(digital music) >> My, what a difference 10 years makes in the tech industry. At the beginning of the last decade, the cloud generally in AWS specifically ushered in the era where leading developers they tapped into a powerful collection of remote services through programmable interfaces you know, out there in the cloud. By the end of the decade this experience would shape the way virtually every IT professional thinks about acquiring, deploying, consuming and managing technology. Today that remote cloud is becoming ubiquitous, expanding to the "edge" with connections to on-premises, data centers and other local points throughout the globe. One of the most talked about examples of this movement is AWS Outposts, which brings the Amazon experience to the edge wherever that may be. Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to explore the ever expanding cloud and how two companies are delivering on customer needs to connect their data center operations to the cloud and the cloud to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. And with me are Joshua Burgin who's the General Manager of AWS Outposts and Michael Sotnick who's the VP at Global Alliances at Pure Storage. Gents, welcome come inside theCUBE. >> Right on. Well, thrilled to be here Dave. >> Great. >> Pleasure is mine, thank you. >> Awesome to have this conversation with you it's really our pleasure. So Joshua, let's start with Outpost. Maybe you could for the audience describe what it is maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing you're heard by narrative upfront maybe you can course correct anything I missed. >> Oh sure. I mean, I think you got it right on. AWS Outpost is a fully managed service that allows you to use AWS, API systems, tools, technology, hardware software innovation in your own data center or a colocation facility. And coming later this year as you put the edge in quotes at almost any edge site, as we announced the small form factor one you and two you Outposts at this last year's re-invent. >> I was excited when I saw Outpost a couple of years ago we were doing theCUBE at reinvent and I said, wow, this is truly going to be interesting. And I'm wondering like, how's Amazon, how are they going to partner? Where do some of the ecosystem get folks fit in? So Michael, you're an AWS Outpost ready partner. You know, what is that program all about? What does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, like you, Dave, I think we're as a vendor in technology we're inspired by what AWS has done. And when we look at Pure and see the opportunity we have you know, shared customer obsession, focused on outcomes, focused on NPS, great customer experience seeing AWS deliver the cloud to the edge, deliver the cloud to the data center that's just a great fit for us. So we rallied internally across our flash array of block storage solution a unified fast file and object flash plate solution and our container solution Portworx and, you know, across the entire portfolio we're the first to be in our segment the first to be service ready with AWS Outposts. And to us, it's an opportunity to link arms with AWS and cover some ground that's very familiar to us in the data center and clearly cover some ground that's very familiar to AWS in terms of great customer relationships across the board. >> Right, and, you know, I got to say, I've been a student of of Andy Jassy I always have listened to all his talks and go back and read the transcripts and Joshua I've learned that I never say never when it comes to AWS. And you see you guys moving into that, whatever you call it, the hybrid cloud, the on-premises really leaning in in a big way with Outposts and I wonder if you could talk about what's behind that expansion strategy? >> Sure, I mean, the way we looked at it obviously is always kind of working backwards from our customers. We have people tell us that they had some applications with low latency needs or where data resonancy or sovereignty was driven by regulations or in some cases where they needed to do local data processing something like an autonomous vehicle workload or in a factory or a healthcare facility. And they really wanted to say like, look, we're going to move all of our applications, you know the bulk of them to one of your regions in the fullness of time, but what's holding us back is that we want a consistent environment on-prem and in what you call the cloud. So we wanted a continuum of offerings from AWS to be able to serve all those needs. And that's really where Outpost came from. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction across financial services with companies like Morningstar and First Abu Dhabi bank, the iGaming space as you can imagine highly regulated industry, every city and, you know, municipality around the world wants to get in on that but they have their own regulations and they really require the infrastructure to be in a specific location and run a certain way. A company like TYPICA, which is based out of Europe they don't want to deliver different solutions depending on whether something's deployed in Minnesota or Germany or, you know, Vancouver. So that's where AWS Outpost comes in and it kind of fits that it works the same way as the things do in the region they can use the same tooling. >> Yeah, so Michael I'm going to ask you this question and maybe Joshua, you can chime in as well. I mean, you've got this, it's sort of a, win-win-win you know, Pure, AWS, you bringing that experience to on-premises, the customer gets that experience that Joshua just explained. I wonder if you could, I mean, you've been out now for a little bit testing the market learning here and there. What are the big takeaways in the learnings you're getting from customers? >> Yeah, I'll start and I'm sure Joshua can compliment quite a bit. And like Joshua hit on, right. You know, I think we take our cues from our customers, Dave, and you know what the customers are looking for, you know is a commercial relationship and so in addition to the technological inspiration we've got from AWS we offer the solution for Outposts and a Pure as a service model. So it's 100% subscription-based for the customer and they're able to consume it, you know the same way that they would all of their services from AWS including Outposts and it's also available on the AWS marketplace. So you've got to meet the customer where they want to be met first and foremost and so they appreciate that. And they see that as a great value in the relationship. You know, the growth of object, you know, I think is another one of those macro trends that's happening in our space. And as customers are deploying locations that are putting out petabytes of object storage requirements there's an increasing need for high-performance object. And that's where we can really compliment an Outpost implementation and deliver high performance and that kind of ubiquitous experience, that hybrid experience to allow the customer on a policy based way to maximize that on-prem performance with Outpost and Pure around that object data set. And then also manage the life cycle of that data and the economics of that data in the cloud. >> So, but Joshua, so you guys obviously you invented that, you know, the modern subscription model for infrastructure but it's different, you're actually installing hardware. So you had to sort of rethink how you did that. What have you learned and how has that model... How do you get it substantially similar as possible to the public cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you called it a win-win-win earlier. And as much as we like to innovate we also like to make things feel kind of comfortable and familiar to people 'cause you think about there's both the developer who's using the APIs and the tools and also the CFO and the people in finance or procurement who are looking at the spending. So with Outposts, it actually feels very similar to the region. If you're used to purchasing our compute savings plans or what people used to call reserved instances or RIs the underlying infrastructure on the Outpost works in a very similar way. You're not going to be deploying a multi-rack Outpost and then ripping it out three weeks later so on demand doesn't really make sense there. But for all the services that are deployed on top of Outposts whether it's application load balancer or elastic cash or Elastic MapReduce, those have the same kind of on demand service model, the pricing model that they do in the region. And so very similarly, the Outpost ready program which lets you use trusted and certified third-party solutions, such as ones from Pure those are also going to feel familiar, whether you're coming from the on-prem world and you're already that technology for your storage, your network monitoring, your security or if you're using that solution from the marketplace in the AWS region, it's going to be a totally seamless deploy on the Outpost. So you're going to get something that's kind of the best of both worlds, familiar to you economically and from an installation perspective but also removing all that undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to patch and manage firmware upgrades and you asked this earlier, what customers really want is that there's this whole world of innovation, things that haven't even been invented yet. A few years ago, we hadn't invented Outposts. People want to know that as those innovations get released to the market they can take advantage of them without having to redeploy and so that's what having an AWS Outpost means. That as third parties or Amazon innovates new services can be made available without shipping a DVD or kind of spinning up an entire staff to manage that. >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting watching this equilibrium you know, take place. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. Obviously AWS has a huge impact on how people think about price, as I said upfront. And it seems like, you know, culturally, Michael, there's a fit. I mean, you guys have always sort of been into that you know, your evergreen model, for the first one that subscription sort of mindset. So it's sort of natural for you whereas, you know, maybe a a legacy company might not (chuckles) be able to lean in as hard as you guys are. Maybe some quick thoughts on that. >> Yeah, look, I love the way you framed that up and couldn't agree more. I think AWS is famous for a lot of things some of the values that they embrace and putting the customer at the center of everything they do couldn't be more shared, you know, with Pure. I think, you know, we talk about our company as one that runs two fires right, to give the customer a great experience. And so we know our way around the data center and I think the opportunity to give that customer, you know a consistent experience with AWS as they deliver Outpost to the data center is a really powerful combination. You know, I think one thing, just look at the backdrop of the pandemic, Dave, you know, every part of a company's organization is going through significant change. And I think the data center is absolutely at the center of some of those changes. And I think every one now as they look at the next generation data center they're asking themselves what are containers what does Kubernetes mean to my business? And I think the opportunity that, you know we see jointly with EKS as a partner is really to help customers achieve that goal of, you know the application deployments anywhere and the ability to drive that application, you know modernize that next generation application cycle. So I love the way you framed it up, giving us credit for being highly differentiated from our legacy competitors and we take great pride in that and really want to give a cloud-like experience to our customers. And I think what we're able to do with AWS Outpost is kind of bring that cloud-like experience that they have come to love from AWS into the data center and at the same time shine a light on what we've always done in terms of a cloud-like experience for the Pure customer. >> There's a lot of ways to skin a cat but when you've invented the cloud and you don't have a lot of legacy baggage you can kind of move faster. And I think that, you know, we're really excited about what's occurring here because take the term digital transformation I mean, before the pandemic (groaning) it's like, yeah okay, it had some meaning but you really had to squint through it and a lot of people were complacent about it. Well, we know what digital means now if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so it was kind of this forced march to digital I call it and as a result it really increases the need for things like automation and that cloud experience on-prem because I don't have time to be provisioning LUNs anymore. It's just what you guys call it undifferentiated heavy lifting that is really a no-no these days I just absolutely can't afford it. Let's close on what's next. I mean, we've got new form factors coming we're like super excited about when we see things like what Amazon is doing with custom Silicon we see these innovations coming out with processing power going through the roof. Everybody says Moore's law is dead but processing power is increasing faster than it ever has when you combine all these innovations of GPU's and NPUs and accelerators, it's just, it's amazing. And the costs are coming down so you're going to be able to take advantage of that. Outpost will take advantage of that, Pure will, New Designs but specifically as it relates to Outpost, you got one you, you got two you, you coming optimizing for the edge what do customers need to know about these solutions? Why should they consider this combination of Pure and AWS? Maybe Joshua you can start and Michael you can bring us home. >> Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the reasons that people should consider it, right. The pace of innovation is not going to slow down here at AWS or of course, with Pure. Whether you have the need for a single server, or you're somebody like dish rolling out a new cloud enabled, you know cloud native 5G network you want to work with somebody who can deploy all the way at the Telco edge right, with hardware innovation up to a local zone all the way up to a region. You don't want to be working with different providers for that and you don't know what you're going to need in three or five years and frankly, I'm not sure that we know everything yet either but we're going to continue to listen to our customers and as you mentioned, deliver things like graviton and inferential and trainium which are our innovations in custom Silicon. Those are delivering 40% price performance improvements for people who are migrating, that's really an enormous benefit. And we're bringing all of those to the Outpost as well so you don't have to choose between moving to the cloud and that being your only modernization option, you can move to the cloud and at the same time still operate on-prem, you know, at a colo facility or all the way at the edge using all of the same tooling. And you can work with best-in-breed third-party technologies like what's offered by Pure. >> Well, and Michael, I'm going to cut you off before you get a chance to close, but I'll let you close. The Portworx acquisition was really interesting to us because it brings that kind of portability, new programming model and something that Joshua said struck in my mind is when I think about the edge word to me what's going to win the edge you know, obviously the flexibility, the agility but the programmability and the customization. So many different use cases. We're not just going to take general purpose boxes and throw them over the fence and say, here you go. You know, the general purpose, that's not what's going to win the edge it's really going to take a lot more thought than that. But, so I just wanted to put that in there. Michael, bring us home, please. (laughing) >> Right on. Well, look you two, and no surprise here right, you two covered so much great ground there. From first principles you know, what does Pure look at? Like what we did being first in terms of service ready across Portworx, for EKS, for flash plate across unified fast file on object and flash ray, you know for block storage, being first with Outposts we want to be first for the one you and to you solutions. So I think customers can expect, you know that our partnership is going to continue to deliver that cloud-like experience, that cloud experience in the AWS context, that cloud-like experience in the Pure context, you know for their on-prem and hybrid workloads. And I think you hit it up so well like if you're not digital business, you're not in business. And so I think one thing that everyone learned over the last year is exactly that. The other thing they learned is they don't know what they don't know. And so they need to make bets on partners that are modern that are delivering simple solutions that solve complex problems that are automated and that are being delivered with the customer first mindset. And I think in the combination of AWS, Outposts and Pure, we're doing exactly that. >> Great point, so a lot of unknowns out there. Hey guys, congratulations on the progress you've made. It's a great partnership, two super innovative companies and really pleasure to have you in theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of a PM partner experience. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube. Virtual. We can't be there in person with a remote. And our two next guests are We have pure storage. Michael Slotnick, VP of Worldwide Alliances, Pure storage. And Robert Czarnecki, principal product manager for a U. S. Outposts. Welcome to the Cube. >>Wonderful to be here. Great to see you. And thanks for having us, >>Michael. Great to see you pure. You guys had some great Momenta, um, earnings and some announcements. You guys have some new news? We're here. Reinvent all part of a W s and outpost. I want to get into it right away. Uh, talk about the relationship with AWS. I know you guys have some hot news. Just came out in late November. We're here in the event. All the talk is about new higher level services. Hybrid edge. What do you guys doing? What's the story? >>Yeah, Look, I gotta tell you the partnership with AWS is a very high profile and strategic partnership for pure storage. We've worked hard with our cloud block store for AWS, which is an extensive bility solution for pure flash array and into a W s. I think the big news and one of things that we're most proud of is the recent establishment of pure being service ready and outpost ready. And the first and Onley on Prem storage solution and were shoulder to shoulder with AWS is a W s takes outpost into the data center. Now they're going after key workloads that were well known for. And we're very excited Thio, partner with AWS in that regard, >>you know, congratulations to pure. We've been following you guys from the beginning since inception since it was founded startup. And now I'll see growing public company on the next level kind of growth plan. You guys were early on all this stuff with with with flash with software and cloud. So it's paying off. Rob, I wanna get toe Outpost because this was probably most controversial announcements I've ever covered at reinvent for the past eight years. It really was the first sign that Andy was saying, You know what? We're working backwards from the customers and they all are talking Hybrid. We're gonna have Outpost. Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing Success without post? Now that that's part of the portfolio, How does it all working out? Give us the update on the workloads in the verticals. >>Absolutely. Although I have to say I'd call it more exciting than controversial. We're so excited about the opportunities that outpost opened for our customers. And, you know, customers have been asking us for years. How can we bring AWS services to our data centers? And we thought about it for a long time. And until until we define the outpost service, we really I thought we could do better. And what outpost does it lets us take those services that customers are familiar with? It lets us bring it to their data center and and one of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest. Outpost right. You could have customers, for example, with data residency needs, those that have to do local data processing. Uh, maybe have Leighton see needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users. We're just folks trying to modernize their data center, and that's a journey. That transformation takes time, right? So So Outpost works for all of those customers. And one of the things that's really become clear to us is that to enable the success that we think L Post can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And and one of the fantastic things about the outpost ready program is many of those customers air using pure and they have pure hardware and way. Send an outpost over to the pure lab recently, and I have to tell you a picture of those two racks next to each other looks really good. >>You know, 20 used to kind of welcome back my controversial comments. You know, I meant in the sense of that's when Cloud really got big into the enterprise and you have to deal with hybrid. So I do think it's exciting because the edges a big theme here. Can you just share real quick before I get in some of the pure questions on this edge piece with the hybrid because what what's the customer need? And when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know, really kind of work backwards from the customer. What are their needs? What causes them to look at Outpost as part of their hybrid? What's the Keith consideration? >>Yeah, so? So there are a couple of different needs. John, right? One, for example, is way have regions and local zones across the globe. But we're not everywhere and and their their data residency regulations that they're becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers I come to us and say, Look, I really need to run, for example, of financial services workload. It needs to be in Thailand, and we don't have a reason or local zone in Thailand. But we could get him an outpost to to places where they need to be right. So the that that requirement to keep data, whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement, that's a that's a big driver. The other pieces there's There's a tremendous amount of interest in the that top down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations right to modernize their their digital approach but there, when they actually look a look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware, and that's a hard challenge. Thio Plan the migration when you could bring an outpost right into that data center. It really makes it much easier because AWS is right there. There could be a monolithic architecture that it doesn't lend well toe having part of the workload running in the region, part of the workload running in their data center. But with an outpost, they can extend AWS to their data center, and that just makes it so much easier for them to get started on their digital transformation. >>Michael, this is This is the key trend. You guys saw early Cloud operations on premise. It becomes cloud ified at that point when you have Dev ops on on Premises and then cloud pure cloud for bursting all that stuff. And now you've got the edge exploding as well of growth and opportunity. What causes the customer to get the pure option on outputs? What's the What's the angle for you guys? Obviously storage, you get data and I can see this whole Yeah, there's no region and certainly outpost stores data, and that's a requirement for a lot of, you know, certainly global customers and needs. What's the pure angle on this? >>Yeah, I appreciate that. And appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees in the wild in terms of yours footprint in the market share that we've established his company over 11 years in business and, you know, over eight years of shipping product. You know, what I would tell you is one of the things that that a lot of people misses the simplicity and the consistency that air characteristically, you know very much in the AWS experience and equally within the pure experience and that that's really powerful. So as we were successful in putting pure into workloads that, you know, for for all the reasons that Rob talked about right data gravity, you know, the the regulatory issues, you know, just application architecture and its inability to move to the public cloud. Um, you know, our predictability are simplicity. Are consistency really match with the costumers getting with other work clothes that they had in AWS? And so with a W S outposts that's really bringing to the customer that single pane of glass to manage their entire environment. And so we saw that we made the three year investment in Outpost. Is Rob said Just having our solution? Inp Yours Data center. It's set up and running today with a solution built on flash Blade, which is our unstructured data solution and, you know, delivering fantastic performance results in a I and ML workloads. We see the same opportunity within backup and disaster recovery workloads and into analytics and then equally the opportunity toe build. You know, Flash Ray and our other storage solutions, and to build architectures with outposts in our data center and bring them to market >>real quick just to follow up on that. What use cases are you seeing that are most successful without post and in general in general, how do you guys get your customers to integrate with the rest of, uh, their environment? Because you you no one's got. Now this operating environments not just cloud public, is cloud on premise and everything else. >>Yeah, you know what's cool is, and then Rob hit right on. It is the the wide range of industries and the wide range of use cases and workloads that air finding themselves attracted to the outpost offering on DSO. You know, without a doubt there's gonna be, You know, I think what people would immediately believe ai and ml workloads and the importance of having high performance storage and to have a high performance outpost environment, you know, as close to the center as possible of those solutions. But it doesn't stop there. Traditional virtualized database workloads that for reasons of application architecture, aren't candidates to move. AWS is public cloud offering our great fit for outpost and those air workloads that we've always traditionally been successful within the market and see a great opportunity. Thio, you know, build on that success as an outpost partner. >>Rob, I gotta ask, you last reinvent when we're in person. When we had real life back then e was at the replay party and hanging out, and this guy comes out to me. I don't even know who he was. Obviously big time engineer over there opens his hand up and shows me this little processor and I'm like, closes and he's like and I go take a picture and it was like freaking out. Don't take a picture. It was it was the big processor was the big, uh, kind of person. Uh, I think it was the big monster. And it was just so small. See the innovation and hard where you guys have done a lot, there s that's cool. I like get your thoughts on where the future is going there because you've got great hardware innovation, but you got the higher level services with containers. I know you guys took your time. Containers are super important because that's going to deal with that. So how do you look at that? You got the innovation in the hardware check containers. How does that all fit in? Because you guys have been making a lot of investments in some of these cloud native projects. What's your position on that? >>You know, it's all part of one common story, John right customers that they want an easy path to delivering impact for their business. Right. And, you know, you've heard us speak a lot over the past few years about how we're really seeing these two different types of customers. We have those customers that really loved to get those foundational core building blocks and stitch them together in a creative way. But then you have more and more customers that they wanna. They wanna operate at a different level, and and that's okay. We want to support both of them. We want to give both of them all the tools that they need. Thio spend their time and put their resource is towards what differentiates their business and just be able to give them support at whatever level they need on the infrastructure side. And it's fantastic that are combination of investments in hardware and services. And now, with Outpost, we can bring those investments even closer to the customer. If you really think about it that way, the possibilities become limitless. >>Yeah, it's not like the simplicity asked, but it was pretty beautiful to the way it looks. It looks nice. Michael. Gotta ask you on your side. A couple of big announcements over that we've been following from pure looking back. You already had the periods of service announcement you bought the port Works was acquisition. Yeah, that's container management. Across the data center, including outposts you got pure is a service is pure. Is the service working with outpost and how and if so, how and what's the consumption model for customers there. >>Yeah, thanks so much, John. And appreciate you following us the way that you do it. Zits meaningful and appreciate it. Listen, you know, I think the customers have made it clear and in AWS is, you know, kind of led the way in terms of the consumption and experience expectations that customers have. It's got to be consumable. They've got to pay for what they use. It's got to be outcome oriented and and we're doing that with pure is a service. And so I think we saw that early and have invested in pure is a service for our customers. And, you know, we look at the way we acquired outposts as ah customer and a partner of AWS aan dat is exactly the same way customers can consume pure. You know, all of our solutions in a, you know, use what you need, pay for what you use, um, environment. And, you know, one of the exciting things about AWS partnership is its wide ranging and one of the things that AWS has done, I think world class is marketplace. And so we're excited to share with this audience, you know, really? On the back of just recent announcement that, pure is the service is available within the AWS marketplace. And so you think about the, you know, simplicity and the consistency that pure and AWS delivered to the market. AWS customers demand that they get that in the marketplace, and and we're proud to have our offerings there. And Port Works has been in the marketplace and and will continue to be showcased from a container management standpoint. So as those workloads increasingly become, you know, the cloud native you know, Dev Ops, Containerized workloads. We've got a solution and to end to support >>that great job. Great insight. Congratulations to pure good moves as making some good moves. Rob, I want to just get to the final word here on Outpost again. Great. Everyone loves this product again. It's a lot of attention. It's really that that puts the operating models cloud firmly on the in the on premise world for Amazon opens up a lot of good conversation and business opportunities and technical integrations or are all around you. So what's your message to the ecosystem out there for outposts? How do I What's the what's the word? I wanna do I work with you guys? How do I get involved? What are some of the opportunities? What's your position? How do you talk to the ecosystem? >>Yeah, You know, John, I think the best way to frame it is we're just getting started. We've got our first year in the books. We've seen so many promising signals from customers, had so many interesting conversations that just weren't possible without outposts. And, uh, you know, working with partners like pure and expanding our outpost. Ready program is just the beginning. Right? We launched back in September. We've We've seen another meaningful set of partners come out. Uh, here it reinvent, and we're gonna continue toe double down on both the outpost business, but specifically on on working with our partners. I think that the key to unlocking the magic of outpost is meeting customers where they are. And those customers are using our partners. And there's no reason that it shouldn't just work when they move there. Their partner based workload from their existing infrastructure right over to the outpost. >>All right, I'll leave it there. Michael saw the VP of worldwide alliances that pier storage congratulations. Great innovation strategy It's easy to do alliances when you've got a great product and technology congratulated. Rob Kearney Key principle product manager. Outpost will be speaking more to you throughout the next couple of weeks. Here at Reinvent Virtual. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay. So cute. Virtual. We are the Cube. Virtual. We wish we could be there in person this year, but it's a virtual event. Over three weeks will be lots of coverage. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music intro) (logo background tingles) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to day three of MWC23, my name is Dave Vellante and we're here live at the Theater of Barcelona, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson, John Furrier's in our studio in Palo Alto. Lot of buzz at the show, the Mobile World Daily Today, front page, Netflix chief hits back in fair share row, Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, talking about how, "Hey, you guys want to tax us, the telcos want to tax us, well, maybe you should help us pay for some of the content. Your margins are higher, you have a monopoly, you know, we're delivering all this value, you're bundling Netflix in, from a lot of ISPs so hold on, you know, pump the brakes on that tax," so that's the big news. Lockheed Martin, FOSS issues, AI guidelines, says, "AI's not going to take over your job anytime soon." Although I would say, your job's going to be AI-powered for the next five years. We're going to talk about data, we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco stack, part of that stack is a data layer. John Kreisa is here, the CMO of Couchbase, John, you know, we've talked about all week, the disaggregation of the telco stacks, they got, you know, Silicon and operating systems that are, you know, real time OS, highly reliable, you know, compute infrastructure all the way up through a telemetry stack, et cetera. And that's a proprietary block that's really exploding, it's like the big bang, like we saw in the enterprise 20 years ago and we haven't had much discussion about that data layer, sort of that horizontal data layer, that's the market you play in. You know, Couchbase obviously has a lot of telco customers- >> John: That's right. >> We've seen, you know, Snowflake and others launch telco businesses. What are you seeing when you talk to customers at the show? What are they doing with that data layer? >> Yeah, so they're building applications to drive and power unique experiences for their users, but of course, it all starts with where the data is. So they're building mobile applications where they're stretching it out to the edge and you have to move the data to the edge, you have to have that capability to deliver that highly interactive experience to their customers or for their own internal use cases out to that edge, so seeing a lot of that with Couchbase and with our customers in telco. >> So what do the telcos want to do with data? I mean, they've got the telemetry data- >> John: Yeah. >> Now they frequently complain about the over-the-top providers that have used that data, again like Netflix, to identify customer demand for content and they're mopping that up in a big way, you know, certainly Amazon and shopping Google and ads, you know, they're all using that network. But what do the telcos do today and what do they want to do in the future? They're all talking about monetization, how do they monetize that data? >> Yeah, well, by taking that data, there's insight to be had, right? So by usage patterns and what's happening, just as you said, so they can deliver a better experience. It's all about getting that edge, if you will, on their competition and so taking that data, using it in a smart way, gives them that edge to deliver a better service and then grow their business. >> We're seeing a lot of action at the edge and, you know, the edge can be a Home Depot or a Lowe's store, but it also could be the far edge, could be a, you know, an oil drilling, an oil rig, it could be a racetrack, you know, certainly hospitals and certain, you know, situations. So let's think about that edge, where there's maybe not a lot of connectivity, there might be private networks going in, in the future- >> John: That's right. >> Private 5G networks. What's the data flow look like there? Do you guys have any customers doing those types of use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what are they doing with the data? >> Yeah, absolutely, we've got customers all across, so telco and transportation, all kinds of service delivery and healthcare, for example, we've got customers who are delivering healthcare out at the edge where they have a remote location, they're able to deliver healthcare, but as you said, there's not always connectivity, so they need to have the applications, need to continue to run and then sync back once they have that connectivity. So it's really having the ability to deliver a service, reliably and then know that that will be synced back to some central server when they have connectivity- >> So the processing might occur where the data- >> Compute at the edge. >> How do you sync back? What is that technology? >> Yeah, so there's, so within, so Couchbase and Couchbase's case, we have an autonomous sync capability that brings it back to the cloud once they get back to whether it's a private network that they want to run over, or if they're doing it over a public, you know, wifi network, once it determines that there's connectivity and, it can be peer-to-peer sync, so different edge apps communicating with each other and then ultimately communicating back to a