>> LIVE from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018! I'm Lisa Martin, finally paired up with Stu Miniman. Hey, Stu! >> Lisa, three days, wall-to-wall coverage and how have you and I not been paired together yet? >> Did you do the scheduling, Stu? >> Um. >> That's okay. I'm glad to be paired up with you. The last interview, saving the best for last. Speaking of the last, we've got two guests, welcoming back some alumni to theCUBE, who also seem to be so busy at VMworld that you come to us as our last guests. I like this tradition. >> You had be the bookend, you know? Got to be the bookend. >> Best for last. >> Exactly. We've got Ajay Patel, SVP of VMware, and Russ Reeder, CEO of OVH US. Welcome, guys! >> Thank you, great to be here. - Thank you. >> Saving the best for last. >> Best for last, you bet. >> So, last year just, yeah, VMworld last year, vCloud Air acquisition by OVH had just happened. Give us an update on what's gone on in the last year and the momentum that that is giving the OVH business in the U.S. >> So, we're super excited to be here on second year as a Diamond Sponsor. We, as OVH Cloud, coming to the U.S. is a great opportunity. OVH is the largest hosting company in Europe. Everyone knows who we are in Europe, we come to the U.S. a year and a half ago, every one's like, who's OVH? We acquire vCloud Air, partnered with VMware, which is old news in Europe. For the past nine years, we've been virtualizing vSphere, seven of those nine we've been the award winning partner in Europe. So coming to America, the best way to really launch with the VMware partnership is to acquire vCloud Air. All of those customers, and brought over those employees, and the best news is that we just launched two months ago, starting to migrate those customers over to OVH Cloud. >> Fantastic. >> It's very exciting. >> Yes. >> Ajay, so, Multi-Cloud being the story of the show, we've seen really the maturation after, you know, we've been tracking this for a lot of years. It was like, okay, do we have the VMware Cloud story? Are we happy with it? Things like that. So first of all, congrats to you and your team. >> Thank you. >> We've had some good proof points, a lot of partners I hear. >> Absolutely. >> I'm joking to you, it's like, yeah, OVH- >> OVH clearly one of the important ones. (laughs loudly) >> So, you know, put this in perspective for us as to, from the vCloud Air world to, you know, we're talking AWS, IBM, OVH and many others. >> Stu, you and I talked about it a couple of times now, this is year number four, so thank you for inviting me, first of all. Our strategy's been consistent. How do we get VMware running on as many destinations as possible? And Hybrid, for us, has been a strategy that's been consistent. Glad the market caught up, even having Andy Jassy talk about moving RDS and making it available to vSphere on-prem is really a sign of maturity that the world is going to be hybrid for a long time. So from a strengths perspective, Hybrid is here to stay and we're really focused on what we've been calling this Cloud Verified Partner. So, OVH is a handful of partners that have reached that highest level achievement of delivering a full-stack VMware CDC and it can have a consistent infrastructure experience that cost customers 10 dollars. So we're at a point where the strategy's being realized. Strategic partners like OVH are delivering a full-stack VMware and customers are seeing the value of delivering Cloud, whether public Cloud or on-prem on vSphere. >> Russ, as I said, multi-cloud, it's matured a bit. You know, one of the big questions we had coming into was that AWS partnership, how much of it is a one-way? Well, things like RDS, really interesting. I've spent a bunch of time digging into it and understanding it. The other thing is, it's as Ajay said, the strategy was VMware everywhere. And partners like yourself, okay, where do we play? You know, public cloud's not the enemy, it's what do we do, what do we partner with? How they're help fitting the landscape as to, you know, how OVH and, you know, how do you play in that larger ecosystem and differentiate and, you know? >> Yeah, I think the third generation of the cloud here coming to multi-cloud is kind of going the first generation of hey, someone needs to do it for me. AWS, I'm going to do it myself. Now, hey, I want to do it myself, but I need multi-cloud. I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket, I need a true infrastructure partner where I have predictability on billing. I don't have ingress or egress charges. I have a true infrastructure partner with the automation that can scale globally. And so, 20 years ago when we started OVH in Europe, the opportunity there was wide open. Coming here to the U.S. now it's a perfect opportunity in multi-cloud where all customers are saying I need to get out of my closet. I have seven-year-old machines in my Colo facility. I'm all-in-one whether it's AWS, or IBM, or another partner out there, they need to put different workloads where they would work best or DR. So coming in as a true infrastructure player with all of our automation, it's actually perfect timing for OVH to come to the U.S. and laugh OVH Cloud. >> So I'm curious, obviously with the European you have their legacy as we've transitioned and it's a spectrum but from kind of the traditional hosted environment to you're almost fully satisfied when you go this. >> Sure. >> The US, do you still have the spectrum or are you more built the modern with the vCloud Air being the foundation? You know, what spectrum of services are you offering customers? >> We offer the full spectrum. We had the opportunity to take OVH, all of our experience and systems, take the next generation of OVH in Europe, launch it in the U.S. and then bringing that back to Europe. So what we're launching in the U.S. is a full spectrum. The initial launch with VMware, fully hosted suite of the VMware products. So we have the VMware, the vSphere, vSAN, NSX offering that we've just announced. And having nine years of experience with vSphere as a service is a great opportunity to launch that. We also have a public cloud and that's the open source OpenStack public cloud, which is a different unique opportunity for a lot of companies that don't want to go the traditional public cloud. We also, being one of the largest dedicated server providers. It's all built on dedicated server, even server-less compute. And so you have to find a infrastructure partner that doesn't want to provide solutions