>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE two stages, three days of coverage, our tenth year here at the VMworld show. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for this segment is Bobby Allan. And welcome back, two of our CUBE alumni. >> How are you? >> As I said back in 2010 we didn't even know what a CUBE alumni was. People were trying to figure out what we're doing but now we have thousands of them and both of these gentlemen have been on the program, a few times. >> Thanks for having us back. >> You're welcome. So, first, over we have Ajay Patel, who I believe was doing another filming evening with our crew-- >> Absolutely >> Earlier today. >> The Accenture Innovation Center. >> Ah, excellent. Beautiful building Accenture has here in San Francisco. >> Ajay: Beautiful (mumbles) >> One of the other benefits of being back in San Francisco is we brought in people and it's really easy to get in and out and do other things in the Valley. But Ajay is the senior vice president and general manager of the cloud provider software business unit inside VMware. And one of his partners is Rackspace. We have Peter FitzGibbon who is the vice president of Product Alliances, with for mentioned Rackspace. >> Yeah, super to be back in San Francisco. It's a great change from Vegas. >> Yeah, you know, there is some debate in the community of course it's a little more expensive here in San Francisco and there are other logistic challenges. We're excited to be back here and yeah, really excited to be talking with both of you. Peter, let's start, you know Rackspace has had a long, long partnership with VMware. When I remember back to like VMware Environments Hosted it's like, Rackspace was the one with the lion's share in that market. And, you know, Rackspace has gone through a lot of changes in the last 10 years that we've been doing this coverage. When I think about multi cloud, all of these environments you've got a nice perspective on this and lots of customers you've worked with. So, give us the update on what you're hearing from customers and your relationship with VMware. >> Yeah, so, 20-year history with VMware that we're very proud of. I would say it's almost being re-birthed in the last two years though. Two years ago, we were one of the first VMware Cloud Verified partners. We launched our VMware Cloud VMware Cloud Foundation Private Cloud. We added that about six months later in customer data centers. We're now one of the major partners of VMware Cloud AWS >> Ajay: VMware Cloud AWS yep. >> And that's one of the areas that we're continuing to expand upon. We announced some new services this week, specifically around VMware Cloud AWS or support of HDX, both for migrations for ongoing support as well as a number of, what we call Rackspace service blocks. Which are additional manage services that we are applying, specifically for VMware Cloud and AWS. So, exciting times at Rackspace and VMware continues to be a look, a major part of our portfolio. >> Ajay: And thank you for all the support, Peter. >> Yeah, so Ajay, bring us up to speed of what's happening in your space you know, a lot of attention gets paid, you know Every time, you know, I saw Sanjay Poon, up on stage at the Goolge clould event, and of course the AWS partnership has been one of the biggest stories in all of tech, for the last couple of years. And that's been extending to, you know first it was like, wait, you know Rackspace has data centers and many of your other partners have data centers, but how did these all, play together and how does the VMware software pull them all together. >> So Stu, I think, you and I have been talking about this world of hybrid multi and we've been arguing, whether it's just a transitionary stage, or here to stay. Hopefully that debate's over, right? Hybrid's a new reality, multi cloud's a new reality and we talk about these hyper scales but you know, Rackspace and many of my VCP partners they've been longstanding in this journey with us. I don't know if you caught Pat's keynote? We demonstrated, that we have over 10 000 data centers through our VCPP network and Rackspace being one of our top 10 partners. So you start, to start seeing this mix of VMware everywhere. Whether it's trough our service provider cloud the customer manage cloud or even a hyper scale VMware cloud. You now have the ubiquitous VMware infrastructure to play with. >> At some point it's just cloud. (chattering) >> That is a great point, when I talk to customers most of them, they have a cloud strategy it's usually not a hybrid or a multi or all these things. Here's the nuance I want to, you know, ask for a second then I definitely want Bobby to jump in with what he's been talking to customers about. You know, hybrid cloud is a reality because customers have their own data centers and they have public cloud. The ideal of multi cloud, customers have multiple clouds, but, you know, one of the definitions I put out there is, multi cloud exists when the multi cloud solution is more valuable than the sum of the pieces. And I'm not sure that we're quite there yet. I think we're starting to move down that path. But what are you both seeing? And does that resonate with what you see today? >> Yeah like, all of our customers have workloads in multiple locations and trying to provide the assessments of where to put the right workloads at the right time is one of the key values that we hold dear. And before we ever talk about where we're going to but a workload we assess whether, what our clients environments is and determine, maybe this is an AWS workload maybe this is a WMS workload maybe this workload really belongs in the data center for, due to laws of the lands laws of gravity and physics. >> And I think, what's happening, really is any application, typically choosing a platform or the cloud service that's driving the decision. Collectively what ends up happening because of that, you are in multiple clouds. So, I think what's it's a result of the reality that applications are driving location and platform choices and the way to drive consistency is trying to pick a few common things whether it's kubernetes as a platform or VMware, right? Those are a way to, kind of, unify these desperate choices that are made individually. That are collectively making each of our customers multi cloud, right? >> Ajay, I want to piggyback on that because you talked about the applications driving a lot of the choices, when applications teams in my experience are, kind of, making the choices they don't care about a centralized strategy and obviously, this very powerful partnership can support multiple places and ways around your workloads. How do you lead the witness, a little bit towards simplification and just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. >> Yes, so I think what's happening from our perspective is depending on which side of the IT house you're at if you're part of the core IT that's running and maintaining mission critical systems you're really looking for something that's reliable, performance scalable, secure. And you, maybe, looking at a hardware refresher looking at your data center strategy