central server. >> I mean, the other theme here, of course, I call it the software-defined telco, right? But you got to have, you got to run on something, got to have hardware. So you see companies like AWS putting Outposts, out to the edge, Outposts, you know, doesn't really run a lot of database to mind, I mean, it runs RDS, you know, maybe they're going to eventually work with companies like... I mean, you're a partner of AWS- >> John: We are. >> Right? So do you see that kind of cloud infrastructure that's moving to the edge? Do you see that as an opportunity for companies like Couchbase? >> Yeah, we do. We see customers wanting to push more and more of that compute out to the edge and so partnering with AWS gives us that opportunity and we are certified on Outpost and- >> Oh, you are? >> We are, yeah. >> Okay. >> Absolutely. >> When did that, go down? >> That was last year, but probably early last year- >> So I can run Couchbase at the edge, on Outpost? >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you know, Outpost adoption has been slow, we've reported on that, but are you seeing any traction there? Are you seeing any nibbles? >> Starting to see some interest, yeah, absolutely. And again, it has to be for the right use case, but again, for service delivery, things like healthcare and in transportation, you know, they're starting to see where they want to have that compute, be very close to where the actions happen. >> And you can run on, in the data center, right? >> That's right. >> You can run in the cloud, you know, you see HPE with GreenLake, you see Dell with Apex, that's essentially their Outposts. >> Yeah. >> They're saying, "Hey, we're going to take our whole infrastructure and make it as a service." >> Yeah, yeah. >> Right? And so you can participate in those environments- >> We do. >> And then so you've got now, you know, we call it supercloud, you've got the on-prem, you've got the, you can run in the public cloud, you can run at the edge and you want that consistent experience- >> That's right. >> You know, from a data layer- >> That's right. >> So is that really the strategy for a data company is taking or should be taking, that horizontal layer across all those use cases? >> You do need to think holistically about it, because you need to be able to deliver as a, you know, as a provider, wherever the customer wants to be able to consume that application. So you do have to think about any of the public clouds or private networks and all the way to the edge. >> What's different John, about the telco business versus the traditional enterprise? >> Well, I mean, there's scale, I mean, one thing they're dealing with, particularly for end user-facing apps, you're dealing at a very very high scale and the expectation that you're going to deliver a very interactive experience. So I'd say one thing in particular that we are focusing on, is making sure we deliver that highly interactive experience but it's the scale of the number of users and customers that they have, and the expectation that your application's always going to work. >> Speaking of applications, I mean, it seems like that's where the innovation is going to come from. We saw yesterday, GSMA announced, I think eight APIs telco APIs, you know, we were talking on theCUBE, one of the analysts was like, "Eight, that's nothing," you know, "What do these guys know about developers?" But you know, as Daniel Royston said, "Eight's better than zero." >> Right? >> So okay, so we're starting there, but the point being, it's all about the apps, that's where the innovation's going to come from- >> That's right. >> So what are you seeing there, in terms of building on top of the data app? >> Right, well you have to provide, I mean, have to provide the APIs and the access because it is really, the rubber meets the road, with the developers and giving them the ability to create those really rich applications where they want and create the experiences and innovate and change the way that they're giving those experiences. >> Yeah, so what's your relationship with developers at Couchbase? >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, talk about that a little bit- >> Yeah, yeah, so we have a great relationship with developers, something we've been investing more and more in, in terms of things like developer relations teams and community, Couchbase started in open source, continue to be based on open source projects and of course, those are very developer centric. So we provide all the consistent APIs for developers to create those applications, whether it's something on Couchbase Lite, which is our kind of edge-based database, or how they can sync that data back and we actually automate a lot of that syncing which is a very difficult developer task which lends them to one of the developer- >> What I'm trying to figure out is, what's the telco developer look like? Is that a developer that comes from the enterprise and somebody comes from the blockchain world, or AI or, you know, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of developer talk here, but there's a huge opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, you know, I feel like, the telcos kind of remind me of, you know, a traditional legacy company trying to get into the developer world, you know, even Oracle, okay, they bought Sun, they got Java, so I guess they have developers, but you know, IBM for years tried with Bluemix, they had to end up buying Red Hat, really, and that gave them the developer community. >> Yep. >> EMC used to have a thing called EMC Code, which was a, you know, good effort, but eh. And then, you know, VMware always trying to do that, but, so as you move up the stack obviously, you have greater developer affinity. Where do you think the telco developer's going to come from? How's that going to evolve? >> Yeah, it's interesting, and I think they're... To kind of get to your first question, I think they're fairly traditional enterprise developers and when we break that down, we look at it in terms of what the developer persona is, are they a front-end developer? Like they're writing that front-end app, they don't care so much about the infrastructure behind or are they a full stack developer and they're really involved in the entire application development lifecycle? Or are they living at the backend and they're really wanting to just focus in on that data layer? So we lend towards all of those different personas and we think about them in terms of the APIs that we create, so that's really what the developers are for telcos is, there's a combination of those front-end and full stack developers and so for them to continue to innovate they need to appeal to those developers and that's technology, like Couchbase, is what helps them do that. >> Yeah and you think about the Apples, you know, the app store model or Apple sort of says, "Okay, here's a developer kit, go create." >> John: Yeah. >> "And then if it's successful, you're going to be successful and we're going to take a vig," okay, good model. >> John: Yeah. >> I think I'm hearing, and maybe I misunderstood this, but I think it was the CEO or chairman of Ericsson on the day one keynotes, was saying, "We are going to monetize the, essentially the telemetry data, you know, through APIs, we're going to charge for that," you know, maybe that's not the best approach, I don't know, I think there's got to be some innovation on top. >> John: Yeah. >> Now maybe some of these greenfield telcos are going to do like, you take like a dish networks, what they're doing, they're really trying to drive development layers. So I think it's like this wild west open, you know, community that's got to be formed and right now it's very unclear to me, do you have any insights there? >> I think it is more, like you said, Wild West, I think there's no emerging standard per se for across those different company types and sort of different pieces of the industry. So consequently, it does need to form some more standards in order to really help it grow and I think you're right, you have to have the right APIs and the right access in order to properly monetize, you have to attract those developers or you're not going to be able to monetize properly. >> Do you think that if, in thinking about your business and you know, you've always sold to telcos, but now it's like there's this transformation going on in telcos, will that become an increasingly larger piece of your business or maybe even a more important piece of your business? Or it's kind of be steady state because it's such a slow moving industry? >> No, it is a big and increasing piece of our business, I think telcos like other enterprises, want to continue to innovate and so they look to, you know, technologies like, Couchbase document database that allows them to have more flexibility and deliver the speed that they need to deliver those kinds of applications. So we see a lot of migration off of traditional legacy infrastructure in order to build that new age interface and new age experience that they want to deliver. >> A lot of buzz in Silicon Valley about open AI and Chat GPT- >> Yeah. >> You know, what's your take on all that? >> Yeah, we're looking at it, I think it's exciting technology, I think there's a lot of applications that are kind of, a little, sort of innovate traditional interfaces, so for example, you can train Chat GPT to create code, sample code for Couchbase, right? You can go and get it to give you that sample app which gets you a headstart or you can actually get it to do a better job of, you know, sorting through your documentation, like Chat GPT can do a better job of helping you get access. So it improves the experience overall for developers, so we're excited about, you know, what the prospect of that is. >> So you're playing around with it, like everybody is- >> Yeah. >> And potentially- >> Looking at use cases- >> Ways tO integrate, yeah. >> Hundred percent. >> So are we. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always great to see you, my friend. >> Great, thanks very much. >> All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, theCUBE will be back live from Barcelona at the theater. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of MWC23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, theCUBE.net is where all the videos are, keep it right there. (cheerful upbeat music outro)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or 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 at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM 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 this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you 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 the 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 to 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 want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS 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 VMworld, talking about how 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 AIOps, you got ITOps 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 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 and 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 assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. 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 best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir 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 workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, 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's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, 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 want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of 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 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 what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. 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 want to 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 going to 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 want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, 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, no, I was going to 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 vStor admin that's used to their on-premises 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, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent 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 users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to 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 going to 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 going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to 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 going to 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 to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And 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 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 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 also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. 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 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 want to 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 want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. 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 Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. 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 events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "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 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 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 and meant 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 in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, 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 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. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting 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? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? 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 for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node 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 for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP 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 reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming 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 going to 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 going to 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 want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS 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 sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and 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 interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So 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 closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe 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 man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either 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 call that super cloud in the way that we 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 kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You 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, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where 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 VMware's 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 want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the 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 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 it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And 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 grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little 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 re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think 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 are called 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 to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin 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, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So 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 on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or 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 at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM 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 this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you 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. You know, one of the key things... Together, 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 the 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 to 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 want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS 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 VMworld, talking about how 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 AIOps, you got ITOps 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 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 and 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 assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. 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 best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir 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 workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, 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's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, 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 want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of 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 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 what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. 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 want to 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 going to 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 want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, 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, no, I was going to 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 vStor admin that's used to their on-premises 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, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent 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 users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to 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 going to 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 going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to 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 going to 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 to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And 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 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 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 also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. 