>> live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the cues covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here you're Hope's Stool Minimum and John Walls. And welcome back to Las Vegas. Here on the cubicle, tear our coverage. Of'em world here. Mandalay Bay along with minimum. I'm John Woes. Thanks for joining us here for our coverage throughout the next three days. All that's happened in Vienna World. Almost 25,000 attendees to pretty good crowd. Well, I hadn't heard the number, so that would be the largest bm world ever. If we believe the numbers, so no reason not to With John Gill Martin, Who is the vice president? General manager of the integrated assistant business at VM. Where, John. Thanks for being with us once again. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. You know, like you bet I am at this point. Yeah. Tell us about the vibe of the show. First off, day one things underway. A lot of excitement, I would think. Yeah, it's fantastic. You know, I think this is my 11 PM world in a row s so I've got to see a huge evolution in this program is amazing to see how much has changed over the years. Going back, you know, it used to be a server virtualization. What is this thing and where we are today? It's so different. There's a lot of excitement. People trying to figure out how to manage and deal with all the change happen in the industry right now. So, John, one of the things we're all coming into this week looking at is kind of the the cloud management suite, which is right in your area. Can you help us unpack? We looked at kind of V cloud sweet, and then there was some STD see stuff, and now it's cloud foundations. How did these things relate? Is it rebranding, Renaming, repackaging? Help us understand, Actually. So with that foundation, that's one of the key announcements we made today. The objective. There is what I think. How do we take what we have been talking about? Whats offered by Data Center and just make it easy? I don't make it easy for our customers to deploy easy for them to architect easy that even offer as a service from public cloud. That's kind of a key concept. So we are taking and integrating together the key components of softer, defined compute storage and network. There are wrapping some new capabilities to automate deployment autumn E provisioning. And so some ways is an extension, but also in evolution of what we've been doing previously. Okay, but this is still a software offering. Correct is what >> one of the components inside of that >> s O. There's four key components inside of my foundation. There's peace here, virtual sand NSX that gives you that software defined across all three domains and >> then a new component >> that we call STD. See, Manager. So what the SEC Manager does is sort of the glue that brings it all together to bring that integrated experience. It takes all the work that our customers do around you. How do I think about design? How does architect how to deploy? How'd I manage patches and upgrades over time and just automates all that inside of software so they can go from air medal systems deployed cloud infrastructure very, very quickly. So So what was the gap? You know what? What do you dress in here in terms of improvement in terms of change. You're talking about doing something a little bit differently for customers. Use a visa. What have you, But we're trying to get done it. So the key thing, just like the two key new things in this that are really different one is that just making it really easy on the private cloud side. But then we also take exactly that same sort of technologies and also work with our partners to offer it as a service. That's also the really new thing that we're doing today. So we had an announcement today with IBM as part of their IBM cloud. They're offering Cloud Foundation as a service, which >> means customers and go to a >> portal and provisioned out capacity based upon 100% consistent infrastructure. >> That means, you know, if I need some more capacity, as you have it inside my data center provisioned it out inside IBM Cloud. And now I have seen management tools, the same operations, everything I do in my data center. I can now do inside of this cloud environment. We'll extend that after other partners in the future. We'll send that out into the crowd air next quarter. This is really a great way for customers to start extending our migrating into the cloud. But do it based upon without having the architect. The applications are fundamentally change how they operate. >> Eso We've been arguing. We've been trying to figure out this hybrid cloud thing to the last few years, and there's many companies that are saying Okay, here's the software sack. You can put it in your own data center, or you can put it in some kind of public cloud environment. We see IBM does that sum. We see Oracle do that. Microsoft, of course, has azure and azure stacks coming some diamond next year. Is this The em wears answer to say OK in the data center where you know and love these fear, this is a full set, and then you can put it in IBM Soft Layer or a bunch of other writers. >> Yes, it is that concept of a consistent stack, yet a seem stacked inside the day's center, exactly the same stack outside the data center. So it is 100% consistent, right? That's part of what's really attractive about that. And then