>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Hey Dave! >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Good, day two. >> Good to see you back here again. >> Exactly! >> Bouncin' between the sets. >> I am. >> 94 guests, it's good. >> In three days, yeah. We've learned a lot already and we're nearing the end of day two. Excited to welcome two new guys to theCUBE, we've got Colin Durocher, Project Manager from Dell EMC, and Sandro Bercelli, Global Product Manager at Telefonica. Gentlemen, it's nice to have you here. >> Great to be here, first time on theCUBE. >> So first time on theCUBE, 20th anniversary of VMware, lots to celebrate, lots going on. From an announcement perspective, momentum perspective, Colin, let's start with you. What are some of the market trends, the customer voices that you were hearing regarding data protection and it's criticality in this multi-cloud world, in which all these enterprises now live? >> Sure, I think we have to put it into context with the growth of the cloud. The cloud is growing exponentially and data protection is one of the leading use cases. I think IDC did a survey recently, 58% of people using the cloud are doing data protection in the cloud. Backup and recovery is the number one use case. So that's one trend. Another trend is more specific to VMworld and VMware. Their vCloud provider program is, or the business unit is one of the fastest growing business units at VMware. They're having incredible success built on the back of fantastic products. And so what we've done is, about a year ago actually, at VMworld last year we formed a three-way partnership between Telefonica, VMware and Dell EMC, to provide a turnkey solution for cloud providers to deliver data protection as a service. >> So I wonder if we can talk a little bit about Telefonica and your business and how it's evolved, say, over the last, I don't know, pick a time frame, decade, better part of a decade. How is it evolving and changing? >> It's a long partnership that you have between Dell EMC and Telefonica and VMware. So we start many years ago, launching new versions of it to see 2.0, 3.0, and now moving to 4.0. So was not so easy doing this journey to improve our service catalog to our customers. And right now, with the VDC 4.0 with the new interface of the cloud director 9.x (mumbles) in data protection software of VMC, but increasing a lot the functionalities show our customers, increasing the user experience of our customers. It is our very valuable to our customers in this new approach of the VDC 4.0. >> So if you think about, if you go back to the early days of virtualization, everybody sort of, you know, took 10 servers, and brought them down to one, which is great, because all the compute power was under-utilized. But of course the one job that needed all that compute power was backup. >> [Colin And Sandro] Sure. >> Then you saw data protection change to accommodate that. Okay, and customers re-architected, et cetera. Now we enter the cloud era, we're knee-deep in it. How is data protection changing, whether it's architecturally, or processes to accommodate multi-cloud? Maybe Colin, you can start. >> Well, so I think another trend that we're seeing is the move from managed services to more of a self service delivery. So providers like Telefonica want to enable their tenants to access data protection as a service, and that has certainly some architectural impacts to it. And, you know, I think that's what's really behind this announcement that we're making here at VMworld. >> The most important part you mentioned is talking about the VDC. It's not just infrastructure as a service platform, it's everything as a service platform. So more than this, you're putting to our customers they're developed services, for example, data protection. Data protection is very important. So our idea in the user experience is to change the customer's life easy. So with the new port, self-serve support or for data protection, the customers right now can do everything in the VDC. This was possible with the partnership between VMworld and WMC. Developing together the new integration of a mod integration using the API for the cloud director, for the new version, is very valuable to us. >> So in terms of impact, give us an example, Sandro, of how this three-way partnership that Telefonica has with Dell EMC and VMware, how is it impacting, not just your customers business, but Telefonica's business? How is it enabling your transformation, from a top line perspective? >> Sure. I think that what we are thinking right now, with Dell EMC and VMware, is a model that must be followed by the other manufacturers. Because they're creating the future, if there's integration between data protection software of Dell EMC and VMware, it impacts directly to our customer, because now our oldest versions, the customer needs to require some... For example, historic procedures, you just talk to someone in Telefonica to asking them. So right now, is immediately through the self-service portal. And this is very important to us to increase the user experience and our customer experience, which is very valuable to us. >> So customer experience improves. How have you been able to expand your customer base globally leveraging this partnership. >> For example, VDC and Telefonica talking about our business. We are the most important deployments of VM around the world. We are more than 80 countries around the world, in South America and Europe, running the VDC software. This is very valuable to us because if opening our global catalog