and you're looking to migrate that workload. You're not really looking to re-change the app just because it's cool. >> Bobby: Right. >> If you're part of digital transformation effort you're looking to say, okay how do I get something out there quickly? >> Bobby: Right. >> How do I integrate on the average my data and application assets while leveraging cloud services? >> Bobby: Right. So, we're seeing this tension in some ways where the, kind of, net new is really pushing the envelope of cloud with self service elasticity, new capability while as the old guard is like I got to keep my running business, running keep it secure. And how do you bridge these two worlds and bring them together? We call it DevOps and, you know, ITA and the traditional, kind of new developer. Reality is, you're trying to bring the two worlds on a common platform. Whether it's VM's or containers and so the exciting part for us is, how do we unify? How do we deliver this experience and give them the choice, where it makes more sense. And blur the lines between public and private. Those are just locations and makes more sense for your customer or your application that you can drive. >> Bobby: Right, excellent. >> We find ourselves in those conversations, all the time trying to bridge two sides of the equation at a customer and trying to get them together on a uniformed strategy and weighing the pros and cons of different locations or different workloads. So, it's not easy, it's not a challenge of course. >> Peter, I'd love you to bring us inside some of those VMware on AWS customers because, you know, some of the first customers I talked to, it was, you know, I'm a VMware shop and there's a part of your group that's like oh my gosh, I can't change and this was a driver saying hey, you don't need to, we can bring you along. But, the value, once again needs to be Oh hey, I need to do some innovative things I want to be able to access some of those cool amazing services that, you know everybody is providing on a daily basis. So, you know, are you seeing that progression are there any interesting use cases that are coming out? >> Progression is the word, we could call it progressive transformation inside Rackspace. Like, you're a VMware customer let's bring you ion the journey towards public cloud. And let's help you leverage those address services. So, we find ourselves in a great position where a very large number of engineers, that support our native AWS workloads, we've brought those two groups together from our VMware expertise and address expertise. So when a customer lands on a VMware address I consider it a failure, if they haven't transformed part of the application in three months. If they're not really consuming those native AWS services. And that's what we really try inject. It's like, get our AWS engineers looking at those workloads let's start consuming those native services and that's what we're finding really exciting about how customers are starting to adopt and starting to plug and play into some of those services. >> Oh I look at it, as you know, you'll see a team Sanjay called it M&MS, migrate and modernize but a part of the migrate is often modernize your infrastructure first by putting on a modern cloud platform. And then modernize your application using cloud services. How it says, it's M-M and M, right, to follow through because it's not just about lifting and shifting keeping the old crap as it is. You got to really start to look at how do you drive innovation drive your Cube to a better place. So that you can operate it more affectively and then modernize for application results. And your service blocks, are really catered to helping that customers. So you can talk a little bit about how they're building the services that compliment our offer. >> Yeah, so our service blocks is... In the past, we offered them one big block manage service to a customer. We realized, let's decompose that and offer the customer what they need at a specific point in time. So we, think about Lego blocks, where at some point you may need, just some support or at some point you might need some architectural services and design and other times you might say cost optimization. That sort of stuff. So over time, we're adding on these Lego blocks if you will, to add a customer, to give them what they need at the point they need it, and not more. So, it's an exciting concept that every month, we're adding more services. We launched a Rackspace manage security service block today specifically for VMware cloud. So, we continue to add these and provide incremental value. >> I want to ask you a little bit of a controversial question. There's a saying, pioneers take the arrows but settlers take the land. >> Right >> So, if I'm a technology leader how do I embrace all this newness without getting shot, partnering with your firms. >> So, you know, we always say lock-ins bad but reality is, we always choose to reject technology platforms. And if you're a VMware customer I hate to say it, you're running on VMware infrastructure you have VMware ecosystem, you have VMware run books you have VMware partners, managing your on-prem assets what if I could you a path forward on any cloud of your choice without having to change any of your day-tot-day operation while leveraging the innovation future. What is the safest path for you, Mr Customer? And so, in this world, you can think of us being laggard in some sense. Because we're not pushing them to a single destination. We're giving them that choice, leveraging the strength. I think the innovative part that we've done today has really brought containers and VM'S in a single solution. We talked about containers killing VM'S two years ago, right? You know, VMware was getting trouble with docker VMware was going to be trouble with Openstack. Where are those two companies today and where is VMware? It's about simplifying for the customer a common solution. And we're taking those choices away and making this easy. Giving partners who can help them on their journey. So, I would say we're the safer choice. >> Okay >> That will be my response. >> Peter, we're not going to ask you about Openstack. (Giggles) >> I'm really back to VMware, it's working progress. (Giggles) >> Interesting point, the settlers right? At this point VMSware and AWS is two years old I think that first year, what was definitely some pioneers our there. But now I think we're really in there where the settlers are coming on and we're seeing large-scale adoption in the platform and now that VMware is offering more and more services, natively we can add more those managed services and help those customers really transform and not worry about the underlying IS that's rock-solid at this point. >> Peter, I would like you to get into it a little bit, kind of, the containerization and the kubernetes, you know, Docker, obviously a lot of hype, but containerization that's hugely important, you know a lot of the keynote this morning was talking about cloud native. I talked to lots of customers, you know there's some that, yes, they will want the VMware journey but many of them say, well, If I'm going to cloud I