>>Okay, welcome back to everyone. Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube. Two sets three days of live coverage. Dave Ante's here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all host of the cube 12 interviews today, just we're with Rocklin and rolling, getting down to the end of the show. As we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Steven Jones. Here's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon web service. Steven Jones. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. >>Welcome back cube alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah. >>Pleasure to be here. Great >>To see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously 10 years at AWS, what a ride is that's been, come on. That's fantastic. Tell me it's been crazy. >>Wow. Learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we, we, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of, of the cloud and, and we, we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that animals say that, but it really is. Right. If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on, on clouds, it's in the billions, right. And the amount of, of spend in it is still in the trillion. So there's, there's a long way to go and customers are pushing us hard. Obviously >>It's been interesting a lot going on with VM. We're obviously around with them, obviously changing the strategy with their, their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at abs, we've been, we've been, this'll be our ninth year, no 10th year at reinvent coming up for us. So, but it's 10 years of everything at Amazon, 10 years of S three, 10 years of C two. So if you look at the, the marks of time, now, the history books are starting to be written about Amazon web services. You know, it's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like >>Hardcore, for sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC two instances back in the day and the maximum amount of memory you could conversion into one of these machines was I think 128 gig of Ram fast forward to today. You literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of Ram just in insane amounts. Right? My, my son who's a gamer tells me he's got 16 gig in his, in his PC. You need to, he thinks that's a lot. >>Yeah. >>That's >>Excited about that. That's not even on his graphics card. I mean, he's, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just all >>The it's like, right? >>I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done, I mean, look at every it's changed. Everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS nitro, Dave ante. And I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantos, these guys have, are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the, at the level. I mean that, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, and the advances on the Silicon graviton performance wise is crazy. I mean, so what does that enabling? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side, we think that's enabling another set of new net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw snowflake come on, customer of AWS refactor, the data warehouse, they call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs. You see capital one, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx >>Is exactly right. And Ziggy mentioned graviton. So graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you know, you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. Every event Adam announced that we're working with SAP to, to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a, a database of service offering HANA flagship to graviton as well. So it's, it's definitely changing. >>And I think, you know, one of the, and we're gonna circle back to VMware is kind of a point to this. This conversation is that, is that if you look at the trends, right, okay. VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot, lot of other stragglers try to do cloud. They fell off the road, OpenStack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't wanna get into that, but the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem, you have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what pat Gelsinger said? And I was there, let's clear up the positioning. Let's go all in with AWS. That's >>Right >>At that time, 2016. >>Yeah. This was new for us, for >>Sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How is that going out? State's worked. >>It's working well very well. It's I mean, we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement what, five years ago at this conference. Yeah. 2016. So, I mean, it's, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And, and, and what's been different. I think about this relationship. And it was new for us was that we, we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't a, we've got a, a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a, a joint offering together. Talk about, about the main difference. >>Yeah. And that, and that's been working, but now here at this show, if you look at, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is like just, I think positioning for, you know, what could happen in, in a post broad Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction they're Tansu where, where customers were leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic. It, you know, mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm gonna go on continu, accelerate on, in the public cloud, but I'm gonna have hybrid on premise as well. You guys have that solution. Now they're gonna need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware is probably not gonna be able to get 'em all of it. And, and that there's a lot more cloud native options as customers want more cloud native. How do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. >>Yeah. There's probably two ways I would look at this. Right? So, so one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS. And then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center, evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers they're like, I I've gotta think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some net new application, more and more. We're actually seeing customers. They've got their assets. A lot of them are still on premises in a VMware state, right. They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this, this idea of migrate. Now you need to get the benefits of TCO and, and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the, the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now AWS native services are for use right alongside any that a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just, >>And that's, that's how you guys see the native and, and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's, that's important because this, I mean, if I always joke about, you know, we've been here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff, you know, on the bus to the event last night, walking the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets, there's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top. And I wanna get your reaction to this Steven, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference, there's conversations around ransomware and storage and D dub and recovery. It's all, a lot of those happen. Yeah. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air gapped. And a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations and then the other one is, okay, I gotta get the cloud story. >>Right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud. I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now not it serves some sort of back office function. Yeah. It's like, my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental siloed. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you, how do you see that evolving because VMware customers are now going there. And I won't say, I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. >>I think, I think, I mean, it's an interesting con it's an interesting way to put it and I, I would completely agree. I think it's, it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted. Right. And they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company. Right. I mean, if, if you look at where not too many years back, there were, you know, big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud. Right. Airbnb they're disruptors. >>There's, that's the >>App, right? That's the app. Yeah. So I, I would exactly agree. And, and that's who other companies are competing with. And so they have to move quickly. You talked about some, some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the general availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now, why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware. On-premises still, there's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp, NetApp filers, and the same enterprise features like replication. D do you were talking about and Snapp and clone. Those types of things can be done. Now within the V VMware state on AWS, what's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this, you know, petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these S from on-premises into AWS, this, this NetApp service, and then connected connecting that up to the BMC option. So it just allows customers much, much. >>You guys, you guys have always been customer focus. Every time I sat down with the Andy jazzy and then last year with Adam, same thing we worked back from, I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customer, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I observed, we talked about here yesterday on the cube was the observations of reinvent versus say, VM world. Now explore is VM world's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware. And the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements can compare that to the past, say eight years of reinvent, where there's so much Amazon action going on the partners, I won't say take as a second, has a backseat to Amazon, but the, the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS, because there's always new stuff coming out. >>And it's, it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or, or change between like the VMware ecosystem. And now Amazon there's, a lot of our interviews are like, they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show they're here. So you start to see what I call the naturalization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow, and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at the event this year, as you always do, but the partners are much more part of the AWS equation, not just we're leasing all these new services and, and oh, for sure. Look at us, look at Amazon. We're growing. Cause you guys were building out and look, the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level, the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How has Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some, some, a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or no solve the problem, addressing the need and this next level of growth. What's your reaction to >>That? Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I, I, I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS and partners are big >>By the way, you sell out every reinvent. So it's, you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that you, that there's no partner network there, but >>Partners are critical. I mean, absolutely naturally we want a relationship with a customer, but in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the, the needs of customers, we need partners. Right. We, we can't, we can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to. Right. And so partners have long built teams and expertise that, that caters to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And, and we love partners >>For that. Yeah. I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side, you don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon, but for the most part, you let competition come in, even on, so you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more the maturization of partners within the reinvent ecosystem, cuz we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there it's sold out as big numbers, but it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition of at a AWS because of the, the rising tide and, and now their enablement, cuz now they're part of the, of the value proposition. Even more than ever before >>They, they really are. And they, and they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right. We, we all do better together. >>Okay. So let's talk about the VMware cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show, what's your, what's your main focus cuz a lot of people here are doing, doing sessions. What's been some of the con content that you guys are producing here. >>Yeah. So the best part obviously is a always the customer conversations to partner conversations. So a, a lot of, a lot of sessions there, we did keynote yesterday in Ryan and I, where we talked about a number of announcements that are, I think pretty material now to the offering a joint announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some, some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like how, how do I take what I've got on premises and easily move into AWS and technology like HSX H CX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re IP applications. I mean, you know, it is super difficult sometimes to, to move an application. If you've got figure out where all the firewall rules are and re iPing those, those things source. But yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. >>A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action. You guys have probably seen an uptake on services right on the native side. >>Yes. Yes. For sure. So maybe I just outlined some of the, some of the assets we made this week. So absolutely >>Go ahead. >>We, we announced a new instance family as a, a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I, I, you mentioned nitro earlier, this is on, based on our latest generation of nitro, which allows us to offer as you know, bare metal instances, which is, which is what VMware actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nira done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I four, I instance, it's based on the, the latest Intel isolate processor with more than double the Ram double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabytes per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the, with the NetApp storage solution that we, we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision, compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your VSAN array, that was on a V VMware cloud. Yeah. You'd add another note. You might not need more compute for memory. You'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers. I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move. Now. We were waiting for something that like this, that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads yeah. Into VMware cloud. It's >>Like, it's like the, the alignment. You mentioned alignment earlier. You know, I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with the hybrid story that's that's seamless or somewhat seems it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you, you guys have that there talking that big here, you got vs a eight vSphere, eight out it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services and the horsepower. They have their stuff, you have yours that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree? And, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's, what's the motivation now to go faster? >>Look, it is, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together. And so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're, we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. >>What is that vision real quick? >>So that vision has to actually help an under help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay. So you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on premises. And why is that? Well, it used to be, there was big for data and migration, right? And the speed. And so we continue to iterate this and that again is a joint thing. Instead of say, VMware, just building on AWS, it really is a, a tight partnership. >>Yeah. The lift and shift is a, an easy thing to do. And, and, and by the way, that could be a hassle too. But I hear most people say the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that. >>We are doing that. Absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options, right? If a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They wanna buy from VMware for a similar reason. They could buy from VMware. So are >>They in the marketplace? >>They are in the market. There, there are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tansu, there's a Tansu offering in the marketplace. So yes. Customers can >>Contract. Yeah. Marketplaces. I'm telling you that's very disruptive. I'm Billy bullish on the market AIOS marketplace. I think that's gonna be a transformative way. People have what they procure and fully agree, deploy and how, and channel relationships are gonna shift. I think that's gonna be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation and, and we haven't even seen it yet. We're gonna be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're gonna be documenting that. So even final question for you, what's next for you? What's on the agenda. You got reinvent right around the corner. Your P ones are done. Right? I know. Assuming all that, I turn that general joke. That's an internal Amazon joke. FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the world. Obviously they're gonna go this, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is gonna be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? >>Yeah. So both of us are hyper focused on adding additional options, both from a, an instance compute perspective. You know, VMware announced some, some, some additional offerings that we've got. We've got a fully complete, like, so they're, they announce things like VMware flex compute V VMware flex storage. You mentioned earlier, there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware based offering. So we're hyper focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice >>Real quick. Jonathan made me think about the ransomware we were at reinforce Steven Schmidtz now the CSO. Now you got a CSO. AJ's the CSO. You got a whole focus, huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's PO more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. It's been more Lum and doom. What's the security tie in here with VMware. Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? >>Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like you don't have anything of security. And so what are the things that, that we're excited about specifically with VMware is, is the latest offering that, that we put together and it's called this, this ransomware offering. And it's, it's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today, just >>Air gap. >>Right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this, this option where CU we can be to be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, right. And a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up super easy. This is cloud. Remember? Yeah. We can spin up a, a copy of this environment, throw a switch, pick a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX firewall it off and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a >>Little bit of scam. We had Tom gills on yesterday and, and one of the things Dave ante had to leave is taking the sun to college is last one in the house and B nester now, but Tom Gill was on. We were talking about how good their security story is ware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could have here. I thought they could have done a better job, but this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. >>Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for, >>Okay. Now the, the real question I want to know is what's your plans for AWS reinvent the blockbuster end of the year, Amazon surf show that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's looking be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really come back and still had massive numbers. AWS summit, New York at 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting reinvent to be pretty large this year. What are you, what are you gonna do there? What's your role there? >>We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously. We're, we're planning on some additional announcements, obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP. And you should look for some things there as well. Yeah. Really looking forward to reinvent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think it >>Always ruins my, I always get an article out. I like, why are you we're having, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I gotta write this article. It's gotta get Adam, Adam. Leski exclusive. We, every year we do a, a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event to me. I think it sets the tone. And it's gonna be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscalers. Now, multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the CapEx goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new, the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone you get paid, cuz it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network, GSI other companies. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean we're really scaling. I mean we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. Yeah. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service, >>The sovereign clouds right around the corner. Let's we'll talk about that soon. Steven. Thanks for coming. I know you gotta go. Thank you for your valuable time. Coming in. Put Steven Jones. Who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business. Four AWS here inside the cube day. Three of cube coverage. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.