>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

>> 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, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Justin Warren, and this is theCUBE, live from the lobby of Moscone North here in San Francisco. The 10th year we've had theCUBE and happy to bring back two CUBE alums. Which, of course, in 2010 we didn't even have the idea of a CUBE alum, we were just gathering some friends, some industry experts. To my right is Jaspreet Singh, who's the founder and CEO of Druva. Sitting next to him is Kit Colbert, who's the Vice President CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good morning. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Jaspreet, I remember talking to you when Druva was a new company and cloud native wasn't the thing that came to mind when we were talking about it. We've known for a long time how important data is, and protecting that and managing that, of course, is something the industry's been looking at a long time. But give us the update on kind of Druva and you brought along Kit, so we're going to be talking about some of the cool, cloud native multi-cloud modernization type things, how that fits in your world. >> Absolutely. If you think about the world, right? In 1998, say for a start, they would create a whole notion of size and no software and the whole picture, right? Since then applications went in size, then came developer tools which were in size, and now it's all about infrastructure and first your management which is getting to be a cloud native, public cloud orientated size world. To where Druva comes in. As the world gets more and more fragmented, the data gets more and more fragmented. The multiple versions of cloud are different parts of strategy. Data management has to get more and more centralized. Which is where Druva comes in and which is where me and Kit are together. I think as VMware build a strategy for multi-cloud. Pulling the whole VMC approach to multiple versions of public cloud. Druva is a great partner, to sort of bring the data management together. A single control plane to manage multiple versions of cloud deployment on a single plane. >> All right, great so Kit it sounds like VMC is the kind of key component work together. 'cause when I think at Druva, a lot of what I think of is SaaS. And SaaS isn't necessarily the first thing that I think of when I think of VMware, so... >> We're tryin' to get there, tryin' to get there Stu. >> Yeah, no but pull it together as to where your customers intersect. >> Yeah absolutely, so it's a great partnership and definitely really focused on rallying around VMware Cloud and native AWS. And the core idea there was that we could deliver a cloud service to our customers of our VMware infrastructure, right? And we'll become a SaaS company, transforming into that. And that's something that we've been very focused on strategically, right? And so VMware Cloud and AWS is really the first offering. But there's many more coming. So just earlier today we announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This idea of bringing our cloud service, STDC as a service on premises, to customer data centers, to customer edge locations. And the cool part about it, as Jaspreet mentioned, is that this world is becoming more and more distributed and we're seeing that with just the number of STDCs and how they're proliferating everywhere and you do need that centralization in terms, from a management perspective in order to handle all that diversity. And so, that's the big focus for us, in terms of the infrastructure, kind of just the core compute, source, network but you then have to up-level and say, how do you think about the data? And that's really where this partnership comes in. >> Right, so Jaspreet so if I understand that correctly, what you're trying to do here is to provide one data management method, no matter where the data lives. So, I don't have to go and find one tiny thing for, oh okay, I've got this other weird bit in the corner here, that I need a special, dedicated data protection thing for, 'cause that's always difficult. Data protection is hard enough. I really don't need to have, oh how am I going to deal out of this particular thing? Oh, now I've got to go and get another tool. And learn how to use it, maintain it, keep everyone skilled in it. Well actually, I can just pick Druva and then I've solved that problem. >> That's right. I think we are more forward-looking, than backward-looking. So, what we're doing is, any new application comes into an enterprise. Think about, from a point of view of a new cloud, like a VMC, AWS deployment. If you're deploying, you know, a lot of new edge location or data centers or new cloud services, Druva's a perfect partner to bring data management, along with it. For a legacy application that you always had, you can keep your legacy vendor with you. Where it has a con wall, you can keep them as they remain in your enterprise. Bring Druva for the new applications at hence. All the new workload that are more cloud bound workload, is our core focus, hence the VMC partnership. >> Right, so does that mean I'll be able to use Druva wherever VMC is available? >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Because you're expanding how many places I can get VMC now, I've noticed. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> That's very interesting >> It is, yeah, and I think that's again, the beauty of the partnership, is that we're doing a ton of work to deliver VMC to more and more locations. We've partnered with AWS, and now we've got global coverage, almost all the regions by the end of this calendar year. And now with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC , we can go wherever the customer is. They essentially give us a street address, and we can deliver hardware there and then operate it remotely and they can take advantage of that. And the cool thing about it, that all comes up to this control plan that we have running in the cloud and this is how we can interact with Druva. They can have a few simple APIs they can manage via us to access all those workloads that are distributed all over the place. >> Think of public cloud. Public cloud is nothing but Amazon's, initially was a concept of Amazon applying retail to IT. You can buy a resource anywhere in