his customers think about well, what are the management tools or the cloud management platform, but I won't run on top of that. That can extend very seamlessly now across multiple environments. >> Okay, what about the interconnection between different locations? How does that >> work? So interconnections. You can take advantage of NSX and what it does around stretching, stretching, networking across environments like it's a very powerful capability to really think about it, really, as it's seamless extension of the data center. That's one of the unique capabilities and obviously with IBM has a first partner. They have almost having 50 data centers around the world, so it becomes very easy to collate. Locate your applications close to your private data center, which >> is important. So IBM is the first partner. How does this fit into, like the V Cloud their network, then, where you have thousands of >> partners already? Yeah, so they're the first Qatar network partner to offer a service, and then we expect that are working with other because our network partners to do the same offer Cloud Foundation as a service and, you know, kind of underlying that technology is this s CDC manager, which makes it easy for them as well. They go provision out these infrastructures very quickly and easily. >> Yeah, when you're about customers, what are the pain points that you were hearing from them that you were dressing? Because we take about the sophistication of technology, these of use efficiencies, high performance, all this stuff. It couldn't be any better, but obviously could have been better. So what we're hearing from them that led you to develop the new product. >> Well, the big thing is his customers were trying to think about how to the leverage public cloud is part of their architectures. You can kind of, It's pretty clear, that kind of result they want. They want to able to have an environment where their application owners and the developers sort of don't even know where things are running. They wanted to be a little bit transparent, kind of seamless. At the same time, they want to be able to have the ability to maintain control, maintain security policies, maintain operational control over the environment, have good insight into it. And so I sort of challenge that we're walking into, and your traditional infrastructure still very much stands in the way people trying to support the developers, people enterprise has spent too much time hugging components together trying to make things work together. And that's just not value added activity. It's not differentiating. It doesn't help them compete in the marketplace. And so we saw is what happened. We help them get out of that business and focus more on the things they want to do above the infrastructure layer. That's sort of the whole rationale for building a foundation was, Just take everything that they do today That's on value, out of activity. Put that in software, automated public empire the cloud and they can focus on what there is value out of business on. >> One of the challenges we've been facing in this transformation is kind of the go to market. If I think about traditionally the sphere, you know Veum. He's got a great channel partnership Lotto, EMS in the early days, and now, I mean just a huge amount of channel parts that know how to sell it, know how to make money. Cloud is a big shift for them. There's only a small percent of the channel that kind of understands this with IBM, kind of as a first partner. How do you see this playing out with kind of official panic Channel partners, service providers and the whole go to market. >> As you point out, it's clearly an evolving story. Right and different partners were kind of thinking about it in different ways. You know, there's still, you know, definitely in on premise opportunity that they're going after. But clearly having a good crowd strategy is going to be important for every reseller out there in every partner. And some of that is gonna be thinking about what are the kind of service is that you can offer your customers to help them make that transition. Yeah, if you think about you know, if I want to extend my data center, I need to migrate workloads or re architect workloads. Those types of service is I think they're going to be critical to become experts in and help customers. We think about their long term strategy. The fact is, the customers are gonna move warm or the workloads into clouds of some type over the next few years, and they're gonna need help in your advice and guidance and migration surfaces to get there. So there's a real business to go be built around those kinds of opportunities. >> Okay. Can you give us a little bit of what should we be looking for? Going forward, You know, if their customers that are running this stack already before it was called this And how do we How could we benchmark to say whether or not you're successful by the time we come back next year? >> Yeah, that's a good question. >> Tough questions, >> A challenge. So now it's a great question. So this software is gonna be available later this week, so it's actually generally available on September 1st. So it's just coming in the marketplace now. And so we've been working with Summerlee Beta customers on this over the last couple a couple of months, get great feedback and really help this steer