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 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 want to 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 want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. 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 Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. 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 events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "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 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 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 and meant 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 in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, 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 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. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting 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? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? 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 for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node 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 for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP 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 reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming 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 going to 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 going to 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 want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS 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 sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and 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 interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So 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 closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe 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 man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either 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 call that super cloud in the way that we 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 kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You 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, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where 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 VMware's 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 want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the 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 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 it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And 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 grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little 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 re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think 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 are called 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 to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin 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, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So 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 on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. CUBE's coverage of re:MARS, here in Las Vegas, in person. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is the analyst panel wrap up analysis of the keynote, the show, past one and a half days. We got two great guests here. We got Andy Thurai, Vice President, Principal Consultant, Constellation Research. Larry Carvalho, Principal Consultant at RobustCloud LLC. Congratulations going out on your own. >> Thank you. >> Andy, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well. >> Guys, thanks for coming out. So this is the session where we break down and analyze, you guys are analysts, industry analysts, you go to all the shows, we see each other. You guys are analyzing the landscape. What does this show mean to you guys? 'Cause this is not obvious to the normal tech follower. The insiders see the confluence of robotics, space, automation and machine learning. Obviously, it's IoTs, industrials, it's a bunch of things. But there's some dots to connect. Let's start with you, Larry. What do you see here happening at this show? >> So you got to see how Amazon started, right? When AWS started. When AWS started, it primarily took the compute storage, networking of Amazon.com and put it as a cloud service, as a service, and started selling the heck out of it. This is a stage later now that Amazon.com has done a lot of physical activity, and using AIML and the robotics, et cetera, it's now the second phase of innovation, which is beyond digital transformation of back office processes, to the transformation of physical processes where people are now actually delivering remotely and it's an amazing area. >> So back office's IT data center kind of vibe. >> Yeah. >> You're saying front end, industrial life. >> Yes. >> Life as we know it. >> Right, right. I mean, I just stopped at a booth here and they have something that helps anybody who's stuck in the house who cannot move around. But with Alexa, order some water to bring them wherever they are in the house where they're stuck in their bed. But look at the innovation that's going on there right at the edge. So I think those are... >> John: And you got the Lunar, got the sex appeal of the space, Lunar Outpost interview, >> Yes. >> those guys. They got Rover on Mars. They're going to have be colonizing the moon. >> Yes. >> I made a joke, I'm like, "Well, I left a part back on earth, I'll be right back." (Larry and Andy laugh) >> You can't drive back to the office. So a lot of challenges. Andy, what's your take of the show? Take us your analysis. What's the vibe, what's your analysis so far? >> It's a great show. So, as Larry was saying, one of the thing was that when Amazon started, right? So they were more about cloud computing. So, which means is they try to commoditize more of data center components or compute components. So that was working really well for what I call it as a compute economy, right? >> John: Mm hmm. >> And I call the newer economy as more of a AIML-based data economy. So when you move from a compute economy into a data economy, there are things that come into the forefront that never existed before, never popular before. Things like your AIML model creation, model training, model movement, model influencing, all of the above, right? And then of course the robotics has come long way since then. And then some of what they do at the store, or the charging, the whole nine yards. So, the whole concept of all of these components, when you put them on re:Invent, such a big show, it was getting lost. So that's why they don't have it for a couple of years. They had it one year. And now all of a sudden they woke up and say, "You know what? We got to do this!" >> John: Yeah. >> To bring out this critical components that we have, that's ripe, mature for the world to next component. So that's why- I think they're pretty good stuff. And some of the robotics things I saw in there, like one of them I posted on my Twitter, it's about the robot dog, sniffing out the robot rover, which I thought was pretty hilarious. (All laugh) >> Yeah, this is the thing. You're seeing like the pandemic put everything on hold on the last re:Mars, and then the whole world was upside down. But a lot of stuff pulled forward. You saw the call center stuff booming. You saw the Zoomification of our workplace. And I think a lot of people got to the realization that this hybrid, steady-state's here. And so, okay. That settles that. But the digital transformation of actually physical work? >> Andy: Yeah. >> Location, the walk in and out store right over here we've seen that's the ghost store in Seattle. We've all been there. In fact, I was kind of challenged, try to steal something. I'm like, okay- (Larry laughs) I'm pulling all my best New Jersey moves on everyone. You know? >> Andy: You'll get charged for it. >> I couldn't get away with it. Two double packs, drop it, it's smart as hell. Can't beat the system. But, you bring that to where the AI machine learning, and the robotics meet, robots. I mean, we had robots here on theCUBE. So, I think this robotics piece is a huge IoT, 'cause we've been covering industrial IoT for how many years, guys? And you could know what's going on there. Huge cyber threats. >> Mm hmm. >> Huge challenges, old antiquated OT technology. So I see a confluence in the collision between that OT getting decimated, to your point. And so, do you guys see that? I mean, am I just kind of seeing mirage? >> I don't see it'll get decimated, it'll get replaced with a newer- >> John: Dave would call me out on that. (Larry laughs) >> Decimated- >> Microsoft's going to get killed. >> I think it's going to have to be reworked. And just right now, you want do anything in a shop floor, you have to have a physical wire connected to it. Now you think about 5G coming in, and without a wire, you get minute details, you get low latency, high bandwidth. And the possibilities are endless at the edge. And I think with AWS, they got Outposts, they got Snowcone. >> John: There's a threat to them at the edge. Outpost is not doing well. You talk to anyone out there, it's like, you can't find success stories. >> Larry: Yeah. >> I'm going to get hammered by Amazon people, "Oh, what're you're saying that?" You know, EKS for example, with serverless is kicking ass too. So, I mean I'm not saying Outpost was wrong answer, it was a right at the time, what, four years ago that came out? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so, but that doesn't mean it's just theirs. You got Dell Technologies want some edge action. >> Yeah. >> So does HPE. >> Yes. >> So you got a competitive edge situation. >> I agree with that and I think that's definitely not Amazon's strong point, but like everything, they try to make it easy to use. >> John: Yeah. >> You know, you look at the AIML and they got Canvas. So Canvas says, hey, anybody can do AIML. If they can do that for the physical robotic processes, or even like with Outpost and Snowcone, that'll be good. I don't think they're there yet, and they don't have the presence in the market, >> John: Yeah. >> like HPE and, >> John: Well, let me ask you guys this question, because I think this brings up the next point. Will the best technology win or will the best solution win? Because if cloud's a platform and all software's open source, which you can make those assumptions, you then say, hey, they got this killer robotics thing going on with Artemis and Moonshot, they're trying to colonize the moon, but oh, they discovered a killer way to solve a big problem. Does something fall out of this kind of re:Mars environment, that cracks the code and radically changes and disrupts the IoT game? That's my open question. I don't know the answer. I'd love to get your take on what might be possible, what wild card's out there around, disrupting the edge. >> So one thing I see the way, so when IoT came into the world of play, it's when you're digitizing the physical world, it's IoT that does digitalization part of that actually, right? >> But then it has its own set of problems. >> John: Yeah. >> You're talking about you installing sensor everywhere, right? And not only installing your own sensor, but also you're installing competitor sensors. So in a given square feet how many sensors can you accommodate? So there are physical limitations on liabilities of bandwidth and networking all of that. >> John: And integration. >> As well. >> John: Your point. >> Right? So when that became an issue, this is where I was talking to the robotic guys here, a couple of companies, and one of the use cases they were talking about, which I thought was pretty cool, is, rather than going the sensor route, you go the robot route. So if you have either a factor that you want to map out, you put as many sensors on your robot, whatever that is, and then you make it go around, map the whole thing, and then you also do a surveillance in the whole nine yards. So, you can either have a fixed sensors or you can have moving sensors. So you can have three or four robots. So initially, when I was asking them about the price of it, when they were saying about a hundred thousand dollars, I was like, "Who would buy that?" (John and Larry laugh) >> When they then explained that, this is the use case, oh, that makes sense, because if you had to install, entire factory floor sensors, you're talking about millions of dollars. >> John: Yeah. >> But if you do the moveable sensors in this way, it's a lot cheaper. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> So it's based on your use case, what are your use cases? What are you trying to achieve? >> The general purpose is over. >> Yeah. >> Which you're getting at, and that the enablement, this is again, this is the cloud scale open question- >> Yep. >> it's, okay, the differentiations isn't going to be open source software. That's open. >> It's going to be in the, how you configure it. >> Yes. >> What workflows you might have, the data streams. >> I think, John, you're bringing up a very good point about general purpose versus special purpose. Yesterday Zoox was on the stage and when they talked about their vehicle, it's made just for self-driving. You walk around in Vegas, over here, you see a bunch of old fashioned cars, whether they're Ford or GM- >> and they put all these devices around it, but you're still driving the same car. >> John: Yeah, exactly. >> You can retrofit those, but I don't think that kind of IoT is going to work. But if you redo the whole thing, we are going to see a significant change in how IoT delivers value all the way from the industrial to home, to healthcare, mining, agriculture, it's going to have to redo. I'll go back to the OT question. There are some OT guys, I know Rockwell and Siemens, some of them are innovating faster. The ones who innovate faster to keep up with the IT side, as well as the MLAI model are going to be the winners on that one. >> John: Yeah, I agree. Andy, your thoughts on manufacturing, you brought up the sensor thing. Robotics ultimately is, end of the day, an opportunity there. Obviously machine learning, we know what that does. As we move into these more autonomous builds, what does that look like? And is Amazon positioned well there? Obviously they have big manufacturers. Some are saying that they might want to get out of that business too, that Jassy's evaluating that some are saying. So, where does this all lead for that robotics manufacturing lifestyle, walk in, grab my food? 'Cause it's all robotics and AI at the end of the day, I got sensors, I got cameras, I got non-humans moving heavy lifting stuff, fixing the moon will be done by robots, not humans. So it's all coming. What's your analysis? >> Well, so, the point about robotics is on how far it has come, it is unbelievable, right? Couple of examples. One was that I was just talking to somebody, was explaining to them, to see that robot dog over there at the Boston Dynamics one- >> John: Yeah. >> climbing up and down the stairs. >> Larry: Yeah. >> That's more like the dinosaur movie opening the doors scene. (John and Larry laugh) It's like that for me, because the coordinated things, it is able to go walk up and down, that's unbelievable. But okay, it does that, and then there was also another video which is going on viral on the internet. This guy kicks the dog, robot dog, and then it falls down and it gets back up, and the sentiment that people were feeling for the dog, (Larry laughs) >> you can't, it's a robot, but people, it just comes at that level- >> John: Empathy, for a non-human. >> Yeah. >> But you see him, hey you, get off my lawn, you know? It's like, where are we? >> It has come to that level that people are able to kind of not look at that as a robot, but as more like a functioning, almost like a pet-level, human-level being. >> John: Yeah. >> And you saw that the human-like walking robot there as well. But to an extent, in my view, they are all still in an experimentation, innovation phase. It doesn't made it in the industrial terms yet. >> John: Yeah, not yet, it's coming. >> But, the problem- >> John: It's coming fast. That's what I'm trying to figure out is where you guys see Amazon and the industry relative to what from the fantasy coming reality- >> Right. >> of space in Mars, which is, it's intoxicating, let's face it. People love this. The nerds are all here. The geeks are all here. It's a celebration. James Hamilton's here- >> Yep. >> trying to get him on theCUBE. And he's here as a civilian. Jeff Barr, same thing. I'm here, not for Amazon, I bought a ticket. No, you didn't buy a ticket. (Larry laughs) >> I'm going to check on that. But, he's geeking out. >> Yeah. >> They're there because they want to be here. >> Yeah. >> Not because they have to work here. >> Well, I mean, the thing is, the innovation velocity has increased, because, in the past, remember, the smaller companies couldn't innovate because they don't have the platform. Now Compute is a platform available at the scale you want, AI is available at the scale. Every one of them is available at the scale you want. So if you have an idea, it's easy to innovate. The innovation velocity is high. But where I see most of the companies failing, whether startup or big company, is that you don't find the appropriate use case to solve, and then don't sell it to the right people to buy that. So if you don't find the right use case or don't sell the right value proposition to the actual buyer, >> John: Mm hmm. >> then why are you here? What are you doing? (John laughs) I mean, you're not just an invention, >> John: Eh, yeah. >> like a telephone kind of thing. >> Now, let's get into next talk track. I want to get your thoughts on the experience here at re:Mars. Obviously AWS and the Amazon people kind of combined effort between their teams. The event team does a great job. I thought the event, personally, was first class. The coffee didn't come in late today, I was complaining about that, (Larry laughs) >> people complaining out there, at CUBE reviews. But world class, high bar on the quality of the event. But you guys were involved in the analyst program. You've been through the walkthrough, some of the briefings. I couldn't do that 'cause I'm doing theCUBE interviews. What would you guys learn? What were some of the key walkaways, impressions? Amazon's putting all new teams together, seems on the analyst relations. >> Larry: Yeah. >> They got their mojo booming. They got three shows now, re:Mars, re:inforce, re:invent. >> Andy: Yeah. >> Which will be at theCUBE at all three. Now we got that coverage going, what's it like? What was the experience like? Did you feel it was good? Where do they need to improve? How would you grade the Amazon team? >> I think they did a great job over here in just bringing all the physical elements of the show. Even on the stage, where they had robots in there. It made it real and it's not just fake stuff. And every, or most of the booths out there are actually having- >> John: High quality demos. >> high quality demos. (John laughs) >> John: Not vaporware. >> Yeah, exactly. Not vaporware. >> John: I won't say the name of the company. (all laugh) >> And even the sessions were very good. They went through details. One thing that stood out, which is good, and I cover Low Code/No Code, and Low Code/No Code goes across everything. You know, you got DevOps No Low-Code Low-Code. You got AI Low Code/No Code. You got application development Low Code/No Code. What they have done with AI with Low Code/No Code is very powerful with Canvas. And I think that has really grown the adoption of AI. Because you don't have to go and train people what to do. And then, people are just saying, Hey, let me kick the tires, let me use it. Let me try it. >> John: It's going to be very interesting to see how Amazon, on that point, handles this, AWS handles this data tsunami. It's cause of Snowflake. Snowflake especially running the table >> Larry: Yeah. >> on the old Hadoop world. I think Dave had a great analysis with other colleagues last week at Snowflake Summit. But still, just scratching the surface. >> Larry: Yeah. >> The question is, how shared that ecosystem, how will that morph? 