produced enough people of color in CEO level positions in our tech industry, that's on us. Meaning we need to develop more of our own. And so this project means a lot to us, because of the fact that we don't think diversity is just a check box that you have on your corporate mission statement. We think diversity can change the DNA of your company and it can influence better products, solutions, and services to our customers. So it's really important for us and this is just the first step of a multi-echelon, multi-year, multi-faceted program. That we want to take this and roll it out to the entire industry. I'd love for Salesforce and Oracle and SAP and Workday. I'd love for all of them to adapt a program similar to this. This isn't pride of ownership, it's the right thing to do and putting brilliant kids and brilliant minds that maybe came from a bad circumstance, they all deserve a chance too. And it only makes all of us better, and I feel like a lot of great things have happened to me in my career and I feel like I have to give back. And if I can be a small part of this with Van, so be it. >> So that's a very thoughtful response by Prince, and you were saying earlier Corey it was sort of hard to get to know him. Was that typical of Prince, was he sort of introspective and maybe pensive and prescient in that way? >> Well the piece the people that don't understand about Prince is that the whole story of his life is written in his music. And he's released over two thousand songs, you know I'm sure the family and the estate might see this but I've heard another couple thousand songs that have been unreleased and it's beautiful brilliant music and his whole life story is there. You just need to listen to the lyrics, or read the lyrics and listen to the music. >> So was... You mentioned this story, and I just thought 17-year-old kid, I mean with all do respect you don't look like one of Prince's friends right. You're a Minnesota guy, he was too, but just different and I think, did you ever just think that what in the world am I doing here? >> I had that moment, I will never forget that one moment. So it was probably the summer of 1995, Prince was standing five feet from me. He had his right hand strumming his electric guitar, his left hand was playing lead keyboard lines on the keyboard, his right foot was controlling the pitch of the guitar, the left foot was controlling the pitch on the keys, and he was singing vocals and dancing. And I said to myself, I pinched myself, and I said this moment in time, if Amadeus Mozart was standing here he would be blown away. Because there is nobody in the history of music that can write, produce all this great music, but also maintain that look, that image. And then the musicianship, he's a musician's musician. You know we talk about Lenny Kravitz, I ran into Lenny Kravitz about 20 years ago sitting on Prince's couch. He probably doesn't remember me, I am pretty sure he doesn't. >> We'll find out tomorrow night. >> We'll find out tomorrow, but I mean the moral of the story is he was a musician's musician. I'll never forget sitting on the couch and this really soft spoken gal said to me she was really nervous to perform tonight. And I am like don't worry you go this, and it was an 18 year old Alicia Keys. And Prince behind the scenes had been cultivating and developing talent whether its Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Nora Jones, you know. These people he helped develop behind the scenes, and no one really knew it. >> Well his band members were always incredibly talented. I don't know if you ever saw Prince live. >> Nope, did not. >> You've saw him many times. Man as he would say, that band was tight. (laughing) >> That's right. >> Well the program's a great legacy. >> It is. >> And one that is certainly not apparent, but it is great to know that back story to know the generation of that. What got going and certainly I think there's a lot seems like of emotional equity that you and the company have invested, to make sure it's successful as well. >> We think that it was Prince's legacy, but we feel like he has passed the torch between Van, myself and Charles. This really means a lot to us. So we want to take it to the next level so, we are pretty excited. >> Fantastic. >> Congratulations. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for sharing the story too. I'm glad and it's just wonderful and look forward to talking to Charles about it, when we have him on tomorrow. Alright back with more we are live here, theCUBE is covering Inforum18 in Washington D.C. 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