first, and how do we rack and stack second. We understand the infrastructure and the network globally to help our partner's succeed. >> Ajay, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the portfolio that your partners get to get access to from VMware. I was just interviewing Milin Desai, who you know oh so well. And the SAS piece is so, you know, it gets lost. You know, infrastructure as a service is one piece, but, you know, it's applications and services and, you know, yeah. >> Yeah, so far our cloud provider partners, what we've done is we introduced something we call Cloud Provider Platform. It gives them all the tools they need to sign up for Cloud, as Russ talked about, in a dedicated cloud. We give you a multi-tenant cloud. We're also, now with our cloud hub announcement, taking the VMware IP Cloud Services and making them available to our partners. And when you think about a partner on MSP, he's no longer just the asset heavy like OVH, but he's also the asset like a DXE. So we're now opening up the aperture for anyone who wants to either build clouds, or use clouds to offer managed services on top. I love the fact that OVH has economics, efficiency, and the customer support with the full VMware value proposition. They've always been the leader in kind of vSphere hosting, now they're offering a full private cloud built on VMware and the managed services go with it. So it's really about that choice, which really uniquely makes a provider program so compelling to our end customers. >> We've heard choice a lot. We hear it, Stu, at every show. Customers need choice, companies like VMware, OVH needs to build for what the customers want, not what you guys all think is great. Another thing that we've heard a lot at this show is that the seamlessness of the message, starting with Pat Gelsinger's keynote on Monday morning with people saying, you know, the structure is in place. I also thought it was one that was very cohesive in terms of the messaging and how the technologies are working together. I'm curious to get your feedback on what are some of the things that you've heard around this show from your customers who need a choice or in multi-cloud environments for many reasons, right? Applications that kind of dictate which direction that needs to go in, or through acquisition and, you know, have multiple cloud solutions. How are they taking this message? Especially with what you're doing with OVH in the U.S. And be able to digest this so they can really figure out, alright, here's what I can do with my infrastructure so that my business succeeds, whether I'm a bank or I'm a hospital. Tell us about that. >> I can go first and then Russ can add. So I think one of the things we've done a really good job this time is clarifying the message. I'm hoping, to the market, we're now becoming a very relevant and strategic platform that spans beyond the traditional VMware data center and hybrid cloud. So the first message is, you know, VMware is providing you the solutions while you're building on VMware or you're building on native clouds. And that CloudHealth acquisition is a good indication of VMware's commitment to kind of pure native public cloud. The second I would say is hybrid and this kind of consistent environment for runtime, if you will, and this hybrid control plane that give people a sense that I will lift and shift my workload first to an OVH and then transform leveraging the power of the public cloud. So it's become very pleasing to say, look, I don't need to change for changes sake, I can move and get economics off a public cloud, a dedicator, or even a pure multi-tenant. But then I can now refactor using public cloud services. So the power of VMware is giving them the flexibility to start a leverage cloud without having to make an upfront investment just for change sake, but more for the business transformation they're trying to drive, right? >> Yeah and so, what we've seen from the OVH side is really coming here and looking at all the partners. So we have Veam for backup, we can no offer Zerto for disaster recovery. Obviously, the VMware partnership we just launched earlier in the week which David Wigglesworth, our chief revenues officer was on talking about our partnership strategy and we have an amazing opportunity to bring partners in. FusionStorm is one of those partners, IT services. So OVH Cloud, we don't compete with our partners, true infrastructure partner with they can leverage our 28 data centers and our 15 terabytes of network and no charges for ingress. So what we're seeing here, our customers are coming and saying, hey, I just used you for DR but I'd like to actually take my on-prem full production system and bring it to the cloud now. So the customer's were migrating. There's more comfort going to the cloud, there's more understanding of the partnership ecosystem, and now instead of just saying, oh, we're going to just put DR or backup, we're going to come and we're going to migrate our entire production system because we've tried it out, our foot's been in the water, and now we're going all-in. So that's exciting and talking to all the customers this week, I love it. It's so exciting to talk to our customers that have migrated to OVH Cloud in the U.S. and now they want to bring over those production workloads. That's where it's really kind of that multi-cloud and I think VMware's been a huge asset to the cloud market in their strategy and a great partner. >> Getting that validation from your customers, the momentum that OVH is carrying is working. You've done a lot of education, especially in the last year. They're getting it and you're seeing your technologies and your partnership validating what it is that they're business needs. >> It's disheartening almost that the technology is in place now. We had to migrate from the vCloud Air into the OVH data center. Those tools, those best practices, those skills now are available to the end customer. So the compelling value here is, you want to take the entire data center and move it to OVH, we know how to do it. We have the tools, the people, the skills. And so just that kind of reference, the ability to say I'm not the first one to do it. It's been done before. That confidence is building in their business now. >> We had the opportunity, I mean, I don't want to say that there was a bleeding edge, but we were on a bleeding edge of HCX and it's working seamlessly now. >> Hybrid Cloud Exchange. >> The extension to bring, without any downtime, from on-prem to over to the cloud