can just use containers. Why would I have the overhead of VM's? when cloud founders was originally created it was not for that type of environment. So where does that fit into, you know your world containers? >> Yeah, we actually launched some more services on that today as well, some more professional services and manage services, so safely around advanced kubernetes support, across all our platforms so this isn't just a VMware announcement this is on AWS, Microsoft, Badger and Google. So, another exciting progression, or hybrid could story and making investments in those resources to deliver kubernetes. We also launched a cloud native service block today, as well, that is really giving customers access to deep engineering skills and giving them cloud reliability engineers that can help them transform their workloads and get them ready for the cloud. >> I think, for us, if you... Project (mumbles) sorry tan zoo as a solution, and project pacific. Our two marquee announcements we made this week and if you look at the way we're focusing on the bull run manage aspects of the full life cycle and our active participation in the kubernetes community we're starting the beginnings of what I felt, like Java in 2000 when I was at BA, right? Where Weblogic and Java was the runtime for rolling and building new apps. Kubernetes and containers are the new runtime for building distributed apps across Cal platforms. And we're in this early journey and we are uniquely in opposition with the combination of pivotal for build. With project Pacific we're bringing containers into V&V-sphere, so VM's and containers become first class. Trough your point, we demonstrated eight percent performance improvement over bare metal on a V-sphere container based solution. Starting to engineer, based on a key scheduling work that we do in the kernel and in the hypervisor we're driving that deep into the kubernetes platform into the core platform itself. And then manage is going to be the new interesting bit. What is that control panel that everyone is going to fight over? And the manage services partner can help them choose. So, I think the battleground is more and more going to manage I think we secured our base with the runtime. And the bill will be about choice. (Mumbles) >> And Tan zoo is music to our ears we can now, again, focus on what's the additional manage services and service-- >> How do you help customers build apps? And change the engineering culture is what you provide. We just give you the runtime across any of these clouds. >> We want to help everyone, transform applications also transform the culture and how they do their business all that rapport-- >> Engineering transformation is a big one. Sajay transformation we talked about, internally for us VMware, same with our customers. You got to change the mindset of how you build the applications. In this container service based architecture >> Agree, agree >> What else is keeping folks up at night? That you talk to? Love to know that, just hot tail. >> Nothing keeps me up at night it's an exciting world we live in so loaded question, what excites me? What excites me is the progression, that VMware is making and the announcement Lydon video and GPU access link I think, early next year. I think that can be another wave of VMC adoptions. So, not keep me up at night but keep me interesting and excited. >> I think to that point I can build on what Pat said about tech for good, I mean we have a joined customer feeding America, right? We're now taking technology and making it available so that, you know, the 60 000 plus distribution centers they have, are up all the time. They're not even worried about infrastructure. They can focus on feeding the cause which is, I think 47 million people being fed. It's scary, right? >> Well, we want to bring it back to the organization of the discussion, you said you're helping customers with because we are worried you know, about how racking, stacking, configuring how doing all of those things, you know how do you help them? I talked to a number of customers at this show and they said look, my roles in my organization is still hardware to find And it's tough to move into a software role but if I want to get into the6 tech for good I need to be able to uplift my skills uplift my organizations, yeah. >> It's difficult, right? Organizational changes differ for every company but as part of the digital transformation there is also organizational transformation so we're having customers think about what is the progression form a VMware administrator to a DevOps-- >> Or cloud, I bet. (Giggles) >> It's not easy, it's your short answer on that. >> I think for us, is really starting to drive the cultural chance providing the tools and bring the self service in where they can be a coach, right? Be the trailblazer, who can come in and help change your organization. Teach them how to do it right. Not everyone will get there, hopefully bulk of the organization can shift right. >> Peter, I want to give you the final word you know, your partners and customers to understand. Take aways from VMware 2019. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, as usual thanks for having us. I think, Tan Zoo is really exciting. The progression that we're making with adding service blocks on top of VMware and AWS and or other hybrid cloud announcements. So, great to be here, but the Tan Zoo is kind of the story of the show. >> For me, it's a VMware is here to stay. We want to be, be have been, your strategic partner for the last decade. We're here to stay for the next decade. We're going to help you solve these hard complex problems and give you the choice you need. Across a broader ecosystem of partners and solutions. so, very excited to be here and to deliver that value. >> And Peter, thank you so much for joining us again, Bobby Allen, thank you for co-hosting. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Vmworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Vmworld 2018, Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Great, this morning started off with tremendous amount of momentum from Pat Gelsinger, including a new tattoo that he debuted. 