and using the VMware data protection software producing the TCO to us and to our customers using for example the data duplication and the new functions in the solution is very good to us and to our customers. >> So vCloud director, maybe we could drill into that a little bit in terms of how it's impacted your business. Talk more about the value that it brings to not just you, but your customers. >> Jesus Christ, it was not so easy during that time, you know, we are using vCloud director since the beginning of our global brothers and global structures, so following, during these years, we have the oldest version, we have a lot of limits in the vCloud directory interface. So right now, using the vCloud director nine in the cloud's extension, the cloud director availability, so this is very valuable to us because the VMware changes a lot, the user exchange interface. The old user interface was very ugly to our customers. So right now, vCloud director 9.1 and 9.x is very good interface. In the same way, improving the user experience in the quality of our services. >> So the business impact is that it's simpler to manage, so saving time so people can... >> Sure. And integration. >> Well, I think you have to think about how do service providers like Telefonica differentiate themselves, right? A cloud provider that only offers infrastructure as a service, they're getting their margins squeezed, right? So they have to bring in these value added services. How do they do that better than the others? They differentiate themselves through a better user experience, which means, you know, the way the user interacts with the product. Also it means, it comes down to the cost, right? So that goes directly to the service provider's bottom line. They're able to pass that on to their customers. Then also, performance and scale. Right, so these are really very, very, important points, and that's what I think our partnership is all about. >> How do you guys go to market? Is it a three way? Two way? What's the go-to-market strategy? >> So, our strategy do not compete for the hyperscale providers. >> Right. >> Our VDC, you have our own services running in our own data centers and combining with our global network infrastructure. We can provide a better service to our customers in local perspective, local billing, local support. In this partnership with Dell EMC, consuming the software and technologies many years ago, so we are evolving our services this way and this is the right thing to do right now, to differentiate us from the hyperscale providers. >> And you were.. I'm sorry, go ahead, Colin. >> Well, I was just going to add to that that in terms of our go-to-market, we've made a very big announcement here at VMworld 2018, which is that VMware, the VCPP business unit is actually selling Dell EMC data protection to their service providers. So this is actually our goal, is to really make it a native feature of vCloud director built right in. >> So the VMware cloud, provider business unit is essentially OEM-ing, reselling, your product... >> Yep. >> Which ultimately makes it into Telefonica. >> Sure. And the way that they're doing that, is actually really interesting because it adds value for us in the sense that they allow service providers to pay by the drip. So the way that we sell it is very different than other routes to market that we have and something that I think is of a lot of value to service providers like Telefonica. >> So it's paid by the drip, by that you mean it's a monthly service? >> It's a monthly per-protected VM, very simple, very simple business model. They pay a certain number of cloud provider points for one offering, a different amount for the other offering, and it's paid in arrears on a monthly basis based on what they've consumed. >> And I can cancel any time, it's not like I got to buy three years in advance, or? >> No, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> So we've been hearing a lot, we hear this a lot, "better together," right, David? At every event and every aspect of life, there's a lot of things that are better together. What, I'm curious, Colin, from your perspective, Dell EMC, VMware, lots of change in the last few years... >> Absolutely. >> How is this, you know, we talked about value streams that go to market, how are you seeing your customers embracing and feeling what Dell EMC and VMware are doing as really better together? How do you simplify the complexities that all these customers are living in with this partnership? >> So, I can say that over the course of history we've had a lot of co-engineering partnerships. Right, between Dell EMC and VMware. I mean, I could probably name five or six of them, and there's a number of them happening right now. This partnership, this aspect of it, is a little bit different because there's a sales and marketing aspect to it, so that's taking the partnership to the next level. Never before has VMware sold Dell EMC product. Right, so that's.... >> Pretty groundbreaking. >> Yeah. This is the next step in better together. For our customers, I mean, there's been an incredible response. We had service provider round tables on Sunday. Lot of excitement about this and actually, I heard two service providers have actually decided to go with this, based on the fact that we have this partnership. So, that's amazing for us. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. >> And then in terms of the evolution of the partnership of the technology, what's the customer feedback loop, if you will, how are they helping to influence the direction the technology goes. >> I think that evolving the catalog and making the customer's life easy and providing the new functionalities, the new features, in the easiest mold, is very valuable to our customers. It's more than providing the (mumbles) in platform service. For more added value of service to the customers, the (mumbles) services, the multi-cloud environments. So our goal is to put all together, providing the hybrid cloud ship, multi-cloud solutions to our customers, is valuable, just as our customers asking to us and claiming to us today. Around the world. >> Well you mentioned your presence in 80 countries? >> Our virtual data centers are present in 80 countries, serving the Americas and Europe. >> Was this possible before the VMware, Dell EMC, Telefonica? >> No, no, we are evolving together. It was not built easy before. Not possible to doing alone before. >> So a lot of growth, what's next? Where do you go from there? You got 80! >> (laughs) >> Where do you go from there? >> I believe that our strategy should evolve in the cataloging freezing the partnership with Dell EMC and VMware, and increasing the... Putting together this new ecosystem and the integration between vCloud director API, ecologic stations in the protection software. I think that is the way, this is the goal, this is our... The processes that are moving now should do... Manufactures are the big parts of our ecostystem is the VDC 4.0. >> So you got a couple of breakout sessions tomorrow? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Give us the top three takeaways that the attendees will glean from your session. >> Oh gosh. The attendances? >> The key takeaways. What are they going to learn? >> So I think at least one of the sessions that Sandro's participating in is a data protection session. So it's a general session covering all of our recent announcements, our technology, kind of a thought leadership type of thing, and using Telefonica's experience with the vCloud director extensions as a testimonial, an example, to share with the... >> The validation. >> The validation to share with the other customers. >> Bringing together some of the hot topics at the show, obviously, cloud, data protection, walk around the floor, everybody's talking about data protection. >> That's what it's all about, yeah. >> Great! Congratulations! >> Thank you so much. >> Colin, Sandro, thanks so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE and sharing with us what you guys are doing with this partnership. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you! >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are continuing day two of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Stick around, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Hey welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin joining me. Next is Dave Marmor, the vice president offering management for the cognitive analytics, planning analytics and rig tucked portfolios at IBM. Dave, welcome to the program. >>Thank you lisa. Thanks for having us today. >>So lots of change in the last year. That's an epic understatement. Right. But I'm curious some of the things that you've seen from a customer's perspective. How are they utilizing planning and reporting technology and analytics to adapt to such a disruptive market? >>Great question. Um the pandemic was truly a test for these organizations in terms of their resiliency and agility but fortunately our clients were able to leverage our planning and reporting technology to do several things. They were able to re plan their financials to integrate and reset operational areas and planning. They were able to create multiple scenarios as disruptions continue to occur and they were able to maintain confidence and insights for collaborative decision making, a truly an enterprise scale. Um They were easily able to increase the frequency of the planning process, moving from quarterly to monthly, even daily for their operational areas, uh such as supply and sales. And this was really far reaching for customers like ranging from people like Barona who focuses on private employment to Hassan, who is one of the largest bakeries in europe and ancestry dot com, which are the world's largest online family history resource. They probably all were able to successfully navigate the radical changes in demand and work flow and cash flow. >>That's impressive considering things were in such a and still are in somewhat state of flux, which is obviously different globally. You talked about the collaboration, that's one of the things that we saw so much change going on in the last year, but this dependence on technology to facilitate collaboration, talk to me a little bit about how you've helped maybe some of those same customers that you mentioned, be able to collaborate collectively across the organizations. >>So the concept that we follow, which is sort of this extending planning and analysis model, is this concept of decisions, financial decisions, even our finance decisions being moved outside of the operational areas of the Office of Finance into there is a supply chain into sales into workforce management. These all had to come together um far more actually and far more connected than they ever were before. Decisions that one or organization was going to make, it is going to impact others and they need to bring in additional exogenous data to kind of augment the decisions they were already doing so, it came very collaborative and hyper participation for the people closest to the decisions. >>Excellent. So if when you look at some of the things that have happened in the last year, what are some of your observations that kind of things that surprised you in terms of how companies have evolved their planning and forecasting strategy in such a dynamic market? >>Well, the biggest surprise and I guess it shouldn't be a surprise but historical trends that they had been counting on for their planning activity, taking last year's activities and actuals and using those to plan out what would happen. Those were sort of out the window. Um and and data sources and drivers, new drivers to their business had to be considered. They hadn't had to deal with this in the past. Like our clients are kind of pleasantly surprised that they're moved to extended planning and analysis when planning is adopted outside of the office of finance uh stood up to the global disruption. Um You know for example, ancestry had already adopted a enterprise planning platform uh as a reaction to phenomenal growth. They experienced years back as they were first launching their DNA product. This put them in really good shape for what happened more really recently. This allowed them to run multiple scenarios to the impact of their supply chain all the way through the labs and back to the clients. And so when the pandemic hit, the facilities were impacted but they will make those adjustments accordingly and keep up a high level of customer service. >>So this seems like ancestry was was already in a really good position to be able to navigate some of the massive disruption that happened so quickly. How have you helped other customers that maybe weren't as far along to do that as well and to be able to forecast and plan in a dynamic time. >>So, so a customer like the son I mentioned, they were like europe's one of europe's largest bakeries, right? They live in a world of of just hours, right? You're creating product that has, that has a shelf life, a realistic shelf life. And and they have much demand changes to for their facilities, but also to the stores and they're frozen food products that they provide um in addition to, you know, how they provide them, uh the daily fresh stuff that they do, their very known for their the rye bread there, Sandro, those types of things. But they had to make a lot of changes based on what they were seeing and take into consideration even margins. So they've been evolving and taking more advantage of ai in and augmenting their human intelligence in this way. They've been able to use very sophisticated algorithms uh with planning analytics to allow them to plan for things like energy consumption, where they calculate the expected outside temperatures and the need for the facilities because where they are based in the in the nordics, you know, they face freezing temperatures where the facility itself because so there's a lot of fluctuation and seasonality to that. And so they need to adjust for that. They also really use this to take a look at the product life cycles that they have been using to get a better long term estimate of what people would be buying um instead of using human intuition. Because as they said, you can get sort of into this methodical radar listening model of looking at what had occurred in the past. And and they were able to start to see things months earlier that they would have normally not been able to see if they had not augmented human intelligence with artificial intelligence. And I think the third thing they started to use was customer personal behavior where they actually, we're starting to see actual patterns of things that were changing and the expected propensity was changing for repeat purchases and cross sell purchases and they were able to make adjustments on their offerings as a result. >>So if we if we talk about ai to augment human intelligence to empower decision making, that's a great example of that that you talked about, what's the adoption been like that around different industries and different countries in the last year. >>So, um, so we see this universally happening that there's an adoption occurring. Um, certain industries are definitely moving faster. It's happening in the, in the sales and operations planning area more so than the traditional places like the financial and planning and analysis areas. So once you get into the areas like supply chain and demand planning, you know we generally see retail and distribution um you know cos high adoption of this because of the sensitivity of making sure the right product is there at the right time. We see this near a customer service. We definitely see this, as I mentioned in workforce analytics. You know there's this pandemic large disruption to people who had to exit the normal facilities and work in different alternative locations. And then this idea of how do we bring them back in a very managed way is a universal problem that everyone is facing and they're always starting to adopt that. So we're seeing adoptions many of these things across all the different industries. But I see the ones I mentioned, we're certainly highly sensitive to the immediate problems that we all personally experienced. >>Right in your opinion, based on just what you've observed? What do you think the true value of integrated planning field by ai what's the true business value there? >>It's a great question. I think in business terms the predictive capabilities like the algorithmic forecasting is really helping companies more actually forecast demand. And while prescriptive capabilities like decision authorization help them determine the best way to meet that demand. Um You know, typically decision optimization excels at developing scenarios um and considering constraints such as time prices, cost and capacities and those are kind of pulled in help augment the decisions, whereas predictive capability really helps the forecast demand As an example, man changes by season by day by our the prescriptive capabilities like this is an optimization help determine the best plan for meeting the demand. But if you think about the energy example I gave before, you know, you have to consider things like is it hydro, is it cold? Is it nuclear? What are those type of things that are involved? Because each method has a different costs in a different capacity. So they kind of work together in that >>when you're having customer conversations, I'm curious what the perspective is of customers understanding the obvious business value of integrating Ai with integrated planning? Is that something that they get right away? What kinds of questions do they have for you? >>So, so again, I think they understand the concept of scenario planning and the fact of building different scenario modeling. I think what they're getting accustomed to is the superpower that we get to augment these humans with with and to work against their intuition. We've seen this time and time again where project planning for, you know, one of our customers who manages, um, you know, on behalf of the government, certain projects that they would look at and say if it wasn't for you, we wouldn't have detected these issues in some of the project scope because we look at managing a certain way based on historical patterns. So it's, you almost have to unlearn the historical patterns. It's not accept what the date is telling you and you're really matching probabilistic and deterministic information together to get a more accurate and an informed decision to help you move and progress further. >>So for businesses and cares to get your advice here for companies that are in the state of flux as we all are and varying degrees of that across the globe. What advice do you have for those companies that are looking into utilizing planning and reporting technology to really fine tune their business performance, but they don't really know where to start. >>Yes. So from a very high level, the advice I would say is first you've got to examine your current planning process and really identify what's working well and what business questions need to be answered. Then you have to understand that planning is primarily driver based and because this driver based, you really have to understand and take a look at your current financial reports, see what's really making up the bulk of your business, what's really driving revenue, what's really driving expenses and really focusing on the drivers that have material impact? Probably, you know that 80 20 rule, what is what is 80% of our costs and revenues coming from. And then you need to understand the level of granularity that you need in your data to really develop the appropriate values that you want to plan against and set those targets. And you should refer to the existing spreadsheets. They have lots of value. Just understand the sources of data, the calculations that get used, what's effective and not effective across the different functions and how they link together. And then you really need to determine your planning horizon. You need to understand who is going to be contributing to the plan, Who hasn't been doing this before because you want people closer to the processes and the decisions to do that. And what's the frequency? As I mentioned, people moved from quarterly to monthly as a matter of fact in a rolling forecasts and they started moving to daily. Uh, you got to understand when do you recommend this kind of a model for what businesses and what's that? How much attention do you want to give to those plans on a regular basis? >>One more question for you dave when you're in those customer conversations, I'm curious is this is this a C level conversation now in terms of hey, we need to be able to utilize a I am predictive for planning technology and reporting technology. Is that, is has that elevated in conversation within the organization? >>No. So yes, the pandemic has opened up and just disruptions in general have opened up the conversation around um about the importance of better planning and business continuity and building resilience into an organization. That is a boardroom conversation. That's very important. So it is definitely raised up into that level as, as planning starts to sprawl outside of just the office of finance, into these operational areas. Those lines of business executives are getting very involved in saying we need to plan to perform and setting that conversation up and using these type of new technologies and capabilities that we're replacing. What can be automated by human beings, right or just can't be done with the amount of manual work involved and we see this today just the amount of sheer number of data, the amount of volume of an amount of data intersections that have to occur. You need the capabilities of something like planalytics with Watson deliver something like that. >>Awesome. Well Dave thanks so much for joining me today, sharing what you've seen in the last year and and how some of the customers have been very successful at adapting to a pretty dynamic time. We appreciate you coming on the show. >>Thank you very much. I appreciate lisa >>for Dave Marmor. I'm lisa martin, you're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think. Mhm mm. Mhm.