with OVH Cloud, or from the vCloud Air cloud over to ours. So it's working and the customer's are super excited, they get that trust. They go back to their management team and say, hey, now it's time to go more. I can go to the cloud and the cost efficiency, the savings, the redundancy of the network and the power, and not all this capex. That's why they're all moving to the cloud now. >> Final thing, you've talked about some good high level things. Any specific customer examples? I know you might not be able to mention names, but, you know, Vertical, or things like that as to how businesses are helping to transform themselves after they've done these sort of solutions. >> Yeah, sure, I mean first of all, it's all about the customer. So we, I can't mention any specific names, we will have some, we filmed some customer testimonials in the booth that we'll be announcing and maybe the next time we can bring customers up here to talk about it. Whether it's really education or high-tech, especially on a high-tech, the tech guys love OVH, right? They really love it. But from an infrastructure provider, people that are looking to lift and shift their existing applications without having to rewrite their applications for a public cloud, that's where OVH really comes into play. I've got all of these systems. I've got VMware on-prem, I need to move it but I don't want to rebuild it. So that's where we see the excitement of, of course I'm going to build some new stuff in the cloud, but how do I take all of my thousands of applications that we have, that we're never going to refactor and just move it over to the cloud to have that security. That's where I think customers are saying, wow, I can't actually do more in the cloud than I thought I could. >> For me, I think, I just walked out of a customer meeting, so I won't name them but just kind of give you a sense of what they're doing. They have four clouds, they believe they have monolithic applications, they don't want to be locked in to a particular cloud, so you're hearing the consistent view is, we're trying to figure out how do we change our development practices. You know, how do we leverage container, whether it's PKS, whether it's payloads. What's my development methodology? How do I make sure that deployment gives me a choice of running across clouds? How should I setup my IT operations to operate in the cloud? So consistency, portability, how do I manage the complexity of running on multiple clouds? What's my cost profile and how do I do it effective? So those are the kinds of questions we're getting. They're starting to look to VMware as a trusted advisor, that safe choice, as we talked about, to say, you know, one thing I can bet on is if I bet on VMware technology, it runs on more clouds than I can, you know, when I need them. It is portable, I can take a workload that traditionally I'd run on different hardware, now we run it on different clouds. So we're seeing a tremendous momentum around this notion of VMware's kind of the pathway or the hybrid control plane that we can bet on. And then partners like OVH, etc. But I have this destination that's safe, that's secure, that's consistent with what they're running today. So pretty exciting in terms of how customers kind of take in the message and start to put it into their strategy as they go forward. >> One more thing I'd like to understand, you talked about the tremendous capabilities that OVH and VMware have together with vCloud Air. You can enable customers to do a lot. To transform IT, to facilitate digital transformation. They're comfortable with this. But one of the things that that absolutely requires is cultural transformation. I'd love to get your final thoughts on how is OVH and VMware together helping your customers to understand and really impact the cultural changes that are need to take advantage, full advantage of the technology? >> That's a great question. Go ahead. >> On our side, what we try to do is, we as a company are going through the same transformation. We're a perpetual company becoming a services company. So the lessons learned, I spent some time where I-CIO actually talks about how we're operating our internal cloud. We're talking about the best practices of how we're moving to a service first mentality. How we're creating a CICD development mentality and practices. How are we leveraging public clouds and how are we managing cost? So those internal lessons learned, we're starting to make available to our customers and our partners. We're also packaging some of the products that we make available to VCP, our provider program. So the products that we're building up much more suited to run a services organization, which when we started five years ago at vCloud Air, we took enterprise products and tried to force fit them, now we're much more delivering our own service, eating our own dog food, if you will, have to incorporate that capability into our platform. So it's a combination of product improvement, best practices and lessons learned that we're making available to the market. >> I can talk from specific example. Acquiring vCloud Air, a great customer base, and all of the personnel from VMware in vCloud Air to come over. So not only was it cultural from a customers perspective, but also from an employee perspective. You build culture on trust. So what's interesting is that our employees and our customers that were over in Europe, in our U.K data centers and our German data centers, they're growing much quicker than the ones over in the U.S. The U.S. after a year of working with us and seeing that, hey, we say we're going to do this and now we're actually doing it, and I've migrated and that was really easy, and I can point and click and actually expand my compute and my storage and add more hosts in a matter of minutes. That builds trust, that has a great culture, and that spreads. So, from an education perspective, we have a lot of higher education customers, and now they're like, I'm going to go talk to this school and this school, and that word of mouth is golden. >> That validation of, we've been in your shoes, VMware has been in our shoes, they've done it successfully. Guys, I wish we had more time, but thanks so much for helping Stu and I wrap up the day on this set. It's great to talk to you both. I think it might be fair to say that we'll probably see you at the next VMworld on day three around the same time. >> Yeah, perfect! - Hopefully earlier. >> Maybe. Ajay, Russ, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. - Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For my co-host, Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be back to wrap up the show. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to the windy city, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeeamOn. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, my co-host, Brian Kuhn is here. He's the chief digital officer at OVH US. Thanks for coming to theCube. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yes, so OVH, a lot of people might remember OVH vCloud Air >> Yeah, that whole thing happened almost a year ago actually so the acquisition of vCloud Air happened May eighth of 2017 so we're just a little over a year since the acquisition happened. >> Dave: Alright, how's it goin? >> It's going great! What it means is we've been running that business for about a year now, the European side of the business came a little bit later, but learning all about our customers, learning what they need, and finding new ways of making them happy. >> The epic nature of the return that VMware gave to its ecosystem is well documented. Tod Nielsen, the former COO if VMware used to talk about how every dollar spent on a VMware license 15 dollars was spent in the ecosystem. Everybody was really freaked out that the Cloud was going to destroy that ratio, it was going to decimate the ecosystem. Fast forward, I don't know five-seven years later, VMware is certainly growing, the ecosystem seems to be thriving. What's your take? >> Well I agree with you, the ecosystem is thriving, we're here at a conference that's part of that ecosystem. In terms of what we do, in terms of what OVH is, as an infrastructure provider, we're thankful that it's thriving. Because we have other opportunities to serve customers needs based based on that VMware stack, and based on the services that that ecosystem provides to the customers. >> Why is the data center booming right now, in your view? >> Why is the data center--what do you mean by that? >> Well the data center business, the enterprise business is cranking! >> Well, I think that's partially because you have that next wave of customers that are figuring out that being in the Cloud is a better thing than being on-prem and having to need those resources to manage that type of activity. >> And the data! >> Brian: And the data, yeah. >> Brian, maybe you could expand a little bit that ecosystem, because some people looked at the VMware stack and were like, ope, they're gonna--not close it, but, we've done all these integrations, we've done all these things in the data center and now when I put it in the OVH or the IBM or the AWS Cloud how many of our services can we move with them? What use is--Veeam obviously is there, partnering with you and with VMware heavily but, can you speak to kind of the breadth and depth of what did come along, and anything that doesn't come along for that journey. >> What came along as part of the acquisition, or it comes along with customer migration. >> No, no, the things that, if I did these here in my data center versus going to the OVH Cloud. I can do Veeam and interplace, there's other parts of the ecosystem that I can, but there's some things I'm--you know if I go to OVH, I'm not saying hey can I throw in my storage array with it, so that's where we're trying to understand what part of the ecosystem, when do you get it? >> Yeah, let's go with the positive side first, so it certainly as moving to a Cloud provider and someone to host your private Cloud or host your software defined data center stack. You don't have to worry about power, you don't have to worry about, in our case, water, cuz we're water-cooled technology, you don't have to worry about the network. So the infrastructure piece of managing this great, you don't have to worry about, I would say, maybe some of the redundancy-type issues or having the data center that's available. OVH manages its own network, so we don't have to worry about capacity or throughput in that means. I think on your other flip-side you're saying what can't I do, because I'm in a hosted private Cloud environment versus a co-lo or on-prem-- >> I'm just saying there's a part of my stack that I was building myself, and now you take care of it, or Amazon takes care of it, or IBM takes care of it, and maybes there's not a way for that software or hardware to come along to the Cloud. >> Yeah, your point is it hollows out the value proposition of the traditional ecosystem and moves everything into the Cloud, right? >> Stu: So somebody like Veeam's makin that transition well, but not everyone has. >> But we haven't seen that. You see well--you've certainly seen the Cloud exploding, maybe it's moderated some of the growth in the data center, but it still seems to be thriving for those companies that are well positioned. >> I don't disagree, and I'm thankful that it is, because that gives us more opportunity to help those customers out. >> So why does a Cloud service provider like yours, wrong question. What does a chief digital officer in a Cloud service provider like yours do? I started to say why does it need one, but everybody needs a CDO! But what's your role within the company? >> OVH US is a separate, standalone company than OVH Group, partially because of, how we want to make sure the, data sovereignty is covered and protecting our European customers. So we are bringing up a standalone company. So Russ Reeder was here, you spoke with him at VMWorld last year, he's the CEO, so he has his own staff, and one of the people on his staff is me, as the chief digital officer. Up until recently I managed marketing so that was part of my portfolio but we still have my title as chief digital officer so that we can serve strategy. So what are we going to do, how are we going to serve our customers, what are the segments that we're going to tackle, and how are we going to take and go to market and take those service offerings forward, and what is the market doing, and how is it moving? And so I have a team that's working on strategy, and that's a separate strategy than what Group has because we're tackling a different market segment. I also have a team of product managers, so looking at, okay this is our strategy, what are the offerings that we have at our disposal? What do customers--more importantly, what are their needs? How do I serve those needs and get those needs met, and how do I work then, with the engineering team, to actually build those products? So I have a team of product managers. I also have a team of, what I'll call, the sales enablement team. So technical marketing managers, or solution architects, find a term for them, but these are the folks that are ensuring that we have good strong hand-off between product and sales. To make sure that the sales team is trained, that they understand the value propositions not only at the marketing level, but at the technical level. And then they're also the ones that are really paying attention to everything it takes to get that product out into the market the right way. >> And you still have marketing, under your?