20th anniversary of VMware, 20th anniversary of the Rackspace, DellEMC partnership, please welcome to theCUBE a veteran and alumni, Peter Fitzgibbon, the VP and GM of the VMware practice at Rackspace. Peter it's great to have you back. >> It's great to be back here at Vmworld. >> And we're excited to welcome David Trigg to theCUBE, the Global Vice President of Market Development and Service Providers from DellEMC, welcome. >> Thank you, glad to but be here. So happy 20th anniversary to Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thank you. >> Longstanding partnership, what's going on? A lot of momentum at Dell Tech World just, what, four months ago? What's some of the momentum that you guys have seen in your joint customer space this summer? >> Yeah, so at Dell Technologies World we launched our Rackspace private cloud, R by VMware, our Everywhere edition, as we're referring to it, which is extending Rackspace private clouds into customer data centers and colos. And since that announcement back at Dell Technologies World, we've seen fantastic adoption from both our existing installed base that's interested, and knows the Rackspace brand, and our fanatical experience, as well as new customers that know now we can service them in new locations. >> And then David, for you, Dell Technologies World was all about IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, and making it real. How is DellEMC working with Rackspace to help customers make these transformations a successful reality? >> Yeah, well one of the fist things, in my opinion, to highlight is the length of time that we have worked together, and through that length of time, Rackspace has made incredible investments in their skill set, their ability to manage infrastructure, you know, there's a lot of a deep knowledge there, so customers can feel very confident about the ability to provide the services. And as customers go through transformation, customers have more choices now, and more things, as we talk about the edge, and the core, and the cloud, they have to manage infrastructure in more places than they've ever had to manage before. So we're very proud of the relationship that we've had, the investments that they've made, because our customers are needing help in managing through, not only the transformations, but all of the choices that they have to make on where's the best place to put an application? Where's the best place to put a workload, and how do they manage the migrations and the modernization? So yeah, it plays very, very close into our transformation message, and quite frankly, we couldn't do it without partners like Rackspace. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that, because you're talking about more than just a storage partnership, right? Is that, >> Oh, yeah. >> A lot more to its, it's much more comprehensive, >> Absolutely. >> Sets of integration, practices, and areas of expertise, so let's double click on that a little bit. >> Yeah, there's a lot of skill sets that are required to even just do assessments, where I'm really understanding where do the applications go. Really then making sure that they understand, how do you support the infrastructure? How do you monitor the infrastructure and how do you make sure that it's running a lot? And again, Rackspace has made a lot of investments, is one of the best in the world in being able to do a lot of this. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that. Why Rackspace? >> Well, we are offering customers strategic flexibility, really. Whether they want to deploy in a Rackspace data center, a customer data center, get access to our deep expertise, not just a DellEMC, but our 150 plus VMware certified experts that our customers can now tap into, because this world gets more and more complex. And you saw the evening announcements this morning. It was like, how do our customers get the best value from those technologies, and not simply have shelf ware? Tap into Rackspace, with our partnerships with DellEMC and VMware to get the real value out of that expensive technology. >> So from a customer's standpoint, help us understand what's really going on. We asked the question a lot this week, is things like the AWS VMware partnership, is it a one-way trip to the cloud, or is it boom for the data center? And a lot of people are saying the latter. What are customers saying? What do they really want to do? >> Listen, customers are going to be living their data center for a long time yet to come. We've got legacy applications, they've got mainframes, we got client server applications, and then we have direct cloud-native applications, but there's a slew of applications in the middle where customers are kind of unsure about where to go, and they lean on a trusted partner like Rackspace, who really is cloud agnostic to help them figure out should they go public cloud? Should they be private cloud? Or are they in a hybrid cloud journey like everybody is on? So we want to be the Switzerland, where we can help people determine where they should go, and really offer unbiased expertise. >> So you guys announced, kind of along the lines of being Switzerland, at Dell Technologies World, Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, Everywhere. I know you've got, what, five data centers in five continents. Talk about that Everywhere. How does it help customers to embrace the reality of multi-cloud, and to actually do so in a way that allows them to understand, working with you guys, where different applications should be placed at different times in the year? >> Yeah so, Everywhere is a natural evolution of what we've offered in our own data centers over time. So now deploying out in customer data centers and colos, well later this year, we hope to launch a formal VMware on AWS software as well. So Everywhere constitutes three parts, really, Rackspace data centers, customer data centers, to get as close to their data as needs be, and VMware on AWS as our product matures, as you saw from a number of announcements this morning. >> And to add on to John's question about the promise of the cloud, I think the original promise, and maybe the threat of the cloud was everything was going at the cloud. Well as we're learning through IoT and other new, emerging trends, that's not realistic. Customers really have to think about the edge, their own data center, because their own data centers are not going away. They have to think about the SLAs that they're providing to their end users, to their employees, and that's where you have to place the application, the workload in the right place to enable the best customer experience for their customers and their employees. And that's were a company like Rackspace, that can really get to the edge, the core, the cloud, by managing that infrastructure regardless. Obviously, the investments that VMware's making to help enable that as well, and being supported by a lot of the DellEMC stuff. It's an exciting time, I think. >> I Want to follow up on that, because Peter, off camera said cloud migration doesn't mean leaving your data center. >> Absolutely. >> This Gartner analyst came out, not that recently, but I think it was last year, and said that 80% of data centers will shut down by 2025, so that caused a lot of, right? Both eye rolling and no way, and et cetera. The Wikibon crew, which is affiliated with theCUBE, a sister company, sister division, just came out with a report that said true private cloud is going to be a $32 billion market this year. So that means on-prem cloud. >> Yep. >> So you have all these countervailing messages going on. Then you see, of course, the epitome of Andy Jassy up on stage today with Pat Gelsinger talking about hybrid cloud. What do you guys make of all of this? What's really happening and going to happen? >> I think customer data centers are going to live for some time to come, as people figure out where should the workload actually go? What can they do with that specific workload? Can they refactor it and rebuild it and go cloud-native? Great. Can they move to a hosted private cloud model with Rackspace rolling racks into a customer