the globe at a fixed price point at certain SLA. That's the promise of, public cloud promise of VMC to get same VMware experience wherever you go across the world same price point. Same promise with Druva . The same data you put anywhere, can be managed, predicted end-to-end, same policy, same price point across the globe. >> And people often forget that part of it, that we're technologists. So people like to look at that the speeds and feeds and what does the technology do but there's, when you're running a business is actually a lot more to it and pricing models and things that technologists sometimes find boring. I love a good spreadsheet but something as, a simple pricing model where I can understand it and I know what it's going to do for me, was when I spin up a brand new application and I understand how am I going to manage this over the long term, how am I going to protect it, and what's it going to do for the the ROI on that? And what's that going to look like in three years' time? Not just turning up the brand new project. What is the operational cost of that going to look like? These are the kinds of things that people, I think are starting to get a lot more used to now that they particularly with cloud it's a much more operational model. It's not a build model. It's, yes build is one part of it, but you also need to be able to run and manage it >> And think of what we call the world of two ransomwares. There is a ransomware when you're worried about a data breach or data loss and there's another ransomware we have to, your data production vendor or your hardware vendors say is, you know, give me five years of money up front with the promise to manage the data eventually. So in the public cloud world, it's pay-as-you-go on demand. You need a new application you spin up a new workload in VMC in AWS. You need data protection spin up right there and then, no pre-planning, pre-positioning, architecture reviews needed. >> And I think like, the great thing about Druva and what we're talking about here in this consistency of operations. How you're managing data, really goes into the whole strategy that VMware has around driving consistency across infrastructure as well. I think one of the big value propositions that we can help with is taking a lot of this very heterogeneous infrastructure with different capabilities, different hardware form factors and layering on our virtual infrastructure which simplifies a lot of that and delivering that consistent experience. And of course data management as we said is a key part of that experience. >> Yeah, you mentioned kind of the move of VMware towards being more of a SaaS player and working in those environments. One of the flags along that journey is VMware's always had a robust ecosystem. But in the cloud my understanding is you've released now a VMware Cloud Marketplace. Reminds me a little bit of a certain cloud provider that has a very well-known marketplace. Give us a little bit about it, and Jaspreet'll, of course tell us about the Druva piece of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. We're kind of really evolving our strategic aims. Historically we've looked at how do we really virtualize an entire data center? This concept of the software-defined data center. Really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases. And now as we've been talking about, we're in this world where you kind of have STDCs everywhere. On Prem, in the cloud, different public clouds. And so how do you really manage across all those? These are things we've been talking about. So the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can give people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners as well as open source solutions, and these are things that come from the Bitnami acquisition that we recently did. So, the idea here is that we cannot make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to draw those consistent operations that exists on top of our platform and with our partners and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well >> And Druva's part of it. We were day one launch partner on the marketplace. Marketplace serves predominantly two purposes. One is, the ease of E-commerce, you can drive through a marketplace. Second, is the ease of integration. You have a prepackaged solution, which comes along with it. It's a whole beauty of cloud, exactly as I mentioned. We see cloud beyond technology. It's an E-commerce model most companies should adapt to. And as the part of the progress, our commitment is to be in marketplace day one. Druva is right now number one ISP globabally for AWS. So we understand the whole landscape of how E-commerce gets done on public cloud very very well, and we are super thrilled to be a partnership with VMC on the marketplace, the VMC Marketplace. >> It's another one of those important indicators. I think about VMware's Cloud journey. Cloud isn't a destination, it's not a location. It's a way of doing things-- >> Kit: It's a model, yep. >> So having this this marketplace way of consuming software and becoming far more like as you say, it's STDC, but with that software as a service on Earth. You can have STDC as a service. That's probably too many letters in that. >> We use that internally, yes the STDC, AAS (laughs). >> Seeing those features coming to VMware and the partners that you bring in to that ecosystem. And Stu and I we spoke before, it's like VMware is always been a great partner for everyone in that ecosystem and it does have a real ecosystem and we see it again this year at the show. That you have these partners who come in, and you're finding ways to make it easier for those integrations to happen in a nice, easy to consume way and customers like that. So the enterprise is a heterogeneous environment. If you just do one acquisition and all of a sudden, I've got two different ways of doing the same thing. So being able to have known trusted solutions to do that, where I don't have to spend ages and ages figuring out how to, how do I configure this? I don't actually make this do what I need it to do. It's like I'm trying to solve a customer problem. I'm not trying to build technology for its own sake for most of the customers. I just want something that works, and particular with data protection, I just want it to work. >> The owners aren't producing