-- >> No I do not have marketing anymore, but that was a function I managed for a while. >> So strategy, product management, the specific offerings, and the sales enablement, tactical marketing-- >> And I have one last thing, customer intelligence. So once we put that product out into the market, how do we know it's being accepted, how do we know it's being adopted, what new insights can we gain to feed back into the system? >> We often say that the difference between a business and a digital business is the way in which a digital business leverages data. And so if I go through these four. Your strategy, I presume data is part of the strategy when I talk about that, the offerings, there's, maybe not, well maybe there are data offerings, but maybe how data contributes to the health of the offerings? Sales enablement, we talked about that, but then customer intelligence obviously is a lot of data, it seems like data cuts orthogonally through each of these, can you talk about the data? First of all, do you buy the premise about what a digital business is? How do you leverage data, how do you, as part of your strategy, understand as the CDO, how much time do you spend, how data effects monetization? >> Yeah, so let me take this at two angles. One, what data do I use through that process, right? So the strategy team is certainly looking at data from analysts, customer data. I like a, I've seen an analogy of a school bus, you're looking forward, you're looking in your side-view mirror, you're looking in your rear-view mirror. So forward is where is everyone going, where's the industry going? So that'll be your analyst reports. Sideways is, your side-view mirrors, what's your competition doing? So, what is the data about the competition and what movements will they be making? My rear-view mirror is what are my customers doing? So that'll tie back into that the customer intelligence team that I have, is how do my customers actually behave, and how do they stack up with where the industry is going? So there's just one set of data points and then of course my product team is taking the inputs of those strategies, and having then one-to-one conversations with customers and finding out first-hand what there needs are. So as a product management professional, there's no ifs, ands, or buts, you always want to hear it first-hand from the customer, what they have to say. >> The role of marketing, sorry, the role of data in marketing. It's not your current per view, but it's your former one, so you can speak to it I presume, can you talk about that a little bit? >> Sure, so also, two different ways. We can look at this from the perspective of an E-commerce business, or we can look at this as a B-to-B business in generating leads, right? Then there's the ecosystem of all the data around marketing beyond that. So in the E-commerce business, of course I'm looking at what's coming through the funnel, and what traffic sources are feeding into it and what's my best conversion rates and those are all great data points for something like the E-commerce business. >> Dave: For transactions? >> For transactions. Similarly, on the leads side of the business, you're still looking at traffic, you're still looking at events or whatever feeds your funnel. So what are the sources, what are the channels of leads, and how are they converting? And as I nurture the customer, how many touches does it take to bring them back, what exactly is bringing them back? So these are all further data points to feed something like the leads side of the story. If I think outside that ecosystem, you think of an event such as this is, what are going to be the best traffic drivers, and how do I know what reach I've hit? So all sorts of data points around brand, and touch, and things that'll effect that as well. >> And it's definitely a lot of affinity between marketing and digital. In fact, if I were the head of marketing, I would come to you and say, hey can you help me, with my, whether it's legion, demand gen, are there new techniques I can use besides, you know, hitting the same old cookie approaches, etc. Do you guys have that discussion and how do you participate? >> Oh yeah, and I think that my head of marketing's watching me here now is probably saying yeah and I've got some tricks that I need your help with because I've got new things up my sleeve that we need the product angle for, right? And the right product marketing spin. >> Talk to us a little bit about your customer set, there's certain GOs and verticals that OVH targets a little bit more? And any kind of use-cases customer success stories you might be able to share? >> Yeah, that's great. So, as opposed to OVH Group, and France, and the European business, where they've really come from the web hosting industry up, and they have a very specific way that they've encountered the market and penetrated. At least here in the US, we're coming into the market really from scratch, and the acquisition is really what's bringing us in. So our prime market is the market that we first got from the acquisition, so these mid-sized and enterprise companies, so defining who that demographic is first as the type of customer, second then what need are we serving for them? So in the vCloud Air experience, vCloud Air was selling data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery, and that is certainly what we keep selling cuz we have those thousand customers that still need that story, and that's an opportunity then to tackle more customers just like that, that have the same types of needs, that same, perhaps niche need, or common day every need because you were asking earlier, like why are all these customers-- why are all these people moving to the Cloud? It's because they're discovering that if they don't they're going to be left behind, or they've got some need inside their company that is forcing them to do that, whether it's to save cost or what have you. So, in the case