data center? Or is it a legacy application that really needs to be kept and maintained over time until the next disruption happens, where they really have to refactor it? >> Yeah, really, in that case there may be no business case. Why lift in and shift it, for what? Just to say, >> Exactly, they get it. >> Hey I'm in the cloud. >> Exactly, I think with cloud migrations, does not mean leaving your data center. I think that's going to continue for some time, where people can get the benefits from Rackspace, moving from a CapEX to an OpEx model with managed services, with industry leading SLAs, but still in their own data center, because they have applications running that cannot be moved. >> Well it's interesting, David to see this equilibrium that's kind of being reached, you know? A few short years ago, there was sort of antagonism between VMware and the AWS. You know, the whole book seller comment. Andy Jassy was like, pfft, on-prem cloud, there's no such thing, and now you see those worlds coming together, underscoring the reality that you can't just shove your business into the public cloud. You can't just move all your data there, and there may not be a business case, or an advantage of doing that. >> Right, right. >> What do you think? >> Well a lot of times the answer to the question in the, one, I'm not an analyst, so it's not my job to really predict where it's going to go. I mean, obviously we watch trends and look where it's going. You know, my job and our job is to help customers deal with the realities that they're dealing with right now, right? And they have data centers. They are thinking about the cloud. They are having to take care of the edge, right? And in time, we've seen some of those shifts, right? There was a lot of the, where are we going with the cloud? Where's it going to go? Are they going to shut down all their data centers? Regardless of that, we will adjust to the market and make sure that we're adjusting the market. But more importantly, we're going to do what's right for our customers, to help enable them to those journeys, and it's still yet to be proven. There's a lot of Predictions out there. Will they shut down all data centers? I'm sure there'll be some consolidation of it, but yeah, it's getting more complex. >> Okay, so VMware, Rackspace, DellEMC, you're not screwed, check. (David laughs) what about the edge? Help us unpack that a little bit, you know, whether VMware at the edge, Rackspace, DellEMC, what do you guys see evolving there? >> I think there's many definitions of the edge, and when you talk about it, everything's IoT initially, but even just deploying smaller data centers in customer locations in partnerships with these guys, to kind of meet customers where they are, and get smaller, roll in racks into different locations is continuing to be something that customers are looking for. >> So there's the hinterland edge, which is a bunch of devices, you know IP cameras, they're going to be instrument, most of the data's going to stay there anyway, but then I think you guys call it, I don't know, the core. There's a aggregation point, >> Well the core, >> if you will. >> which is typically what we refer to as kind of the customer data center, and then there's the cloud, right? So kind of the two different, customer data center versus the cloud, and then, truly, the edge, capturing, And it started, and we referred to everything from laptops, phones, as well as, really a lot of the sensors that are going to be out there, and your ability to have to process and analyze and react real time at the edge. And so a lot of use cases, public safety use cases, where, you know, when an event happens, that connection back to a place where you would analyze it. Obviously the autonomous cars, right? They can't have to connect to a data center every time it wants to make a left turn. So a lot of that ability has to be pushed out to the edge, but yet, then also being able to bring that data back, be able to manage that, and be able to update those computers, or those data centers. I mean, an autonomous car is basically a mini data center. Someone's got to manage that, patch that, make sure it's running, and manage that. So yeah, to your point, the edge is beginning to mean a lot of different things. There are the hinterlands, I think was the word you used, and some of those things, but then there are the more traditional work cases, and even just running a phone app is now considered an app, versus, you know, and that's were people start to really look at, is how do you deliver that experience on a phone, and that's an application. >> A lot of data. Well, I like to follow the data, you know? A lot of data at the edge. There's a lot of data, like I say, at the aggregation point, and then if you want to do some hardcore modeling, go to the cloud, and that cloud can be your own, on-prem data center. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's just so much data being generated, and data is power, I think was one of the key taglines of DellEMC Worlds. And I was like, it truly is. Where the data is, is where the power is. So some has to be transferred back to the core. Some may be pushed up to the cloud for deep processing with AI and ML type processing, but there'll be data at all these different points. >> Well that's the other point, is it's just like the innovation engine no longer is Moore's Law in this industry. it's the data, applying machine intelligence, and then cloud scale. And then, you got to, as suppliers in this business, you better be playing in some way, shape, or form, in all three of those, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how, and speaking of that, I think Pat Gelsinger talked about it this morning in the context of superpowers. He talked about autonomous vehicles, AI machine learning, advanced analytics, IoT. How is DellEMC and their technology, Peter, helping to enable Rackspace to optimize your offerings to be able to take advantage of machine learning AI? To be able to deliver on customer expectations? >> Yeah, we're deeply partnered with these guys from those announcements you head earlier this year, that we're already investigating the different capabilities they're having from an AIML perspective, and really seeing what sort of technologies are they launching that we can then put into our private cloud practice, and offer to our customers. So it's our deep partnership allows us to kind of get a front seat at that and working closely to investigate and to do a lot of R&D with the new capabilities they're coming out with so. >> What superpower does that give Rackspace? In terms of differentiation? >> Uh, you've stumped me on that one. (laughs) >> Well customers have, we talked about, everybody wants flexibility. They also have choice. >> Yeah. >> What are some things that this 20 year partnership infuses into Rackspace to give you those differentiation points? >> Yeah, it's the deep partnership, and knowing, working so long together that we know who to pick up the phone to solve some of these complex problems. >> Yeah, and of us, from my perspective, we always start with out joint customers