perfectly towards this public cloud opportunity S O. I would expect as we come back in a few months, we'd be able to talk about our kind of initial lighthouse customers and how they're doing. But we see just huge interest in this right now, right? Customers want to move, and companies want to move away from kind of plugging things together. They want away from individuals, components. They really are looking to buy Seymour integrated ways. This is kind of a key enabling technology to help him do that. And we could do that also with our partners. >> Yeah, Um, one of the big challenges we've had is everybody is always like, okay, but my needs are a little bit different. So we understand that if we can eliminate diversity of the environments in the homogeneity is good, I can repeat it. I understand it. But everybody, all that you know, that's the problem with ideas. They always want to tweak it. So what do you do when they say, Oh, you know, the sand's great. But, you know, you've got all these ecosystem part partners in storage. I kind of want this storage. And it's ex. I understand some pieces. Maybe I want over. Yes, but I wanted till some other pieces. What do you do for customers that want to kind of go outside of this initial package? What kind of choice and options that they have? >> Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh so just like this year, you know, these here is sort of been the universal platform for running virtual machines and has a lot of those connections into different things, so foundation fundamentally is based on the sphere. So for the take storage, for example, no keys here can connect to external storage. We can connect national storage and on a road map for the automation software inside. We'll look at how we can take advantage of external storage and some of these things as well, so as new as we talk to customers. And we, as we learned those areas that are consistent across many, we can start to bring some of those things in tow the equation as well. This gives us a very powerful starting point, and we can look at what are the right connections out system? >> And do you still have folks who are trying to hang on to say I understand what you're doing understands the new service of a new opportunity here, But I'm not ready to cut the Courtauld away. And how do you bring them along to showing them? There are new efficiencies here and there is a better bottom line benefit to you. >> I think you know the history of I t is a history of things remaining right. So you still have a I actually feel mainframes. Eso this transition will take time. This is not gonna be on overnight time type of changes. We moved to these types of architectures that are fully suffered a find, but we made a huge amount of progress thus far. We have over 5000 customers on virtual sand. Your NSX is going incredibly fast. Both of these approved points that these are the architecture's customers are trying to move to the end of the same time. Though we have to find the right the right starting points. What is the right project to start with? This doesn't have to be a wholesale change. The data center it could be. Let's take a virtual desktop project and run now on top of that foundation must take a new invite. New server applications, unemployed run that on foundation. And just like the sphere kind of started with these use cases that expanded over time. Same thing of foundation. We could start with a project and then and that shows success to move into other projects. >> John, you've been with the, um where for quite a few years you've done two stints of the company as you hear the outside world talking about, you know, cloud and where things were going. What do you think people don't understand about bm Worse position in the cloud marketplace going forward. >> You know the one thing you know, I've talked a lot right now about Cloud Foundation, which was one of our announcements. I think the other thing that is really unique that we talked about this week is, uh, something called across Cloud Architecture and said across Cloud service Is that in addition foundation and what we're recognizing is just like with server virtualization, we were able to abstract multiple types of servers and provide consistent layer we're going to do the same. Thing is we were across multiple clouds. Even non GM were based clouds, right, working with Amazon Azure Google. And I think that's one thing that is maybe even surprising, folks. And it's very different than kind of the company strategy going back 10 years ago. So we are fully embracing that these will be part of our customer strategy in the future. We do expect to see them, but we see a unique opportunity for us to go help them when it comes to managing applications across the networking security where we have really unique assets we can help with. And also data management. Government. >> Well, John, I know you said it takes time. Transition state time. >> Still gave you a year. >> Yeah. So next year at the world will come back and the update you on the progress that we've made, >> we look forward to it. Thank you for joining us and the best left down the road. We'll see a year from now. >> Fantastic. Thank you very much. >> You bet John Gill Martin from VM where we'll be back with more from Veum World here in Vegas. Right after this, You're watching the Cube.