coming back to our customers is, it is the mid and enterprise-sized companies, we're still serving everything that is will lead in with private Cloud technology, and bring to them those data center extension, data center replacement, disaster recovery stories and we'll augment that because, what's different about us now is, we're OVH, and we have not only that hosted private Cloud product, but we also have dedicated servers, we also have public Cloud, and then we have this really fantastic backbone: we own our own network. We have this huge amount of capacity, 14 terabytes per second with that, we have an anti-DDoS solution behind that, and these are all things that we get to bring to those customers and introduce them to. So for a customer who's doing their digital transformation, migration to the Cloud, it's not just hey we can bring you over on your VMware stack and migrate you in, but it's hey we can do that plus a lot more that maybe you didn't know that we could do for you. >> Let's talk about that a lot more, are those professional services or other offerings that you have? >> Sure, so it's primarily the offerings themselves, the services. You asked me about customer so I'll give an example. We have a customer today that has come to us because of the data center consolidation need. They brought that in and also needed disaster recovery, but what they're finding now is they have a large amount of data. And what is best for them is an object storage solution, so augmenting the host to private Cloud with our Cloud offerings to solve that need. >> Last question is, so how do you guys position, relative to some of the other things that you know, for instance Vmware, we just had IBM on, IBM Cloud obviously they make a big deal out of AWS because they're such a hot company right now. How do you guys differentiate from those other offerings? >> That's a really intriguing question, right, because that's the key is how are we different? We wanted to come in and be your trusted Cloud provider, to help you do what we're going to be first, really good at, so we're really good at that VMware stack, we're going to bring you in, help you migrate to the Cloud, we're going to run and manage that business for you, or the operation of your data center, and your infrastructure. But what goes around that then, is you know, that is our core, infrastructure is our core business, so we build our own servers, we build our own data centers, we own our own network, so that is what we do best for you. But that's coupled with the fact that we're doing innovation with purpose. We've learned how to do the building of those data centers, and do water-cooling to save on costs, we've learned how to do all of this at high-capacity automation capabilities so that you have lightning speeds to get your provisioning up and running. Then we also have this concept where OVH is really about being open, so something that does differentiate us and set us apart is the freedom for you to build your infrastructure, and the freedom to choose your offerings and your providers. So OVH sponsors an open Cloud foundation and we believe in the opening of that, we use opensource technology, we use OpenStack in a lot of our products so that you have that there, we're believing that, we have the inner connectivity with our pops to other networks, if you so desire. That openness is something that sort of permeates through us and then lastly, it's our passion for our customers. We're serving 1.3 million customers around the world today, from fortune 500 companies to top-tier educational institutions, and in the case, in France, with small/medium businesses and individuals. So we have a very wide range of customers that have trusted us to host their infrastructure, and we like hearing feedback. We love operating on that feedback, and we love solving the needs for our customers. >> Alright, Brian we'll leave it there, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great, thanks so much for having me! >> You're welcome! Okay, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE, live from VeeamOn 2018, be right back. (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> We're back. I'm Stu Miniman here, with Justin Warren and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's broadcast of VMworld 2017. We're the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Russ Reeder, who is the President and CEO of OVH. Russ, thanks so much for joining us. >> You bet, Stu, thank you. >> Alright Russ, so, those of us who have been coming for VMworld for years, said, you know, "VMware, their Cloud strategy, what a mess. "vCloud Air, total failure." Now, I think you might have a slightly different viewpoint on some of that dynamics. For an audience that doesn't know, OVH was a predominantly European Cloud-hosting provider, part of the vCloud Air network, if I understand. Tell us what brought you to OVH and what's your story on the whole vCloud thing? >> Sure, OVH, we're one of the largest infrastructure providers in the world. We're the fifth largest and we're the number one partner for VMware over in Umia, right? And so, I guarantee if Pat Gelsinger was here, you wouldn't have thrown vCloud Air under the bus so hard, but it's a great opportunity. >> He'll be on tomorrow, let's see. >> So vCloud Air's a great opportunity for VMware, kind of, launching it, working with it. Some of the top enterprise customers in the world, some of the biggest of VMware are launching a Cloud strategy. But, VMware is more of a software player rather than an infrastructure player. We're one of the largest in the world. And so when VMware called us and said, "Hey, one of our bests in Umia, "we know that you're coming to the US. "We think there's a perfect acquisition." So when I sat down with Pat and talked about the acquisition, we said, look, we're about ready to come into the US with all of our force. We have 27 data centers around the world, we're an 11 terabyte network, three terabytes of DDoS capacity. And we're coming here with scale. And so, if we can add in to over 200, close to 300 employees that understand the space and about a thousand enterprise customers that are committed to VMware solution and then really care about great tech, it's a match made in heaven. >> Yeah, what can you share? How many customers did you get for that? And since OVH took it over, where are things? What momentum do you have? >> So we have around a thousand enterprise customers. Some of the biggest names out there. And so, a lot of those are