in mind first. So it's our job to bring the advance technologies, the advanced capabilities that we're making big investments in, and make sure that Rackspace is able to support and leverage those within their business so that we'd provide a better experience for the end customer, but then also making sure that we show Rackspace how they make money on that, and how they can run a business on that, that's really, is differentiated to your point. Because a lot of, you know, you painted a very pretty vision of what the world might look like. Most customers aren't there yet. Most customers aren't taking advantage of AI and deep learning. They're still dealing with some very traditional legacy issues, and it's that gap that becomes very, we love talking about the cool, new, exciting stuff, but for a lot of customers, they're stuck somewhere in the middle, and that's were partnerships like this, because you can not only help them with the legacy, old stuff. How do you migrate, and then how do you take advantage of the really new stuff? Or how do start at least thinking about that and exploring that and looking. A lot of the original IoT use cases, the ROI wasn't known. They're setting up projects, then they hoped they'd get a benefit out of it, right? And that's continuing to emerge and evolve as time goes on. >> Well it's hard, too. I mean, everybody's afraid of getting Uberized and disrupted, et cetera, et cetera, but they, at the same time, if you over rotate, to a new, you can spend bunch of money and not get any return. >> Yeah. >> Everybody's trying to get digital right, it seems, but it's unclear what that means. So they look to partners like you to help them figure that out. >> Well, it's a scary journey to your point, because they obviously have existing revenue streams. It's the inventor's dilemma, right? It's they have existing revenue streams, but how do they digitize their business? How do they reach customers in a different way? And so they don't become Uberized or Airbnbed, or whatever, what term you want to use. Every CIO, every executive is thinking about that. IT for a long time was about taking cost out of the business which, after a while, that's no fun, because that usually means head count reductions, that usually, I mean, that's not a fun conversation to have every single day. Now with the digital transformations mode, how do you generate new revenue streams? How do you, in a way, a lot of companies never, one of the most older industries, being taxis, a little bit not that exciting. It's gotten reinvigorated through some of these things. So it's kind of cool. >> Yeah, and you said digital transformation, right? What does that really mean? Cloud transformation, security transformation, app transformation, so there's many different factors. And companies like Rackspace can offer expertise in all those different areas, where some of our competitors may only hit on one of those. They're only a security company, or only a VMware shop, or only an AWS shop. >> Helping customers really glean the power from that data, because if they can't, it's not powerful. Gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me. We appreciate hearing what's going on with Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thanks guys. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. I appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld day one. Stick around, we'll be back after break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend, and you're watching wall to wall coverage of VM World 2017 on the Cube here in Las Vegas. You know, third day of programming. We've done so many interviews. A lot of people went to parties last night, you know up early for lots of executive meetings, but you know we go strong through the whole show because we've got great guests, so happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Peter FitzGibbon, Vice President and General Manager with Rackspace, and welcome back to the program Ajay Patel with VM Ware. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Peter, you know, Rackspace, interesting transformation over the last few years. You know we've had the Cube at OpenStack for a bunch of years. I've heard almost no discussion of OpenStack this week at the show. >> Man: I'm not complaining. >> I talked to Rackers though, at Reinvent. You have, you know, kind of reinvented the business there, but the VM partnership is one that's been going on for many years. Some people I talk to don't understand. I mean this is a sizable business that you've been doing. I said, you know, let's measure the Rackspace managed VM Ware business against the entire revenue stream of OpenStack outside of what RackSpace does, you know, and it's an interesting comparison. >> So RackSpace continues through the multi cloud company, offering our customers the choice and flexibility they want, so our OpenStack practice continues to grow strong and we continue to invest there, as we do in our VM Ware practice, which we have a great partnership with. Ajay and his team, over the last 10 plus years. >> Also for us, the partnership's only growing stronger. If you walk around WM World with all the banners, you've walked into the airports, the investment RackSpace is making around VM Ware technology, I couldn't be much more happier, so thank you for that. >> So Peter, to Stu's point, RackSpace has been part of the VM Ware community for a long time. I've run into a couple of Rackers on the show floor, talked through kind of what they're doing with their feet on the ground, great work. Can you talk through the relationship with the customer to this point? I mean RackSpace is known for fanatical support. How has that conversation changed over the past three years or so as we've gone through this changing VM Ware strategy to where we're at today? >> Yeah, we're continuing to try to support the customer on whichever technology they really want to land on, so it starts with the planning and analysis phase that we sit with customers and analyze their work loads and try to figure out what's the best fit for them outside of determining is it OpenStack, is it VM Ware? Is it our fanatical support on top of AWS? From a VM Ware perspective, we're really helping people to determine how to move out of the data center, or at least not extend the data centers as they have them right now. We recently launched our RackSpace private cloud powered by VM Ware Cloud foundations. It went to general availability last week, so that's a global effort that we're discussing with our clients and it's proving a very attractive options for those looking for an alternative to their own private cloud and moving to hosting private cloud model. >> Peter, that operating experience is one of the things that customers have been challenged with, and RackSpace, you know, known for, you know, they know how to do this. Talk to us about some of this journey as to how your customers are seeing things. You know RackSpace has had a few different private cloud options you talk about. You've given your customers choice, but what's different now in 2017 and what's the mindset of your customers? >> Yeah, we