'Cause right now you've got Data Bricks, you've got Snowflake and a handful of others. Teradata's got some new chops going on there and a bunch of other folks. Some are going to win and lose in this downturn, but still, the scale that's needed is massive. >> So you got data growing so much, you were talking earlier about the growth of data and they were talking about the growth. That is a big pie and the pie can be shared by a lot of folks. I don't think- >> John: And snowflake pays AWS, remember that? >> Right, I get it. (John laughs) >> I get it. But they got very unique capabilities, just like Netflix has very unique capabilities. >> John: Yeah. >> They also pay AWS. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? But they're competing on prime. So I really think the cooperation is going to be there. >> John: Yeah. >> The pie is so big >> John: Yeah. >> that there's not going to be losers, but everybody could be winners. >> John: I'd be interested to follow up with you guys after next time we have an event together, we'll get you back on and figure out how do you measure this transitions? You went to IDC, so they had all kinds of ways to measure shipments. >> Larry: Yep. >> Even Gartner had fumbled for years, the Magic Quadrant on IaaS and PaaS when they had the market share. (Larry laughs) And then they finally bundled PaaS and IaaS together after years of my suggesting, thank you very much Gartner. (Larry laughs) But that just performs as the landscape changes so does the scoreboard. >> Yep. >> Right so, how do you measure who's winning and who's losing? How can we be critical of Amazon so they can get better? I mean, Andy Jassy always said to me, and Adam Salassi same way, we want to hear how bad we're doing so we can get better. >> Yeah. >> So they're open-minded to feedback. I mean, not (beep) posting on them, but they're open to critical feedback. What do you guys, what feedback would you give Amazon? Are they winning? I see them number one clearly over Azure, by miles. And even though Azure's kicking ass and taking names, getting back in the game, Microsoft's still behind, by a long ways, in some areas. >> Andy: Yes. In some ways. >> So, the scoreboard's changing. What's your thoughts on that? >> So, look, I mean, at the end of the day, when it comes to compute, right, Amazon is a clear winner. I mean, there are others who are catching up to it, but still, they are the established leader. And it comes with its own advantages because when you're trying to do innovation, when you're trying to do anything else, whether it's a data collection, we were talking about the data sensors, the amount of data they are collecting, whether it's the store, that self-serving store or other innovation projects, what they have going on. The storage compute and process of that requires a ton of compute. And they have that advantage with them. And, as I mentioned in my last article, one of my articles, when it comes to AIML and data programs, there is a rich and there is a poor. And the rich always gets richer because they, they have one leg up already. >> John: Yeah. >> I mean the amount of model training they have done, the billion or trillion dollar trillion parametrization, fine tuning of the model training and everything. They could do it faster. >> John: Yeah. >> Which means they have a leg up to begin with. So unless you are given an opportunity as a smaller, mid-size company to compete at them at the same level, you're going to start at the negative level to begin with. You have a lot of catch up to do. So, the other thing about Amazon is that they, when it comes to a lot of areas, they admit that they have to improve in certain areas and they're open and willing and listen to the people. >> Where are you, let's get critical. Let's do some critical analysis. Where does Amazon Websters need to get better? In your opinion, what criticism would you, in a constructive way, share? >> I think on the open source side, they need to be more proactive in, they are already, but they got to get even better than what they are. They got to engage with the community. They got to be able to talk on the open source side, hey, what are we doing? Maybe on the hardware side, can they do some open-sourcing of that? They got graviton. They got a lot of stuff. Will they be able to share the wealth with other folks, other than just being on an Amazon site, on the edge with their partners. >> John: Got it. >> If they can now take that, like you said, compute with what they have with a very end-to-end solution, the full stack. And if they can extend it, that's going to be really beneficial for them. >> Awesome. Andy, final word here. >> So one area where I think they could improve, which would be a game changer would be, right now, if you look at all of their solutions, if you look at the way they suggest implementation, the innovations, everything that comes out, comes out across very techy-oriented. The persona is very techy-oriented. Very rarely their solutions are built to the business audience or to the decision makers. So if I'm, say, an analyst, if I want to build, a business analyst rather, if I want to build a model, and then I want to deploy that or do some sort of application, mobile application, or what have you, it's a little bit hard. It's more techy-oriented. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> So, if they could appeal or build a higher level abstraction of how to build and deploy applications for business users, or even build something industry specific, that's where a lot of the legacy companies succeeded. >> John: Yeah. >> Go after manufacturing specific or education. >> Well, we coined the term 'Supercloud' last re:Invent, and that's what we see. And Jerry Chen at Greylock calls it Castles in the Cloud, you can create these moats >> Yep. >> on top of the CapEx >> Yep. >> of Amazon. >> Exactly. >> And ride their back. >> Yep. >> And the difference in what you're paying and what you're charging, if you're good, like a Snowflake or a Mongo. I mean, Mongo's, they're just as big as Snow, if not bigger on Amazon than Snowflake is. 'Cause they use a lot of compute. No one turns off their database. (John laughs) >> Snowflake a little bit different, a little nuanced point, but, this is the new thing. You see Goldman Sachs, you got Capital One. They're building their own kind of, I call them sub clouds, but Dave Vellante says it's a Supercloud. And that essentially is the model. And then once you have a Supercloud, you say, great, I'm going to make sure it works on Azure and Google. >> Andy: Yep. >> And Alibaba if I have to. So, we're kind of seeing a playbook. >> Andy: Mm hmm. >> But you can't get it wrong 'cause it scales. >> Larry: Yeah, yeah. >> You can't scale the wrong answer. >> Andy: Yeah. >> So that seems to be what I'm watching is, who gets it right? Product market fit. Then if they roll it out to the cloud, then it becomes a Supercloud, and that's pure product market fit. So I think that's something that I've seen some people trying to figure out. And then, are you a supplier to the Superclouds? Like a Dell? Or you become an enabler? >> Andy: Yeah. >> You know, what's Dell Technologies do? >> Larry: Yeah. >> I mean, how do the box movers compete? >> Larry: I, the whole thing is now hybrid and you're going to have to see just, you said. (Larry laughs) >> John: Hybrid's a steady-state. I don't need to. >> Andy: I mean, >> By the way we're (indistinct), we can't get the chips, cause Broadcom and Apple bought 'em all. (Larry laughs) I mean there's a huge chip problem going on. >> Yes. I agree. >> Right now. >> I agree. >> I mean all these problems when you attract to a much higher level, a lot of those problems go away because you don't care about what they're using underlying as long as you deliver my solution. >> Larry: Yes. >> Yeah, it could be significantly, a little bit faster than what it used to be. But at the end of the day, are you solving my specific use case? >> John: Yeah. >> Then I'm willing to wait a little bit longer. >> John: Yeah. Time's on our side and now they're getting the right answers. Larry, Andy, thanks for coming on. This great analyst session turned into more of a podcast vibe, but you know what? (Larry laughs) To chill here at re:Mars, thanks for coming on, and we unpacked a lot. Thanks for sharing. >> Both: Thank you. >> Appreciate it. We'll get you back on. We'll get you in the rotation. We'll take it virtual. Do a panel. Do a panel, do some panels around this. >> Larry: Absolutely. >> Andy: Oh this not virtual, this physical. >> No we're live right now! (all laugh) We get back to Palo Alto. You guys are influencers. Thanks for coming on. You guys are moving the market, congratulations. Take a minute, quick minute each to plug any work you're doing for the people watching. Larry, what are you working on? Andy? You go after Larry, what you're working on. >> Yeah. So since I started my company, RobustCloud, since I left IDC about a year ago, I'm focused on edge computing, cloud-native technologies, and Low Code/No Code. And basically I help companies put their business value together. >> All right, Andy, what are you working on? >> I do a lot of work on the AIML areas. Particularly, last few of my reports are in the AI Ops incident management and ML Ops areas of how to generally improve your operations. >> John: Got it, yeah. >> In other words, how do you use the AIML to improve your IT operations? How do you use IT Ops to improve your AIML efficiency? So those are the- >> John: The real hardcore business transformation. >> Yep. >> All right. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the analyst session. We do keynote review, breaking down re:Mars after day two. We got a full day tomorrow. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. See you next time. (pleasant music)

>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. Rob Belson is here as the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon. Robbie great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Verizon and developer relations. Talk about your role there. Really interesting. >> Absolutely. If you think about our mobile edge computing portfolio in Verizon 5G Edge, suddenly the developer is a more important persona than ever for actually adopting the cloud itself and adopting the mobile edge. So the question then quickly became how do we go after developers and how do we tell stories that ultimately resonate with them? And so my role has been spearheading our developer relations and experience efforts, which is all about meeting developers in the channels where they actually are, building content that resonates with them. Building out architectures that showcase how do you actually use the technology in the wild? And then ultimately creating automation assets that make their lives easier in deploying to the mobile edge. >> So, you know, telcos get a bad rap, when you're thinking it's amazing what you guys do. You put out all this capital infrastructure, big outlays. You know, we use our phones to drop a call. People like, "Ah, freaking Verizon." But it's amazing what we can actually do too. You think about the pandemic, the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines to support home, never missed a beat. And yet at the same time you're providing all this infrastructure for people to come over the top, the cost forbid is going down, right? Your cost are going up and yet now we're doing this big 5G buildup. So I feel like there's a renaissance about to occur in edge computing that the telcos are going to lead new forms of monetization new value that you're going to be able to add, new services, new applications. The future's got to be exciting for you guys and it's going to be developer-led, isn't it? >> Absolutely. I mean it's been such an exciting time to be a part of our mobile edge computing portfolio. If you think back to late 2019 we were really asking the question with the advent of high speed 5G mobile networks, how can you drive more immersive experiences from the cloud in a cloud native way without compromising on the tools you know and love? And that's ultimately what caused us to really work with the likes of AWS and others to think about what does a mobile edge computing portfolio look like? So we started with 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength. So taking the compute and storage services you know and love in AWS and bringing it to the edge of our 4G and 5G networks. But then we start to think, well, wait a minute. Why stop at public networks? Let's think about private networks. How can we bring the cloud and private networks together? So you turn back to late 2021 we announced Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts but we didn't even stop there. We said, "Well, interest's cool, but what about network APIs? We've been talking about the ability and the programmability of the 5G network but what does that actually look like to the developers? And one great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So you think about the proliferation of the edge 17 Wavelength Zones today in the US. Well, what edge is the right edge? You think about maybe the airline industry if the closest exit might be behind you absolutely applies to service discovery. So we've built an API that helps answer that seemingly basic question but is the fundamental building block for everything to workload orchestration, workload distribution. A basic network building block has become so important to some of these new sources of revenue streams, as we mentioned, but also the ability to disintermediate that purpose built hardware. You think about the future of autonomous mobile robots either ground and aerial robotics. Well, you want to make those devices as cheap as possible but you don't want to compromise on performance. And that mobile edge layer is going to become so critical for that connectivity, but also the compute itself. >> So I just kind of gave my little narrative up front about telco, but that purpose built hardware that you're talking about is exceedingly reliable. I mean, it's hardened, it's fossilized and so now as you just disaggregate that and go to a more programmable infrastructure, how are you able to and what gives you confidence that you're going to be able to maintain that reliability that I joke about? Oh, but it's so reliable. The network has amazing reliability. How are you able to maintain that? Is that just the pace of technology is now caught up, I wonder if you can explain that? >> I think it's really cool as I see reliability and sort of geo distribution as inextricably linked. So in a world where to get that best in class latency you needed to go to one place and one place only. Well, now you're creating some form of single source of failure whether it's the power, whether it's the compute itself, whether it's the networking, but with a more geo distributed footprint, particularly in the mobile edge more choices for where to deliver that immersive experience you're naturally driving an increase in reliability. But again, infra alone it's not going to do the job. You need the network APIs. So it's the convergence of the cloud and network and infra and the automation behind it that's been incredibly powerful. And as a great example, the work we've been doing in hybrid MEC the ability to converge within one single architecture, the private network, the public network, the AWS Outposts, the AWS Wavelength all in one has been such a fantastic journey and Red Hat has been a really important part in that journey. >> From the perspective of the developer when they're building a full cloud to edge application, where does Verizon pick up? Where do they start working primarily with you versus with their cloud provider? >> Absolutely. And I think you touched on a really important point. I think when you often think about the edge it's thought of as an either, or. Is it the edge? Is it the cloud? Is it both? It's an and I can't emphasize that enough. What we've seen from the customers greenfield or otherwise it's about extending an application or services that were never intended to live at the edge, to the edge itself, to deliver a more performant experience. And for certain control plane operations, metadata, backend operations analytics that can absolutely stay in the cloud itself. And so our role is to be a trusted partner in some of our enterprise customers' journeys. Of course, they can lean on the cloud provider in select cases, but we're an absolutely critical mode of support as you think about what are those architectures? How do you integrate the network APIs? And through our developer relations efforts, we've put a major role in helping to shape what those patterns really look like in the wild. >> When they're developing for 5G I mean, the availability of 5G of particularly you know, the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now. Mostly urban areas. How should they be thinking in the future developing an application roll out two years from now about where 5G will be at that point? >> Absolutely. I think one of the most important things in this case is the interoperability of our edge computing portfolio with both 4G and 5G. Whenever somebody asks me about the performance of 5G they ask how fast? Or for edge computing. It's always about benchmark. It's not an absolute value. It's always about benchmarking the performance to that next best alternative. What were you going to get if you didn't have edge computing in your back pocket? And so along that line of thought having the option to go either through 4G or 5G, having a mobile edge computing portfolio that works for both modes of connectivity even CAN-AM IoT is incredibly powerful. >> So it sounds like 4G is going to be with us for quite a while still? >> And I think it's an important part of the architecture. >> Yeah. >> Robert, tell us about the developer that's building these applications. Where does that individual come from? What's their persona? >> Oh, boy I think there's a number of different personas and flavors. I've seen everything from the startup in the back of a garage working hard to try to figure out what could I do for a next generation media and entertainment experience but also large enterprises. And I think a great area where we saw this was our 5G Edge Computing Challenge that we hosted last year. Believe it or not 100 submissions from over 22 countries, all building on Verizon 5G Edge. It was so exciting to see because so many different use cases across public safety, healthcare, media and entertainment. And what we found was that education is so important. A lot of developers have great ideas but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the infrastructure you get bogged down in networking and setting up your environment. And that's why we think that developer education is so important. We want to make it easy and in fact, the 5G Edge portfolio was designed in such a way that we'll abstract the complexities of the network away so you can focus on building your application and that's such a central theme and focus for how we approach the development. >> So what kind of services are you exposing via APIs? >> Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you think about 5G Edge with say AWS Wavelength, the infra there are APIs that are exposed by AWS to launch your infra, to patch your infrastructure, to automate your infrastructure. Specifically that Verizon has developed that's our network APIs. And a great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So think of this as like a service registry you've launched an application in all 17 edge zones. You would take that information, you would send it via API to the Edge Discovery Service so that for any mobile client say, you wake up one morning in Boston, you can ask the API or query, "Hey, what's the closest edge zone?" DNS isn't going to be able to figure it out. You need knowledge of the actual topology of the mobile network itself. So the API will answer. Let's say you take a little road trip 1,000 miles south to say Miami, Florida you ask that question again. It could change. So that's the workflow and how you would use the network API today. >> How'd you get into this? You're an engineer it's obvious how'd you stumble into this role? >> Well, yeah, I have a background in networks and distributed systems so I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere. And there was a really unique opportunity at Verizon as the portfolio was being developed to really think about what this developer community looked like. And we built this all from scratch. If you look at say our Verizon 5G Edge Blog we launched it just along the timing of the actual GA of Wavelength. You look at our developer newsletter also around the time of the launch of Wavelength. So we've done a lot in such a short period and it's all been sort of organic, interacting with developers, working backwards from the customer. And so it's been a fairly new, but incredibly exciting journey. >> How will your data, architecture, data flow what will that look like in the future? How will that be different than it is sort of historically? >> When I think about customer workloads real time data architecture is an incredibly difficult thing to do. When you overlay the edge, admittedly, it gets more complicated. More places that produce the data, more places that consume data. How do you reconcile all of these environments? Maintain consistency? This is absolutely something we've been working on with the ecosystem at large. We're not going to solve this alone. We've looked at architecture patterns that we think are successful. And some of the things that we found that we believe are pretty cool this idea of taking that embedded mobile database, virtualizing it to the edge, even making it multi-tenant. And then you're producing data to one single source and simplifying how you organize and share data because all of the data being produced to that one location will be relevant to that topology. So Boston, as an example, Boston data being produced to that edge zone will only service Boston clients. So having a geo distributed footprint really does help data architectures, but at the core of all of this database, architectures, you need a compute environment that actually makes sense. That's performant, that's reliable. That's easy to use that you understand how to manage and that the edge doesn't make it any more difficult to manage. >> So are you building that? >> That's exactly what we're doing. So here at Red Hat Summit we've had the unique opportunity to continue to collaborate with our partners at Red Hat to think about how you actually use OpenShift in the context of hybrid MEC. So what have done is we've used OpenShift as is to extend what already exists to some of these new edge zones without adding in an additional layer of complexity that was unmanageable. >> So you use OpenShift so you don't have to cobble this together on your own as a full development environment and that's the role really that OpenShift plays here? >> That's exactly right. And we presented pieces of this at our re:Invent this past year and what we basically did is we said the edge needs to be inextricably linked with the cloud. And you want to be able to manage it from some seamless central pane of glass and using that OpenShift console is a great way. So what we did is we wanted to show a really geo-distributed footprint in action. We started with a Wavelength zone in Boston, the region in Northern Virginia, an outpost in the Texas area. We cobbled it all together in one cluster. So you had a whole compute mesh separated by thousands of miles all within a single cluster, single pane of glass. We take that and are starting to expand on the complexity of these architectures to overlay the network APIs we mentioned, to overlay multi-region support. So when we say you can use all 17 zones at once you actually can. >> So you've been talking about Wavelength and Outposts which are AWS products, but Microsoft and Google both have their distributed architectures as well. Where do you stand with those? Will you support those? Are you working with them? >> That's a great question. We have made announcements with Microsoft and Google but today I focus a lot on the work we do with AWS Wavelength and Outposts and continuing to work backwards from the customer and ultimately meet their needs. >> Yeah I mean, you got to start with an environment that the developers know that obviously a great developer community, you know, you see it at re:Invent. What was the reaction at re:Invent when you showed this from a developer community? >> Absolutely. Developers are excited and I think the best part is we're not the only ones talking about Wavelength not even AWS are the only ones talking about Wavelength. And to me from a developer ecosystem perspective that's when you know it's working. When you're not the one telling the best stories when others are evangelizing the power of your technology on your behalf that's when the ecosystem's starting to pick up. >> Speaking of making a bet on Outposts you know, it's somewhat limited today. I'll say it it's limited today in terms of we think it supports RDS and there's a few storage players. Is it your expectation that Outposts is going to be this essentially the cloud environment on your premises is that? >> That's a great question. I see it more as we want to expand customer choice more than ever and ultimately let the developers and architects decide. That's why I'm so bullish on this idea of hybrid MEC. Let's provide all of the options the most complicated geo distributed hybrid deployment you can imagine and automate it, make it easy. That way if you want to take away components of this architecture all you're doing is simplifying something that's already automated and fairly simple to begin with. So start with the largest problem to solve and then provide customers choice for what exactly meets their requirements their SLAs, their footprint, their network and work backwards from the customer. >> Exciting times ahead. Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, thanks for your time. >> Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're live at Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. We'll be right back.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you Data Driven Insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the pre-cloud era hardware companies would run benchmarks, showing how database and or application performance ran better on their systems relative to competitors or previous generation boxes. And they would make a big deal out of it. And the independent software vendors, you know they'd do a little golf clap if you will, in the form of a joint press release it became a game of leaprog amongst hardware competitors. That was pretty commonplace over the years. The Dell Snowflake Deal underscores that the value proposition between hardware companies and ISVs is changing and has much more to do with distribution channels, volumes and the amount of data that lives On-Prem in various storage platforms. For cloud native ISVs like Snowflake they're realizing that despite their Cloud only dogma they have to grit their teeth and deal with On-premises data or risk getting shut out of evolving architectures. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we unpack what little is known about the Snowflake announcement from Dell Technologies World and discuss the implications of a changing Cloud landscape. We'll also share some new data for Cloud and Database platforms from ETR that shows Snowflake has actually entered the Earth's orbit when it comes to spending momentum on its platform. Now, before we get into the news I want you to listen to Frank's Slootman's answer to my question as to whether or not Snowflake would ever architect the platform to run On-Prem because it's doable technically, here's what he said, play the clip >> Forget it, this will only work in the Public Cloud. Because it's, this is how the utility model works, right. I think everybody is coming through this realization, right? I mean, excuses are running out at this point. You know, we think that it'll, people will come to the Public Cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the Private Cloud. It's not that we can't run a private Cloud. It's just diminishes the potential and the value that we bring. >> So you may be asking yourselves how do you square that circle? Because basically the Dell Snowflake announcement is about bringing Snowflake to the private cloud, right? Or is it let's get into the news and we'll find out. Here's what we know at Dell Technologies World. One of the more buzzy announcements was the, by the way this was a very well attended vet event. I should say about I would say 8,000 people by my estimates. But anyway, one of the more buzzy announcements was Snowflake can now run analytics on Non-native Snowflake data that lives On-prem in a Dell object store Dell's ECS to start with. And eventually it's software defined object store. Here's Snowflake's clark, Snowflake's Clark Patterson describing how it works this past week on theCUBE. Play the clip. The way it works is I can now access Non-native Snowflake data using what materialized views, external tables How does that work? >> Some combination of the, all the above. So we've had in Snowflake, a capability called External Tables, which you refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically there's a through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data, wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud, up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell On-Premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake. So that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> So as Clark explained, this capability of External tables has been around in the Cloud for a while, mainly to suck data out of Cloud data lakes. Snowflake External Tables use file level metadata, for instance, the name of the file and the versioning so that it can be queried in a stage. A stage is just an external location outside of Snowflake. It could be an S3 bucket or an Azure Blob and it's soon will be a Dell object store. And in using this feature, the Dell looks like it lives inside of Snowflake and Clark essentially, he's correct to say to an analyst that looks exactly like the data is in Snowflake, but uh, not exactly the data's read only which means you can't do what are called DML operations. DML stands for Data Manipulation Language and allows for things like inserting data into tables or deleting and modifying existing data. But the data can be queried. However, the performance of those queries to External Tables will almost certainly be slower. Now users can build things like materialized views which are going to speed things up a bit, but at the end of the day, it's going to run faster than the Cloud. And you can be almost certain that's where Snowflake wants it to run, but some organizations can't or won't move data into the Cloud for a variety of reasons, data sovereignty, compliance security policies, culture, you know, whatever. So data can remain in place On-prem, or it can be moved into the Public Cloud with this new announcement. Now, the compute today presumably is going to be done in the Public Cloud. I don't know where else it's going to be done. They really didn't talk about the compute side of things. Remember, one of Snowflake's early innovations was to separate compute from storage. And what that gave them is you could more efficiently scale with unlimited resources when you needed them. And you could shut off the compute when you don't need us. You didn't have to buy, and if you need more storage you didn't have to buy more compute and vice versa. So everybody in the industry has copied that including AWS with Redshift, although as we've reported not as elegantly as Snowflake did. RedShift's more of a storage tiering solution which minimizes the compute required but you can't really shut it off. And there are companies like Vertica with Eon Mode that have enabled this capability to be done On-prem, you know, but of course in that instance you don't have unlimited elastic compute scale on-Prem but with solutions like Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake, you can certainly, you can start to simulate that Cloud elasticity On-prem. I mean, it's not unlimited but it's sort of gets you there. According to a Dell Snowflake joint statement, the companies the quote, the companies will pursue product integrations and joint go to market efforts in the second half of 2022. So that's a little vague and kind of benign. It's not really clear when this is going to be available based on that statement from the two first, but, you know, we're left wondering will Dell develop an On-Prem compute capability and enable queries to run locally maybe as part of an extended apex offering? I mean, we don't know really not sure there's even a market for that but it's probably a good bet that again, Snowflake wants that data to land in the Snowflake data Cloud kind of makes you wonder how this deal came about. You heard Sloop on earlier Snowflake has always been pretty dogmatic about getting data into its native snowflake format to enable the best performance as we talked about but also data sharing and governance. But you could imagine that data architects they're building out their data mesh we've reported on this quite extensively and their data fabric and those visions around that. And they're probably telling Snowflake, Hey if you want to be a strategic partner of ours you're going to have to be more inclusive of our data. That for whatever reason we're not putting in your Cloud. So Snowflake had to kind of hold its nose and capitulate. Now the good news is it further opens up Snowflakes Tam the total available market. It's obviously good marketing posture. And ultimately it provides an on ramp to the Cloud. And we're going to come back to that shortly but let's look a little deeper into what's happening with data platforms and to do that we'll bring in some ETR data. Now, let me just say as companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Pure and others build out their hybrid Clouds. The cold hard fact is not only do they have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model. You will hear them talk about that a lot, but they got to do that. So it, and that's critical from a user experience but in order to gain that flywheel momentum they need to build a robust ecosystem that goes beyond their proprietary portfolios. And, you know, honestly they're really not even in the first inning most companies and for the likes of Snowflake to sort of flip this, they've had to recognize that not everything is moving into the Cloud. Now, let's bring up the next slide. One of the big areas of discussion at Dell Tech World was Apex. That's essentially Dell's nascent as a service offering. Apex is infrastructure as a Service Cloud On-prem and obviously has the vision of connecting to the Cloud and across Clouds and out to the Edge. And it's no secret that database is one of the most important ingredients of infrastructure as a service generally in Cloud Infrastructure specifically. So this chart here shows the ETR data for data platforms inside of Dell accounts. So the beauty of ETR platform is you can cut data a million different ways. So we cut it. We said, okay, give us the Cloud platforms inside Dell accounts, how are they performing? Now, this is a two dimensional graphic. You got net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and what ETR now calls Overlap formally called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. That's on the horizontal axis that red dotted line at 40% represents highly elevated spending on the Y. The table insert shows the raw data for how the dots are positioned. Now, the first call out here is Snowflake. According to ETR quote, after 13 straight surveys of astounding net scores, Snowflake has finally broken the trend with its net score dropping below the 70% mark among all respondents. Now, as you know, net score is measured by asking customers are you adding the platform new? That's the lime green in the bar that's pointing from Snowflake in the graph and or are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the forest green is spending flat that's the gray is you're spend decreasing by 6% or worse. That's the pinkish or are you decommissioning the platform bright red which is essentially zero for Snowflake subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now, what's somewhat interesting is that snowflakes net score overall in the survey is 68 which is still huge, just under 70%, but it's net score inside the Dell account base drops to the low sixties. Nonetheless, this chart tells you why Snowflake it's highly elevated spending momentum combined with an increasing presence in the market over the past two years makes it a perfect initial data platform partner for Dell. Now and in the Ford versus Ferrari dynamic. That's going on between the likes of Dell's apex and HPE GreenLake database deals are going to become increasingly important beyond what we're seeing with this recent Snowflake deal. Now noticed by the way HPE is positioned on this graph with its acquisition of map R which is now part of HPE Ezmeral. But if these companies want to be taken seriously as Cloud players, they need to further expand their database affinity to compete ideally spinning up databases as part of their super Clouds. We'll come back to that that span multiple Clouds and include Edge data platforms. We're a long ways off from that. But look, there's Mongo, there's Couchbase, MariaDB, Cloudera or Redis. All of those should be on the short list in my view and why not Microsoft? And what about Oracle? Look, that's to be continued on maybe as a future topic in a, in a Breaking Analysis but I'll leave you with this. There are a lot of people like John Furrier who believe that Dell is playing with fire in the Snowflake deal because he sees it as a one way ticket to the Cloud. He calls it a one way door sometimes listen to what he said this past week. >> I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah, but that we've talked about this don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers ultimately from VMware. >> Okay, so what does the data say about what John just said? How is VMware actually doing in Cloud after its early missteps and then its subsequent embracing of AWS and other Clouds. Here's that same XY graphic spending momentum on the Y and pervasiveness on the X and the same table insert that plots the dots and the, in the breakdown of Dell's net score granularity. You see that at the bottom of the chart in those colors. So as usual, you see Azure and AWS up and to the right with Google well behind in a distant third, but still in the mix. So very impressive for Microsoft and AWS to have both that market presence in such elevated spending momentum. But the story here in context is that the VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware's On-Prem Cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation VCF they're doing pretty well in the market. Look, at HPE, gaining some traction in Cloud. And remember, you may not think HPE and Dell and VCF are true Cloud but these are customers answering the survey. So their perspective matters more than the purest view. And the bad news is the Dell Cloud is not setting the world on fire from a momentum standpoint on the vertical axis but it's above the line of zero and compared to Dell's overall net score of 20 you could see it's got some work to do. Okay, so overall Dell's got a pretty solid net score to you know, positive 20, as I say their Cloud perception needs to improve. Look, Apex has to be the Dell Cloud brand not Dell reselling VMware. And that requires more maturity of Apex it's feature sets, its selling partners, its compensation models and it's ecosystem. And I think Dell clearly understands that. I think they're pretty open about that. Now this includes partners that go beyond being just sellers has to include more tech offerings in the marketplace. And actually they got to build out a marketplace like Cloud Platform. So they got a lot of work to do there. And look, you've got Oracle coming up. I mean they're actually kind of just below the magic 40% in the line which is pro it's pretty impressive. And we've been telling you for years, you can hate Oracle all you want. You can hate its price, it's closed system all of that it's red stack shore. You can say it's legacy. You can say it's old and outdated, blah, blah, blah. You can say Oracle is irrelevant in trouble. You are dead wrong. When it comes to mission critical workloads. Oracle is the king of the hill. They're a founder led company that knows exactly what it's doing and they're showing Cloud momentum. Okay, the last point is that while Microsoft AWS and Google have major presence as shown on the X axis. VMware and Oracle now have more than a hundred citations in the survey. You can see that on the insert in the right hand, right most column. And IBM had better keep the momentum from last quarter going, or it won't be long before they get passed by Dell and HP in Cloud. So look, John might be right. And I would think Snowflake quietly agrees that this Dell deal is all about access to Dell's customers and their data. So they can Hoover it into the Snowflake Data Cloud but the data right now, anyway doesn't suggest that's happening with VMware. Oh, by the way, we're keeping an eye close eye on NetApp who last September ink, a similar deal to VMware Cloud on AWS to see how that fares. Okay, let's wrap with some closing thoughts on what this deal means. We learned a lot from the Cloud generally in AWS, specifically in two pizza teams, working backwards, customer obsession. We talk about flywheel all the time and we've been talking today about marketplaces. These have all become common parlance and often fundamental narratives within strategic plans investor decks and customer presentations. Cloud ecosystems are different. They take both competition and partnerships to new heights. You know, when I look at Azure service offerings like Apex, GreenLake and similar services and I see the vendor noise or hear the vendor noise that's being made around them. I kind of shake my head and ask, you know which movie were these companies watching last decade? I really wish we would've seen these initiatives start to roll out in 2015, three years before AWS announced Outposts not three years after but Hey, the good news is that not only was Outposts a wake up call for the On-Prem crowd but it's showing how difficult it is to build a platform like Outposts and bring it to On-Premises. I mean, Outpost isn't currently even a rounding era in the marketplace. It really doesn't do much in terms of database support and support of other services. And, you know, it's unclear where that that is going. And I don't think it has much momentum. And so the Hybrid Cloud Vendors they've had time to figure it out. But now it's game on, companies like Dell they're promising a consistent experience between On-Prem into the Cloud, across Clouds and out to the Edge. They call it MultCloud which by the way my view has really been multi-vendor Chuck, Chuck Whitten. Who's the new co-COO of Dell called it Multi-Cloud by default. (laughing) That's really, I think an accurate description of that. I call this new world Super Cloud. To me, it's different than MultiCloud. It's a layer that runs on top of hyperscale infrastructure kind of hides the underlying complexity of the Cloud. It's APIs, it's primitives. And it stretches not only across Clouds but out to the Edge. That's a big vision and that's going to require some seriously intense engineering to build out. It's also going to require partnerships that go beyond the portfolios of companies like Dell like their own proprietary stacks if you will. It's going to have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model and to do that, you're going to need more and more deals like Snowflake and even deeper than Snowflake, not just in database. Sure, you'll need to have a catalog of databases that run in your On-Prem and Hybrid and Super Cloud but also other services that customers can tap. I mean, can you imagine a day when Dell offers and embraces a directly competitive service inside of apex. I have trouble envisioning that, you know not with their historical posture, you think about companies like, you know, Nutanix, you know, or Cisco where they really, you know those relationships cooled quite quickly but you know, look, think about it. That's what AWS does. It offers for instance, Redshift and Snowflake side by side happily and the Redshift guys they probably hate Snowflake. I wouldn't blame them, but the EC Two Folks, they love them. And Adam SloopesKy understands that ISVs like Snowflake are a key part of the Cloud ecosystem. Again, I have a hard time envisioning that occurring with Dell or even HPE, you know maybe less so with HPE, but what does this imply that the Edge will allow companies like Dell to a reach around on the Cloud and somehow create a new type of model that begrudgingly accommodates the Public Cloud but drafts of the new momentum of the Edge, which right now to these companies is kind of mostly telco and retail. It's hard to see that happening. I think it's got to evolve in a more comprehensive and inclusive fashion. What's much more likely is companies like Dell are going to substantially replicate that Cloud Operating Model for the pieces that they own pieces that they control which admittedly are big pieces of the market. But unless they're able to really tap that ecosystem magic they're not going to be able to grow much beyond their existing install bases. You take that lime green we showed you earlier that new adoption metric from ETR as an example, by my estimates, AWS and Azure are capturing new accounts at a rate between three to five times faster than Dell and HPE. And in the more mature US and mere markets it's probably more like 10 X and a major reason is because of the Cloud's robust ecosystem and the optionality and simplicity of transaction that that is bringing to customers. Now, Dell for its part is a hundred billion dollar revenue company. And it has the capability to drive that kind of dynamic. If it can pivot its partner ecosystem mindset from kind of resellers to Cloud services and technology optionality. Okay, that's it for now? Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson is on the production team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and Rob Hof, on editorial they helped get the word out and thanks to Jordan Anderson for the new Breaking Analysis branding and graphics package. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. You could check out ETR website @etr.ai. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You want to get in touch. @dave.vellente @siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante. You can make a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. 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(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. This is "theCube". We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at a live event, hybrid event, two sets. We had two remote studios prior to the event, over 100 interviews. Really excited to have George Elissaios here. He's the director of product management for EC2 Edge, really interesting topic at AWS. George, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, everybody's talking about Edge, IoT, EC2. What's the scope of your portfolio, your responsibility? >> Yeah, well, our vision here at AWS is to really bring the power of the AWS platform wherever customers need it. AWS wherever our customers want it is our long-term vision. And we have a bunch of products in this space that help us do that and help us enable our customers whatever their use case is. So we have things like Wavelength. I know we talked about Wavelength before here in "theCube", where we bring full AWS service at the edge of the 5G network, so with 5G edge computing in partnership with telcos worldwide, our partnership with Verizon in the US has been flourishing. We're up to, I think, 15 or more Wavelength zones right now in many of the major cities in the US, but also in Japan and Korea, and in Europe with Vodafone. So that's one of the portfolio kind of offerings. And that helps you as a customer of AWS if you want to have the best latency to mobile devices, whether they are sensors, or mobile phones, or what have you. But we're also feeling out that Edge portfolio with local zones. Earlier today in Werner's keynote, we announced that we're going to launch another 30 local zones in 20 new countries, everywhere from South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, obviously. So a lot of expansion there. Very excited about that. And that is kind of a similar offering, but it basically brings you closer to customers in metropolitan areas over the internet. >> So, Wavelength's a big feature. George, I want to get just to touch on it because I think latency comes up a lot in Edge conversations, low latency issues, whether it's cars, factories. You guys gave a demo yesterday to the press corps in the press room, I was there, where you had someone in San Francisco from the Opera and someone in person here in Vegas, and you had 13 milliseconds going back and forth demoing, real time- >> Collaboration. >> The benefit of low latency in remote. It wasn't next door. It was San Francisco. This is kind of the purpose of what Edge is about. Can you explain what that means, that demo, why it was important, and what you were trying to show, and how does it mean for the Edge? >> So there is multiple use cases. One of them is human collaboration, right? Like, we spent the last two years of our lives over conferences and kind of like the teleconferences, and trying to talk over each other and unmute ourselves desperately. But existing solutions kind of work, generally, for most of the things that we do, but when it comes to music collaboration where milliseconds matter, it's a lot harder with existing solutions to get artists to collaborate when they're hundreds of miles away. Last night, we saw a really inspiring demo, I think, of how two top tier musicians, one located in San Francisco and one located in Vegas, can collaborate in opera, which is one of the most precise art forms in the music world. There are no beats in opera to kind of synchronize, so you really need to play off each other, right? So we provided a latency between them of less than 30 milliseconds, which translates, if you're thinking about audio or if you're thinking about the speed of sound, that's like being in the same stage. And that was very inspiring. But there's also a lot of use cases that are machine to machine communications, where even lower latencies matter, and we can think of latencies down to one millisecond, like single digit milliseconds when it comes to, for example, vehicles or robots, and things like that. So we're, with our products, we're enabling customers to drive down that latency, but also the jitter, which is the variation of latency. Especially in human communications, that is almost more important than latency itself. Your mind can adapt to latency, and you can start predicting what's going to happen, but if I'm keep changing that for you, that becomes even harder. >> Well, this is what I want to get to because you got outcomes and applications like this opera example. That's an application, I guess. So working backwards from the application, that's one thing, but now people are really starting to trying to figure out, "What is the Edge?" So I have to ask you, what is AWS's Edge? Is it Outpost, Wavelength? What do people buy to make the Edge work? >> Well, for us, is providing a breadth of services that our customers can either use holistically or combine multiple of those. So a really good example, for example, is DISH Wireless. I'm sure you know we're building with DISH the first in the world mobile network, 5G mobile network fully on cloud, right? So these combines Outposts and combines local zones in order to distribute the 5G network across nationwide. And different parts of their applications live in different edges, right? The local zone, the Outputs, and the region itself. So we have our customers... You know, I talked about how local zones is going to be, you know, in total, 45 cities in the world, right? We're already in 15 in the U.S. We're going to do another 30. But customers might still come, and say, "Oh, why are you not," you know, "in "in Costa Rica?" Well, we'll have Outposts in Costa Rica. So you could build your own offering there, or you could build on top of Outputs while you distribute the rest of your workload in existing AWS offering. So to answer your question, John, there is no single answer. I think that it is per use case and per workload that customers are going to combine or choose which one of- >> Okay, so let's go through local zones. Explain what a local zone is real quick. I know we covered it a bit last year with the virtual event, but local zones are now part of the nomenclature of the AWS language. >> Yes. >> And we know what a region is, right? So regions are regions. What's a local zone? >> When your region's saying new availability zones, and then we're just (chuckles)- >> You got availability zones. Now you got local zones. Take us through the topology, if you will, of how to think about this. >> Right, so a local zone is a fully-managed AWS infrastructure deployment. So it's owned and managed and operated by AWS. And because of that, it offers you the same elasticity, and security, and all of the goodies of the cloud, but it's positioned closer to your end customers or to your own deployment. So it's positioned in the local urban, metropolitan or industrial center closer to you. So if you think about the U.S., for example, we have a few regions, like, in the East Coast and in the West Coast, but now, we're basically extending these regions, and we're bringing more and more services to 15 cities. So if you are in Miami, there is a local zone there. If you are in LA, there is two locals zones actually in LA. That enables customers to run two different types of workloads. One is these distributed clouds or distributed Edge kind of workload that we've been hearing more and more about. Think of gaming, for example, right? Like, we have customers that are, like Supercell, that need to be closer to the gamers, wherever they are. So they're going to be using a bunch of local zones to deploy. And also, we have these hyper-local use cases, where we're talking, for example, about Netflix that are enabling in LA their creative artists to connect locally and get like as low as single millisecond latencies. So local zone is like an availability zone, but it's closer to you. It offers the same scalability, the same elasticity, the same security and the same services as the AWS cloud. And it connects back to the regions to offer you the full breadth of the platform. >> So just to clarify, so the Edge strategy essentially is to bring the cloud, AWS, the primitives, the APIs, to where the customers are in instances where they either can't move or won't move their resources into the cloud, or there's no connectivity? >> Right, we have a bunch of use cases where customers either need to be there because of regulation or because of some data gravity, so data is being generated in a specific place and you need to locally process it, or we'll have customers in this distributed use case. But I think that you're pointing out a very important thing, which is a common factor across all of these offerings. It's it is the cloud. It's not like a copycat of the cloud. It's the same API. It's the same services that you already know and use, et cetera. So extending the cloud rather than copying it around is our vision, and getting those customers who, well, connectivity obviously needs to be there. We were offering AWS Private 5G. We talked about it yesterday. >> Now, a premise that we've had is that a lot of Edge use cases will be driven by AI inferencing. And so... First of all, is that a reasonable premise, that's growing, we think, very quickly, and it has huge potential. What does the compute, if that's the correct premise, what does the compute look like for that type of workload? >> That is a great premise, and that's why we think that the model that we're offering is so powerful, because you have the Edge and the cloud fully cooperating and being connected together. You know, the Edge is a resource that's more limited than the full cloud in the AWS region. So when you're doing inferencing, what you really want to do is you want to train your models back up in the region where you get more scalability and the best prices. You know, you have the full scale of AWS. But for the latency-sensitive parts of your applications, you want to push those to the Edge. So when you're doing the actual inferencing, not the training of the models- >> Real time. Yeah. >> Real time, you push that to the Edge, whether that's if your connectivity is 5G, you can push that into a Wavelength zone. If your connectivity is wired, you can push it into a local zone. If you really need it to be in your data center, you can push it in your Outposts. So you see how our kind of like building out for all of those use cases. >> But in those instances, I'm interested in what the compute looks like, 'cause I presume it's got to be low power, low cost, super high performance. I mean, all of those things that are good for data-driven workloads. >> Right, the power, if we think here, is the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. So the same EC2 instance types, the EBS volumes, the S3 for storage, or RDS for your databases and EMR clusters. You can use the same service. And the compute is the same powerful all the way down from the hardware up to the service. >> And is the promise to customers that eventually those... It's not all of those services, right? I mean, you go to Outposts today, it continues to grow. >> Continuing to grow, yeah. Right, so but conceptually, as many services you could possibly push to the Edge, you intend to do so? >> We are pushing services according to customer requests, but also there is a nuance here. The nuance is that you push down the services that are truly latency-sensitive. You don't need to push everything down to the Edge when you're talking about latency- >> Like, what's an example of what you wouldn't push down? >> So management tools, right? So when you're doing monitoring and management, yeah, you don't need these to be at the Edge. You can do that, and you can scale that. Or, you know, batch processing, it doesn't have to be at the Edge because it's, by definition, not online, not like a latency service. So we're keeping those, like AWS Batch, for example, that's in the region because, you know, that's where customers really use it. But things like EC2, EBS, EMR, we're pushing those to the Edge because those are more- >> We got two minutes left. I want to get the Outposts kind of update. I remember when Outposts launched. It was really a seminal moment for re:Invent. Hybrid. "Oh, Andy Jassy said hybrid." Yeah. "I'll never say hybrid." But now hybrid's kind of translated into all cloud operations. Now you got local zones. A lot's changed from Amazon Web Services standpoint since Outposts launched. Local zones, things are happening. 5G, DISH. Now what's the status of Outposts? Are you guys happy with it? What has it morphed into? Is it still the same game? What is Outposts today, vis-a-vis what people may think it is or isn't? >> Yeah, we've been focusing in what we're talking about, building out a number of services that customers request, but also being in more and more places. So I think we're in more than 60, now, countries with Outposts. We've seen very good adoption. We've seen very good feedback. You know, half of my EBCs have been on Outposts, but this year, I think that one of the most exciting announcements were the Outposts servers. So the smaller form factors that enable an additional use cases, like for example, retail or even building your 5G networks. You know, one of our partners, Mavenir, is moving their 5G core, so the smarts of the network that does all the routing, on Outposts servers, and we can distribute those all over the place. So, we're keeping on the innovation. We're keeping on the expansion. And we've been getting very good customer feedback- >> So all steam ahead, full steam ahead? >> Full steam ahead plus 10%. (John laughs) >> All right, guys. Thank you so much, George. Really appreciate it. We're seeing the cloud expand. The definition is growing, kind of like the universe, John. Dave Vellante for John John Furrier. You're watching "theCube" at AWS re:Invent, the leader in high tech coverage globally. We'll be right back.

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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(innovative music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. My name is Dave Vellante, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. Hybrid as in physical, not a lot of that going on this year. But we're here with the AWS ecosystem, AWS, and special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage of the event. We've got two live sets, two remote studios, more than a hundred guests on the program. We're going really deep, as we enter the next decade of Cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Danny Allan, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Veeam, and James Kirschner who's the Engineering Director for Amazon S3. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's kick things off. Veeam and AWS, you guys have been partnering for a long time. Danny, where's the focus at this point in time? What are customers telling you they want you to solve for? And then maybe James, you can weigh in on the problems that customers are facing, and the opportunities that they see ahead. But Danny, why don't you start us off? >> Sure. So we hear from our customers a lot that they certainly want the solutions that Veeam is bringing to market, in terms of data protection. But one of the things that we're hearing is they want to move to Cloud. And so there's a number of capabilities that they're asking us for help with. Things like S3, things like EC2, and RDS. And so over the last, I'll say four or five years, we've been doing more and more together with AWS in, I'll say, two big categories. One is, how do we help them send their data to the Cloud? And we've done that in a very significant way. We support obviously tiering data into S3, but not just S3. We support S3, and S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. And more importantly than ever, we do it with immutability because customers are asking for security. So a big category of what we're working on is making sure that we can store data and we can do it securely. Second big category that we get asked about is "Help us to protect the Cloud-Native Workloads." So they have workloads running in EC2 and RDS, and EFS, and EKS, and all these different services knowing Cloud-Native Data Protection. So we're very focused on solving those problems for our customers. >> You know, James, it's interesting. I was out at the 15th anniversary of S3 in Seattle, in September. I was talking to Mai-Lan. Remember we used to talk about gigabytes and terabytes, but things have changed quite dramatically, haven't they? What's your take on this topic? >> Well, they sure have. We've seen the exponential growth data worldwide and that's made managing backups more difficult than ever before. We're seeing traditional methods like tape libraries and secondary sites fall behind, and many organizations are moving more and more of their workloads to the Cloud. They're extending backup targets to the Cloud as well. AWS offers the most storage services, data transfer methods and networking options with unmatched durability, security and affordability. And customers who are moving their Veeam Backups to AWS, they get all those benefits with a cost-effective offsite storage platform. Providing physical separation from on-premises primary data with pay-as-you-go economics, no upfront fees or capital investments, and near zero overhead to manage. AWS and APM partners like Veeam are helping to build secure, efficient, cost-effective backup, and restore solutions using the products you know and trust with the scale and reliability of the AWS Cloud. >> So thank you for that. Danny, I remember I was way back in the old days, it was a VeeamON physical event. And I remember kicking around and seeing this company called Kasten. And I was really interested in like, "You protect the containers, aren't they ephemeral?" And we started to sort of chit-chat about how that's going to change and what their vision was. Well, back in 2020, you purchased Kasten, you formed the Veeam KBU- the Kubernetes Business Unit. What was the rationale behind that acquisition? And then James, I'm going to get you to talk a little bit about modern apps. But Danny, start with the rationale behind the Kasten acquisition. >> Well, one of the things that we certainly believe is that the next generation of infrastructure is going to be based on containers, and there's a whole number of reasons for that. Things like scalability and portability. And there's a number of significant value-adds. So back in October of last year in 2020, as you mentioned, we acquired Kasten. And since that time we've been working through Kasten and from Veeam to add more capabilities and services around AWS. For example, we supported the Bottlerocket launch they just did and actually EKS anywhere. And so we're very focused on making sure that our customers can protect their data no matter whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's on-premises in a data center, or if it's running up in the Cloud in EC2. We give this consistent data management experience and including, of course, the next generation of infrastructure that we believe will be based on containers. >> Yeah. You know, James, I've always noted to our audience that, "Hey AWS, they provide rich set of primitives and API's that ISV's like Veeam can take advantage of it." But I wonder if you could talk about your perspective, maybe what you're seeing in the ecosystem, maybe comment on what Veeam's doing. Specifically containers, app modernization in the Cloud, the evolution of S3 to support all these trends. >> Yeah. Well, it's been great to see Veeam expands for more and more AWS services to help joint customers protect their data. Especially since Veeam stores their data in Amazon S3 storage classes. And over the last 15 years, S3 has helped companies around the world optimize their work, so I'd be happy to share some insights into that with you today. When you think about S3 well, you can find virtually every use case across all industries running on S3. That ranges from backup, to (indistinct) data, to machine learning models, the list goes on and on. And one of the reasons is because S3 provides industry leading scalability, availability, durability, security, and performance. Those are characteristics customers want. To give you some examples, S3 stores exabytes the data across millions of hard drives, trillions of objects around the world and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second. S3 can process in a single region over 60 terabytes a second. So in summary, it's a very powerful storage offering. >> Yeah, indeed. So you guys always talking about, you know, working backwards, the customer centricity. I think frankly that AWS sort of change the culture of the entire industry. So, let's talk about customers. Danny do you have an example of a joint customer? Maybe how you're partnering with AWS to try to address some of the challenges in data protection. What are customers is seeing today? >> Well, we're certainly seeing that migration towards the Cloud as James alluded today. And actually, if we're talking about Kubernetes, actually there's a customer that I know of right now, Leidos. They're a fortune 500 Information Technology Company. They deal in the engineering and technology services space, and focus on highly regulated industry. Things like defense and intelligence in the civil space. And healthcare in these very regulated industries. Anyway, they decided to make a big investment in continuous integration, continuous development. There's a segment of the industry called portable DevSecOps, and they wanted to build infrastructure as code that they could deploy services, not in days or weeks or months, but they literally wanted to deploy their services in hours. And so they came to us, and with Kasten K10 actually around Kubernetes, they created a service that could enable them to do that. So they could be fully compliant, and they could deliver the services in, like I say, hours, not days or months. And they did that all while delivering the same security that they need in a cost-effective way. So it's been a great partnership, and that's just one example. We see these all the time, customers who want to combine the power of Kubernetes with the scale of the Cloud from AWS, with the data protection that comes from Veeam. >> Yes, so James, you know at AWS you don't get dinner if you don't have a customer example. So maybe you could share one with us. >> Yeah. We do love working backwards from customers and Danny, I loved hearing that story. One customer leveraging Veeam and AWS is Maritz. Maritz provides business performance solutions that connect people to results, ensuring brands deliver on their customer promises and drive growth. Recently Maritz moved over a thousand VM's and petabytes of data into AWS, using Veeam. Veeam Backup for AWS enables Maritz to protect their Amazon EC2 instances with the backup of the data in the Amazon S3 for highly available, cost-effective, long-term storage. >> You know, one of the hallmarks of Cloud is strong ecosystem. I see a lot of companies doing sort of their own version of Cloud. I always ask "What's the partner ecosystem look like?" Because that is a fundamental requirement, in my view anyway, and attribute. And so, a big part of that, Danny, is channel partners. And you have a 100 percent channel model. And I wonder if we could talk about your strategy in that regard. Why is it important to be all channel? How to consulting partners fit into the strategy? And then James, I'm going to ask you what's the fit with the AWS ecosystem. But Danny, let's start with you. >> Sure, so one of the things that we've learned, we're 15 years old as well, actually. I think we're about two months older, or younger I should say than AWS. I think their birthday was in August, ours was in October. But over that 15 years, we've learned that our customers enjoy the services, and support, and expertise that comes from the channel. And so we've always been a 100 percent channel company. And so one of the things that we've done with AWS is to make sure that our customers can purchase both how and when they want through the AWS marketplace. They have a program called Consulting Partners Private Agreements, or CPPO, I think is what it's known as. And that allows our customers to consume through the channel, but with the terms and bill that they associate with AWS. And so it's a new route-to-market for us, but we continue to partner with AWS in the channel programs as well. >> Yeah. The marketplace is really impressive. James, I wonder if you could maybe add in a little bit. >> Yeah. I think Danny said it well, AWS marketplace is a sales channel for ISV's and consulting partners. It lets them sell their solutions to AWS customers. And we focus on making it really easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage software solutions, including software as a service in just a matter of minutes. >> Danny, you mentioned you're 15 years old. The first time I mean, the name Veeam. The brilliance of tying it to virtualization and VMware. I was at a VMUG when I first met you guys and saw your ascendancy tied to virtualization. And now you're obviously leaning heavily into the Cloud. You and I have talked a lot about the difference between just wrapping your stack in a container and hosting it in the Cloud versus actually taking advantage of Cloud-Native Services to drive further innovation. So my question to you is, where does Veeam fit on that spectrum, and specifically what Cloud-Native Services are you leveraging on AWS? And maybe what have been some outcomes of those efforts, if in fact that's what you're doing? And then James, I have a follow-up for you. >> Sure. So the, the outcomes clearly are just more success, more scale, more security. All the things that James is alluding to, that's true for Veeam it's true for our customers. And so if you look at the Cloud-Native capabilities that we protect today, certainly it began with EC2. So we run things in the Cloud in EC2, and we wanted to protect that. But we've gone well beyond that today, we protect RDS, we protect EFS- Elastic File Services. We talked about EKS- Elastic Kubernetes Services, ECS. So there's a number of these different services that we protect, and we're going to continue to expand on that. But the interesting thing is in all of these, Dave, when we do data protection, we're sending it to S3, and we're doing all of that management, and tiering, and security that our customers know and love and expect from Veeam. And so you'll continue to see these types of capabilities coming from Veeam as we go forward. >> Thank you for that. So James, as we know S3- very first service offered in 2006 on the AWS' Cloud. As I said, theCUBE was out in Seattle, September. It was a great, you know, a little semi-hybrid event. But so over the decade and a half, you really expanded the offerings quite dramatically. Including a number of, you got on-premise services things, like Outposts. You got other services with "Wintery" names. How have you seen partners take advantage of those services? Is there anything you can highlight maybe that Veeam is doing that's notable? What can you share? >> Yeah, I think you're right to call out that growth. We have a very broad and rich set of features and services, and we keep growing that. Almost every day there's a new release coming out, so it can be hard to keep up with. And Veeam has really been listening and innovating to support our joint customers. Like Danny called out a number of the ways in which they've expanded their support. Within Amazon S3, I want to call out their support for our infrequent access, infrequent access One-Zone, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive Storage Classes. And they also support other AWS storage services like AWS Outposts, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball Edge, and the Cold-themed storage offerings. So absolutely a broad set of support there. >> Yeah. There's those, winter is coming. Okay, great guys, we're going to leave it there. Danny, James, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really good to see you guys. >> Good to see you as well, thank you. >> All right >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of 2021 AWS re:Invent, keep it right there for more action on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage, right back. (uplifting music)