the biggest names for VMware. With that, we took around 250 employees, globally. So we now have the global, vCloud Air infrastructure, personnel and customer base. >> So with a thousand customers, Stu, you'd sort of call that an abject failure. So clearly there's some people who do like it, otherwise you wouldn't have managed to sell. >> There's significant business here and they're really important customers to VMware. >> Yeah, so what is it that those customers really like about the vCloud Air solution? >> So what they like, just about... First, it's VMware, right? So they really love the flexibility that VMware solutions give them. With vCloud Air, they went to it to have more of a no vendor lock-in, more of a portable solution where they can migrate VMs from on-prem to off-prem and be a part of the Cloud. And so what they're excited about now with OVH is going to a provider that's... We're very well known for high-performance, great network, at the best value. And so, coming to the US, what they care about is, the US is 58% of the world market in Cloud hosting. Very large market, 58%. And you have a number of very large hyperscale Cloud providers. And OVH is the largest Cloud provider that no one knows about in the US but everyone knows about us in Europe. And so the customers now are super-excited about bringing that technology and we've really reinvented the whole infrastructure, Cloud-hosting market. And bringing that new technology and the green technology into the US. >> Russ, we've been watching this Colo data center business, seen a number of companies that have kind of exited. You know, think Rackspace, how they've changed. Verizon, what they've done. I've talked to some of your team at the booth here at the show and they're actually excited about talking about the way OVH builds data centers. Can you bring us inside this because some people look and they're like, "Oh, if you're not spending "five to 10 billion dollars a year, "You're probably not in that business." Once again, OVH, I think, has a slightly different viewpoint on that. >> Yes, so we were founded by Octav Klaba, who's an engineer. Network engineer who started building, hosting websites and then started to build their own servers. And so, now we are vertically integrated. We build our own servers. We build all of our own DDoS equipment. We build our own data centers. Our servers are water cooled and we have very strong R&D relationships with Intel and AMD. It allows us to crank up the processing speed. With our data cooling capacity, 30% of the data centers are cooled by natural air. 70% are cooled by water. So, when other very large, well-known companies are out there trying to put data centers in Alaska and sinking them in containers, we have it figured out at scale. We have 27 data centers around the world. We're investing 1.5 billion dollars in the next three years to have over 50 data centers. So, we're doing it at scale and our data centers are, not only, more high performance but, 50% more cost effective and we give that cost savings directly back to the client. >> Russ, one of the things, when I talk to customers, if you ask them about their Cloud strategy, sometimes they say hybrid Cloud, sometimes they say multi-Cloud but, whatever they say, their strategy is different for every customer I talk to. Some are actually federating or splitting up applications between different environments. Others are workloads depending on where they have... What are you hearing from your customers? What are the types of applications and I know it depends and it varies greatly but, where is it that you have the gravity of where customers are going and how do you fit into the broader ecosystem? Amazon is the elephant in the room. I think the booth next to yours, if I recall right. How's the dynamic work? >> Unless you're a very small business, you need a hybrid Cloud strategy. If you're only in one Cloud provider, you should be very worried. We've seen multiple attacks. Any kind of failure, right, so hybrid Cloud strategy, from even a medium and definitely enterprise, is where they already are. Even if you're going to create a brand new application, that data is going to be somewhere else, whether it's on-prem or whether it's in another data center, Instantly you have to think about hybrid Cloud. Right? We're kind of in that third generation of the Cloud. First generation was Rackspace, do it for me. Second generation was AWS, I'm going to do it. And now third generation is like, whoa, I just can't be in one Cloud provider. I need to have multiple cloud providers so, based on my workload, I need high performance servers. Where can that go? I have a lot of traffic in my ingress, egress and so, what Cloud provider should I use there?" And, so, now you can pick and choose workloads and then also your disaster recovery. You obviously should have that, not just in a different data center, but with an entirely different partner. >> Question on what exactly is hybrid Cloud? Because early on when people were talking about it, well, hybrid Cloud means I'm going to have some onsite and I'm going to have some in the Cloud as well and we have the idea of the Cloud bursting, where it'd be basically the same application and I'd have part of it moving to the Cloud when I needed it to and then I'd turn it off. But people who tried that found out that's actually really, really hard. It seems to be that people are more choosing that, I'll put this application onsite and I'll put that application in that Cloud and I'll put a different application over here. Is that what you see customers doing and what does that imply when we have features that are available in one Cloud that aren't in another? I'm thinking of things like Google's abilities in AI. That seems to be something people would like to do but, if my data are sitting over here, that's actually really difficult for me to pull that stuff across. So, what are you seeing with customers in their application choice of location? >> So, at the most basic level, obviously a hybrid Cloud strategy is to leverage multiple Cloud infrastructure providers for your enterprise, most basic level. But whether you keep the data onsite and then maybe the application offsite, that's really not a hybrid Cloud. That's, kind of like, I've got my on-prem and my one Cloud provider. Hybrid Cloud really comes into play when you're using everyone from OVH, for a specific set of workloads, maybe you have your disaster recovery here, maybe you have your whole set of enterprise