continue to offer 24 by seven, 365 fanatical support. It's what we really see as our true differentiator in the market, or we have 150 certified VM Ware Rackers on the team that really go beyond, above and beyond every single day for these customers, and looking at not just how to migrate into our private cloud, but how to optimize them when we're there, when they've landed on a VM Ware private hosted cloud solution, how do we really optimize it and really get the full value of the technology? And these are expensive and difficult technologies to use, so you want to make sure people are really getting the true value out of NSX and VSAN, and now with VCF, which we're really excited about. >> Yeah, for us, it's, you know, as you were speaking, I mean the biggest challenge and the constraints exclude resources. Having 150 specialists out there with fanatical support with the great VM Ware technology. And in some ways the VM Ware cloud announcement is kind of making the awareness that you have a cloud stack, that you can now get through, you know RackSpace private cloud, so for us it's really all boats are rising as a result, and not having the skilled capability to then accelerate deployment and delivery and operations is pretty exciting. >> So Ajay, can you talk a little bit about working with RackSpace specifically because RackSpace has a tradition of having a very pronounced way of supporting customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 or you're a small ma and pa shop, RackSpace is going to come with full engineering might and help build the most reliable solution, and that comes with kind of, I imagine, a predisposed position on something like VCF, VM Ware Cloud Foundation. What has it been like to engineer? >> I'll speak the best thing from one of the joint customers that we had the opportunity to be on a panel with, Show Tell, right, and it was interesting to say how Show Tell said RackSpace is part of their operating team, so they enrolled up front in terms of having a partner who can help them with the choice, they made the selection based on the excellent support, but more importantly, they're just an extension of the operating team, and being able to have a single team manage both the on prem and the cloud without having to build a separate kind of cloud team, that was a critical piece of this decision, so kind of this common operating model, which they seamlessly augment with skillset, you know, that was really what resonated for Show Tell and was the reason they chose. >> The operating model is something I was just going to go to in terms of really helping people how they're going to live in this multi cloud world across multiple different technology stacks, and that's what our fanatical support is intended to be, to really be an extension of their, of a homegrown IT team so we can really get the full benefit of these complicated technologies. >> Alright, Peter, you talk multi cloud, and one of the things we talk to customers is a lot of times they say they have a cloud strategy, but how they got there wasn't necessarily as plan full as they might have liked. I had somebody writing for Wikibon a couple years ago said we have composite cloud because you kind of look at it and you always said, you know, do I have Amazon? Yeah, everybody does, you know. Oh I've got some app that somebody needed on GCP. RackSpace is a manage service provider for a lot of different pieces. How do you help customers get their arms around it, you know, and you know, maybe talk, the VM Ware on Amazon, the VMC stuff, how do you look at that in the future, how does that tie into kind of the skillset that your team has? >> So we often see customers coming in with that composite cloud situation where they're like we think we're multi cloud, but we're not truly because they don't have a defined strategy about why they put certain workloads in certain places, it just grew up organically, often through lines of business. VMC is a really exciting offer for us and we're going to be launching it in early 2018. It really gives more choice for customers in terms of where they're going to run their workloads, be it running them in different availability zones that RackSpace doesn't cover or potentially used as a DR solution. >> So let's dive into that composite cloud space, and I really love that comment. What, cloud, multi cloud is one of those things, you don't know you don't have a multi cloud until you don't know you don't have a multi cloud. What are some of the surefire indicators that customers are in where a composite cloud experience or environment versus a true multi cloud? Like what is that conversation like? >> Man: What's a good best practice, yeah? >> Well I think there isn't a lot of good best practices from our customers' point of view. I think they often come in and we lay out their, look at their architectures, look at their different applications, and they're often just, central IT doesn't know where most of it is running half the time, so it's really like okay, let's look at each part of this and decide for you what's the best fit, where should it go? Should we be putting something on Azure or Azure Stack? Should it be better suited to OpenStack? Or is it, they're very familiar with VM Ware and they want to continue to leverage VM Ware either on a host model or internally in their own data center. >> What we're learning is you just don't have visibility, so the biggest interest and the demand when we launched our cross cloud or cloud services, the notion of having visibility of what's running where. And the second question is how much is it costing me, and what can I move and what are the data security leakages that I want to put in place because these things weren't controlled. So those are kind of just knowing, right, knowing where your data is, knowing where your workloads are and how much they're costing you. That's the first baseline they're looking for help on. Once they've got that, then they're like okay, how do I still provide some level of self service and control to the end user while putting some structure by which I can go to a multi cloud strategy? So that's the journey we're just about to see with IT coming into play. >> Peter, I have to mention human interest viewpoint on the ecosystem. RackSpace, I think I understand better now than a few years ago what services you did. VM Ware just launched a bunch of SAS offerings. There were some launched last year. I can't count how many companies are helping people with cloud cost management, licensing, you know, you name it, 12 different aspects to take bites out of this giant elephant of multi cloud and do that. What are the biggest pain points you're hearing from customers? How do you help advise some of them and bring some of the pieces together? >> And it's not even what we see from a customer standpoint. You think of RackSpace, we have to integrate all of these clouds into our own internal system, so we get to experience it firsthand as the customer how we create unified billing systems, how we have unified monitoring, how we integrate all their own legacy systems to deal with these clouds, so we effectively learn from integrating into our own systems, then can advise our customers on the pain points we've seen and bring them on that journey to help them through their true multi cloud approach. >> So if we blow it out and a customer comes to you and they want a multi cloud strategy, and you know, you kind of show them the ugly, you show them the truth for where they're at, what's the next step, like from a practical tactical perspective? What's like step one to helping with SAS applications and for viability for each one of the RackSpace offerings? >> Yeah, so we have a framework which we call PADMO. It's plan, analyze, design, migrate, optimize. It took me a second to get the last part out, and trying to, that planning stage is really where we sit with the customer aside, okay, what does your environment look like and why is it that way? Were things made in a conscious decision or did it just happen organically? So we try to figure out what did they do intentionally and what, what just grew up organically? And move from there into designing or analyzing what's best fit for the different cloud strategies, then start designing it, migrating it, and then effectively optimizing it when they land on RackSpace and show the value of our 24 seven, 365 fanatical support. >> For us, it's about, for us the technology part, and we want to enable the core VM Foundation, but we also believe that network connectivity's the next big thing, so things like NSXT is something we're already having conversation with, like how are we going to stitch these clouds together, how do we make it more software defined so as we move towards this kind of policy driven, you know management abstraction, how do we then open up the different clouds and service that capability? So that's really the next journey for both of us from VCM, or VM Ware Cloud Foundation to the broader multi cloud strategy. >> And Ajay, your, you know, cloud provider partners, what about services? Is there any joint engagement or things that VM Ware helps write that are? >> So one of the big service for all, we're kind of coming together is around DR. Consistently the easy step to get to a hybrid or a leverage cloud is disaster recovery. What if we made that a native feature of the VM Ware stack? We could have our customer right click on a VM and protected by all these service provider clouds. That's an example of something we're kind of trying to generalize. Now on each of them, the complexity of operating it, the scale, the visibility, the service levels, those are unique to each partner, but we're trying to make sure that the platform gives you this basic capability to capture workloads. >> I feel like DR is essential to everyone's road map right now. Most of our customers, maybe all of our customers are requiring DR when they land on RackSpace, and we're really looking at that on our 2018 roadmap to see how we make DR, as a service, consistently part of the offering. >> So what works well and what doesn't work well? When you go through that initial setup complication, so DR's a great example of oh, this is low hanging fruit. We either don't have a DR that's working or we don't have DR at all, and there's kind of this, you know, when you whiteboard it, it works extremely well. What are some of the practical business challenges that you see customers experience on that journey? >> There's definitely some easy options to move first for customers. DR is a common one that we see, DevTest as well in terms of okay, how can you test out our environments and do it in a low risk way? There's always going to be those more core applications, those mission critical applications that people will wait till the end until they migrate, so let's migrate them to RackSpace private cloud and see how it operates, maybe as a DR environment, or as a DEV environment test environment, and then as they build confidence and see what fanatical support we offer, then they start moving more mission critical workloads. >> I share the same. Tier one usually is high availability, high design, high touch, tier two often ignored, too expensive, too hard. We're trying to go after the tier two or tier three apps and just provide a convenient cloud economics for protecting those workloads. >> Peter, I'm curious, how often are customers trying one thing and then moving into another? You know I get calls all the time, you know, data gravity of course is a big issue, but you know if I'm building an application, sometimes it's like oh wait, you know maybe this isn't the best place to live. Lots of customers, you know, will build one place and run production in another place. You know we've seen that. How much is mobility in turn, is lock in still a challenge? You know, how much, what's real and what's not? >> I think lock in is still a challenge, but we're certainly looking into how we're helping our customers move from one cloud to another. We continue work in our different business units across RackSpace, be it VM Ware, AWS, Azure Open Stack, and see how we can offer flexibility for customers. When they realize they've gone too far on one or another, we're not seeing specific use cases of everybody moving from one to another, it's more of a pick and choose, and so we're helping customers migrate from one to another as needed. >> So I'd be interested to know what, not percentage, what type of customer kind of has this hybrid IT or hybrid cloud approach in RackSpace where they build cloud native applications and then connect them to a VCF or VM Ware private cloud, and I think more specifically, I think the question that I would like to get at is that a real thing that, not necessarily real thing, is that impacting friction between the public cloud with cloud native applications and your ability to manage that and add that fanatical support in the developer looking to consume that, to integrate it to VM Ware? >> I'm not seeing that friction between the different technologies. I think, at RackSpace we try work across all of them to offer the choice to our clients and our customers as much as possible, make sure we really offer them the best choice and put the workloads in where they really are best suited to run. >> And opposition is you know container and micro sourced architecture are going to provide an excellent frameworks and tools. The maturity's still in the works, and our goal is to say can we make, you know, either VM or physical, be it the best place for deploying, and what are the tools and capability you need to provide? So for us, networking, security, those are kind of fundamental problems regardless if you're building a cloud native app or a traditional app, and how do we insert our value into the equation versus trying to own the whole solution, right? >> Peter FitzGibbon, thank you so much for getting the update on RackSpace. Ajay, always a pleasure. I'm trying to remember what the five time award is. We'll talk to John Furrier, make sure we have it ready for the next time we have you on. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. This is VM World 2017 and you are watching the Cube. >> Man: Thank you guys. (upbeat instrumental music)