more back abutments. >> No, which, I don't think it should. it's kind of a shame. I used to be a back out man but we don't need anymore of those >> I think this is the idea. You talked in the beginning about this notion of service delivery and how can we take all these STDC's that we have out there that customers are running, and enhance their value and enhance the value to the customer's business by adding on these value-added services. So, I think that's one of the beauties of cloud marketplace is that they can very easily extend what they, customers can extend what they already have with these additional services. >> Jaspreet, VMware's been going through a lot of change. They've made acquisitions. I saw a number of announcements today, that I don't think I would have seen back in the EMC days of you know, some of the data protection solutions being baked into the platform. Tell us what it means to be a VMware partner today. >> I think it's great to see VMware innovating and making strong progress. I think in this world of constant change it can either be in the front end of, you can never never over-innovate. You can be in the front end of, being in the edge, driving change, driving Innovation, driving chain industry or taking a back seat and then be in HPE. So I think I love to see VMware what they're doing and making all the progress and great to be a partner in this change, in this journey to see as a strong partner. >> Yeah, I mean, we're not standing still and it's funny like. So one of the biggest announcements today in my mind is Project Pacific, this re-architecture of vSphere to building Kubernetes into the fabric of what vSphere is. And it's funny when you start looking at that because I think folks have a concept in their mind, of what vSphere is, right? It's VM-based and I have worked with it in certain ways. It's got a certain API or interface and we're fundamentally changing all that. We're rethinking, as I mentioned how we deliver our STDC's, our customers consume them. And so I think that notion of being at the forefront, we're very committed to that >> Kit, I'm glad you broke it up 'cause I'm still having a little trouble thinking through it. Now on the one hand, every company is going through this, we're going to containerize everything, we're going to make it microservices, every infrastructure component, now has that fundamental building block. Docker had a ripple effect on what happens, similar to what VMware had a decade before. But I look at Project Pacific and I'm like well, when Cloud Foundry was originally created, it was, we want back then we called it Paz, but I want a thin layer, and I don't want to pull VMware along for that necessarily. It might fit underneath it, but it might not. So help us understand as to like, how is this not like, a lock into what, you're going to use vSphere and you're going to have your license agreement with us every year and now you're going to be locked into this because this is your Kubernetes platform. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So look, I actually think it drives more openness because Kubernetes is an open platform and we're integrating that in, and we're leveraging the Kubernetes API. And so, the vSphere will have two northbound APIs, one of which is based on the existing VM-based one and the other one which is Kubernetes. And so partially, it's we're actually opening it up. The cool thing about what we can do with Pacific is that we have what, 300, 400000 customers running vSphere. They have an aggregate around 70 million workloads. We're able to take that massive footprint and move it forward almost overnight by building Kubernetes into vSphere. And so the way I look at it, is this is a huge force multiplier for our customers, this ability to move their fleet of applications forward at basically, zero cost, very little cost. And while leveraging all the tools and technologies, they already have. This is another good thing, that our partnership with Druva as well, is that because the way we've architected this, all the tools that use vSphere today and the vSphere's APIs, those APIs will see the Kubernetes pods and things that are provisioned and those tools can operate on those pods just like they can on VMs. And those things just work out of the box. So like if a customer gets specific and uses Druva, and they start provisioning some pods, into Kubernetes on vSphere, Druva will see those they can manage the data, it's all automatic. And of course, Druva can do extra cool things, like even get deeper integration there. But the point is that we've got, you know thousands of partners again who's out of the box that stuff will work. Now is that lock in? No, I actually think that because people are switching over to Kubernetes, they now have the ability to move that to a different Kubernetes environment if they so see fit. Anyway, so that's my quick answer >> Think about the world. Virtualization is practically free right now. What you pay for is the enterprise, once you pay for abstraction level, remove complexity, make my scale happen, and this is where you pay for the whole VMware stack. When the customer start deploying containers, they haven't seen the complexity they would see at scale. When you see the complexity in management and data plane and insecurity plane, then they would need the ecosystem of providers to solve those complexities at scale but as we're a think if Kubernetes takes off and production application, right now it's mostly dev and test, it goes to a production application, the world would need something which is a much more robust sort of control planes to manage it end-to-end >> Yeah, I mean, we solved a lot of the hard problems around running applications in production. And I think what we're doing with Pacific, is enabling all those cool innovations to work not just for existing apps but for new Kubernetes-based apps as well. >> All right, well Kit and Jaspreet, thank you so much. A lot of new things for everybody to dig into and I always appreciate both of you and your teams are very responsive and dig in. Be looking forward to more blog posts and more podcasts from your team and the like, to go into it more. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We have tons more coverage here at VMworld 2019. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)