workloads on OVH and you're using, say, maybe IBM for a different workload. Or maybe you're data set is in another Colo facility so, once you start mixing workloads where the data is and having multiple Cloud providers, that's more of where the definition is really evolving to because it's definitely evolving. >> If I'm an enterprise who wants to do that, not a lot of people actually have the skills in house to be able to do that themselves, so they generally rely on partners to do that. I'm thinking people like midlevel systems integrators, they tend to get involved in these kinds of deals. Is that something that you see OVH providing as well or are you looking more to partner with other firms to help? >> Yes, so that's a great question. We're a pure play infrastructure provider. We work really well with other systems integrators and this works very well with VMware's Vcan offering, where all the system integrators out there now have found themselves competing with AWS and competing with Rackspace, now that they're spending up their managed service providers. All these great system architects that are used to sitting on the client being that consultant, kind of helping with their hybrid Cloud strategy, now they're competing with the offerings that they used to offer. So, AWS and Rackspace now have managed services. We're not providing managed services. We rely on system integrators for that. >> I actually want to put a point on that. I bumped into Ajay Patel, we're going to be talking to him tomorrow, it feels like the network has been invigorated some since VMware no longer owns vCloud Air. You do and so now if VMware can focus on the ecosystem more, I've got a number of other hosting and service providers that we're talking to on theCUBE so, does that dynamic help VMware and help you? How does that look? >> No, I think it helps everyone. It give clarity. It gives clarity to the customer. That's what we're all here for, right? We're definitely a customer driven organization. We focus on making sure the customers are successful. And so the customer really understands, hey, this is someone that is investing billions of dollars in global infrastructure, security and scalability. And then for a VMware customer, they understand, okay, I can use VMware for all the great software enterprise software scale that they provide. As a VCam partner, now I'm not trying to compete. I understand where I can play and OVH, we're very clear on what we do and what we don't do so we're big partners on the VSan and working with Ajay Patel on the whole network to make sure those resellers now see that they can actually make more money with the vCloud Air on OVH. >> Right, so if things like the Cloud foundation, I'm assuming that, NSX, you're all tied in. How much joint engineering work do you do there? >> We're working very closely with all the teams over at VMware so whether it's HSX or on the vCloud Air side that already has a lot of technology built in and now VMware is productizing it so our engineers have to work together so it's very exciting. >> Is there anything in particular at the show that's really caught your attention? Because you were saying earlier that this is pretty much your first show in the VMware ecosystem. So, what's stood out to you from that you've seen at the show? >> Yeah, I think what stands out most are the customers that are really... We're talking about hybrid Cloud but there have been so many customers that really are looking for hybrid Cloud and that we all have been a part of the Cloud for so many years and that they're now just migrating workloads off of on-prem. I mean, it's like every year, I have to pinch myself. Like, really? Are there still 65% of workloads that aren't in the Cloud? It's just amazing. >> What do you think that instates going to look like, though. I question whether it's going to be 100% in the Cloud because we have people, customers still have mainframes. It's not most of the market but they still exist and there are plenty of, I call them heritage systems, that are out there. They're very difficult to move and often the upside of moving it isn't work taking the risk. >> In the future there will definitely be 100%. That's like saying that we need a fire in every house to keep it warm. Everything will be in the Cloud in the future. And then you have to differentiate based on the quality of service you're getting. What's the SLA? If I choose you, can I not choose someone else in the future? The vendor lock-in is pretty scary. But, without a doubt, as companies are spending up and you look at these startups now, yes, this is a long time, it may take a hundred years for GM to be totally in the Cloud, right, but you have such vendor lock-in now that these startups are learning that they can be 100% in the Cloud and then how do I work with different Cloud providers not to be locked in with them forever? It's been a big issue. Using other Paz offerings are good and bad. You have to be very careful to let your engineers just go off and start spending up services. >> Russ, one last thing I want to ask you, we talked a lot about the VMware partnership. I know you said you've got some networking capabilities. What other Cloud services can people tie into and I'm curious, the public Cloud's, is there a direct connect from your offering and things like that? >> We've got some great offerings. Obviously we're the worlds largest player in the infrastructure bare metal player and so we have tremendous automation and everything is redundant and backed up automatically, and then we build all of the other solutions on top of that. So, we not only have now vCloud Air, we've been a vSphere provider for seven years now. We have open stack provider as well for the people that do want a public Cloud. More of an open play. A lot of retail companies out there that don't want to go to AWS that are looking for more of an open source public Cloud offering as well. And we've been a great partner there. >> So, your services, I'm just curious, do you plug into other Clouds like Azure, AWS? >> There's not a specific API that we've built to plug in but we definitely have... Our philosophy and our culture is a portable, open, free internet so we don't lock anything down. >> Alright, Russ Reeder, really appreciate you joining us. Congratulations on the progress with bringing OVH to the US and yeah, maybe we'll ask Pat Gelsinger tomorrow, you know, his opinion on it today of some of the criticisms. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE.