>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering The VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live in Las Vegas, day three of VMworld 2017. We also have our voices, which is pretty good. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for this segment is Peter Burris. Peter and I are joined by a couple of guests. We have Geoff Waters, Vice President of Global Cloud Sales from VMware, first time on theCUBE? >> Yes, yes. >> Good to have you here. >> You know, I'm a big fan, first time here, I'm excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. >> Awesome. >> And we have Cube alumni, Roger Frey, VP of Alliances and Business Development from Skytap, welcome back. >> Thank you very much, great to be here. >> So day three, both of you still smiling, that's good, you know, we're kind of close to that happy hour time, almost. So, Geoff, you've been with VMworld 11 years. What is your takeaway from the announcements that VMworld made at the show this year, and what you're hearing from your partners and your customers. >> So, I mean clearly, there's a buzz, there's a buzz again, right? I saw some articles saying there was a lacking of a buzz, but it is here, it's strong. Clearly, Pat knocked it out of the park on the opening keynote, great to see all the logos, customers, and I think our overall cloud strategy. I think it's really come on, and I think it's resonating with customers and partners. >> So, tell us how VMware works with Skytap, Roger, I guess I'll throw that to you. What are you guys doing together, and what's the story there? >> So, Skytap, we're a public cloud provider, and we're focused on enterprise applications, and basically, what we do, is we enable customers to take their on-prem legacy applications, move them to the cloud, modernize them, do parallel processing, add value-added service to them in the cloud, and for us to do that, we rely on VMware technologies that underpin our solutions. >> And what are the key things, just really quickly, that you're hearing from your customers who are using VMware in terms of the value that they're getting from this collaboration? >> I think the biggest thing that we hear from customers is that they need to be more agile, they need to be faster, they need to get to market more quickly. With the framework of VMware and using VMware underneath us, people are comfortable with our solution, they understand how we're going to interact with their application stacks, and it provides for a better solution for our customers. >> Roger, the statement that we are a public cloud provider for traditional applications-- >> Roger: Yes. >> Is a huge statement, there's a lot of implications. Take us through a little bit, how does a customer think through this process, working with you, and then we'll get to the technology choices that make it easier or more difficult? >> Sure. >> So, how does this process work? >> That's a great question, so, when we talk to customers, we're really leading with a business discussion, talking about how are we going to make them more effective? How are we going to make them more agile? How are we going to help them drive revenue or reduce cost? And typically, what we'll see with a customer, is we'll do an inventory of their application environment, so with Skytap, basically, we'll look at your customer's entire application environment from the applications all the way down to the networking, and they'll say, you know what? "Based on our understanding, these are the applications we think that we can migrate to the Cloud, these other applications we think we have to keep on-prem. And we actually come in and say, you know what? These legacy applications that you have that may have been written five, 10, 15 years ago based on networking requirements or hardware requirements. We can actually take that, we can lift it, put it into the Skytap cloud, so we can bring a more complete vision to our customers on their cloud journey, so things that they thought were going to have to stay on-prem, they can actually now take to the cloud and enjoy those efficiencies. >> So identify, do some pattern recognition for us, so identify what are those attributes when you look at a couple of applications, or a set of workloads. What are some of the characteristics that determine whether it's ready for public cloud, or whether it should stay where it is? >> That's a great question, so most public clouds today, they're really geared for net new development, born in the cloud applications, mobile, things like that that we're all very familiar with. Again, if you're a bank, or an insurance company, or a hospital, you've written applications that maybe at one time were specifically dependent on physical MAC addresses, maybe you're putting multiple IP Addresses on physical NICs, maybe you're doing some interesting VPN or tunneling things that you had to develop five, 10, 15 years ago because that's what you had to do, then. A lot of our customers have applications that they don't want to touch, they're running, they're mission critical, and they're absolutely scared to break it, so with Skytap, basically, we can draw a circle around their complete application stack, down to the level two networking layer, take that, put it into a public cloud, and enable those developers to self-service, to make clones, to self-provision, to do whatever work that they need, and then, if they want, integrate that back into their on-prem production environment, or take it to a cloud-based production environment, as well. >> So it sounds as though, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as though, in many respects, the first thing you're looking at is, okay, you've got these workloads working really well, but you've done things at various hardware levels that could benefit from virtualization. >> Absolutely. >> So in many respects, the first thing you're doing is identifying what about these workloads can be virtualized, and that's part of the lift, which is where VMware comes in, have I got that right? >> Exactly, and that's why VMware is such a great partner of ours, because again, most enterprises today, virtually all enterprises today use VMware, so they're very comfortable with the solution, they understand how we're leveraging the technology, and we can focus on the business discussion, versus spending a lot of time in the technical discussions, trying to see if this is going to work or not. And that's really where we want to focus our energies. >> From a VMware perspective, there's hundreds of thousands of customers out there that have invested in, and everything from vSphere, NSX, vSAN, giving them the opportunity for another incredible cloud partner, you know, it was fantastic for us. We're seeing things like burstability, I mean, our hearts and thoughts are in Houston, with the big storm, but things like that will have a big impact on companies, on insurance companies, for instance, there's going to be a huge burst. So things like that, data center extensibility, consolidation, DR, these are the sort of things that they want to be able to tap into their VMware invest. >> Or emergency services is getting a whole bunch of work right now. One of the nice things is it sounds as though a lot of that infrastructure hasn't gone down despite the flooding and I've got to believe there's a whole bunch of IT guys that are doing a lot of God's work right now, to try to make sure that people stay alive. >> Yep. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So talk to us about the innovation in terms of how VMware and Skytap are sort of working together. Did you see customers bringing you guys together, wanting more flexibility, wanting more advice and guidance on what should we move, what should we virtualize, what should we keep, or what should we move. How have your customers facilitated the innovations that you're achieving together? >> Yeah, maybe, I'll take a first shot at it, and then give it to Roger. So first of all, Skytap's a premier partner of ours in the VMware Cloud Provider Program. So, we're really excited about that, we just announced that today. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And on-- >> Like getting a scholarship on a football team. (laughing) >> Oh, I thought we said we weren't going to talk sports. >> Peter: Oh, that's right. >> No sports, right. >> No sports. >> Go Patriots. Anyway, you know what this does it allows us from a field level, it allows us to collaborate deeper from a partnership with our core sales team working with Skytap's. The second thing is around joint go-to-market, and messaging, it allows us to do a lot more in the market together. And then thirdly, around innovation, it's not just about the VMware install base, but it's also working with them on different cloud tools, leveraging that, integrated it in all the different technologies across the board. So, that's sort of a three-prong approach when you are one of our top premier partners. >> That's exactly right, it's a technology, it's a marketing, and it's a go-to-market and sales partnership that we have, so we're very happy with it. We're excited about being a premier partner. We've really boned up on our own technical capabilities within Skytap, to be more expert in VMware technologies, and now we want to be able to roll that out into the field with our joint customers. And getting back to your question, from a joint sales perspective, a joint go-to-market perspective, VMware is doing a great job of motivating its own sales force to become more cloud-ready and cloud-friendly, and it's a great fit for what we do. Their sales reps get compensated on Skytap, so it makes for a very good and smooth motion out in the field, which is where we're really all, it's where it matters. >> So Roger, I'm going to admit that I'm a little bit on edge about the word innovation. I've always believed that there's a difference between inventing something, which is an engineering act, and innovating, which is a social act, getting people to do things differently. And partnerships have always been a crucial feature of the computing industry in that innovation front, how you go to market, and especially, how you get businesses to adopt new things faster, more completely, so that they can be more successful. And as we go through this significant transformation, partners have to play another role, and that is they have to feed back to some core technology companies what they're hearing, what is working, what isn't working. How is that part of the relationship working? You as an advocate for customers as VMware evolves its platforms? >> That's a great question. Again, our customers, when we talk to them, they're really looking to get more agile, to be more innovative, to get to revenue sooner. And the things they they're asking from us as a public Cloud provider is self-service, is the ability to set up resources of their own without having to wait for central IT. They're looking to enable their team members across the globe. With Skytap and using VMware technology, we can clone images of our customers' environments, we can ship them globally. So, you may have a team in San Francisco, you may have a team in Seattle, you may have a team in Tokyo. With Skytap, you can send these images or these clones all over. They can be shared, they can be put back together, and a lot of that capability was feedback directly, that we see from our own customers. So, that's how we keep that feedback loop going, and that's the feedback that we give back to VMware. >> Yeah. If I could add to that, VMware is an incredible enterprise software company, we all know that. The last few years, we've been pivoting to develop a products and services for service providers. Part of being in our premier program as a VMware Cloud provider is you're getting access into some of those feedbacks and loops, and giving direct feedback and things, whether it's DR, us productizing products just for these guys for DR, or replication, like VCD. There's other multi-tenant, self-service portals that we're working in collaboration with our top partners. So, those are some of the other sorts of innovation that we're trying to also, beyond just the enterprise, in a service way where they can service the enterprise in the commercial space. >> Excellent, well guys, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE today, and talking with Peter and me about what's going on with VMware and Skytap together. We wish you continued success in your partnership. >> Great, thanks for being here, Lisa. >> Thank you so much. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Alright, for Geoff, and Roger, and my co-host Peter Burris, I am Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE, we are again live at Vmworld 2017, continuing coverage day three. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)