>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, And their ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here, in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent 2018. 52,000 people here. Two days. Second day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at theCUBE. I'm John, with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years, we've been doing theCUBE. We've been to all re:Invents except for the first year. We've been a customer, we've been following these guys. >> Plus the summits! >> Plus the summits. Great ecosystem. And VMware and VMworld, similar dynamic. I want to talk about that now, obviously the new announcement, on-premise, is huge. Want to dig in to it with our guest, Sanjay Poonen, who's the Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Sanjay, great to see you. Cube alumni, many times, thanks for coming back again. >> John and Dave, pleasure to be on your show. >> Thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Congratulations on all this success, you've got a wonderful booth and presence here, and I think this is becoming like the Mecca of all IT events. >> You know, we have our new video cloud service on AWS, we're ingesting over 110 videos, we'll have 500 short video clips behind it. Tons of blog posts, tons of coverage. There's an insatiable appetite for Amazon Web Services content as Andy pointed out in my interview with him. And it's just the beginning. You guys at VMware really, I mean, talk about a seminal moment in the history of the computer industry, and VMware was, when you guys recognized the sea change of operators on IT and cloud developers coming together, you guys were very proactive two years ago. Raghu, yourself, and the team, Pat. We're going to, hey you know what? Let's just align. Culture's a fit with Amazon. Let's co-develop. Let's ride the wave together, and let's see where the chips fall. Which is basically, I'm oversimplifying, but that's kind of what's happened. So much has happened. I saw Raghu last night at the Greylock partner event. This is a historic moment. Good outcome so far, deep partnership, meaningful partnership. A lot of resonance in the marketplace, you guys are iterating and raising the bar. That's Amazon talk for success. How do you feel? >> Yeah, no, I think it's, absolutely, John. We, if you think about how this has evolved, you know five years ago when I joined VMware, I felt like cloud and containers, the two C's, were our big headwinds. We've turned those headwinds now into tailwinds, but it took some catharsis from us. We had vCloud Air, our own public cloud. We had to divest that. And I think the Amazon VMware coming together, when we announced it two and a half years ago, was like a Berlin Wall moment, where you had the US and the Soviet Union getting together. That was good for world peace. People were surprised, because these are two purported enemies now, and it really built trust. And step by step, launching VMware on AWS, announcing RDS on VMware, the beginning of on-premise, and then today, announcing Outposts, it's just an example of not just the validity of VMware as a hybrid cloud leader, but the strength of this partnership. We have a very special relationship with Andy, Pat, myself, Raghu, spent a lot of time together. Often, you can't tell, when our engineering teams meet, when an Amazon engineer and a VMware apart from each other. They're like finishing each other's sentences. That, we don't do, like, Mickey Mouse, Barney, you know press releases. It's real stuff. >> And the culture of, the engineering culture of VMware, which has been a core, cultural thing, the DNA of VMware is technical. Very community oriented. Amazon, technical, very operationally efficient, good community. This is good fit there. I got to get your perspective, though, on how that is going to evolve, specifically around on-premise. Because certainly Andy Jassy validates on-premises with the announcement that VMworld, which you guys covered, Pat Gelsinger uses words like dial tone, Kubernetes, you mentioned containers. Andy, when I asked him, "Andy, you know you told me "in theCUBE, five years ago, "that everything's going to the public cloud. "Change of tune? "You mind if I pin you down?" "No, John, you can pin me down all you want." He says good leaders are self-aware. He said "Our customers wanted this." And he's cool to it. And the partnership with VMware highlights that this is not going to happen overnight, he recognizes the duration, the role of on-premise. And then he also says that the data center's like a big Edge. So, if everything's cloud, what you guys basically announced with Outpost is, cloud, public cloud everywhere. So, just, there's no public, private, it's just cloud. This is a game changer, because-- >> Absolutely. >> Just, why wouldn't I want to buy this product? >> I mean, first off, congratulations on scoring that interview. Not many people have access to Andy that way, and you guys have built a very good relationship. I thought that interview you did with him was phenomenal. There was a special point in that, John, where you tried to get him to talk about Outposts, this was before he announced it, which is will Amazon go on-premise. So a couple of months ago, when Andy called us, and Matt Garman, to talk about this project under NDA, it was a continuation of those RDS type discussions where we basically said, if you want to do anything on-premise, you should do it with VMware, because you're going to have to go through this door called VMware. We are the de facto king of the on-premise private cloud world. Many of these customers are used to our tooling, vSphere, vMotion. They want anything to run on VMware. So from that became a sequence of discussions that really really evolved very quickly, and well, so we can announce this together. I mean, you know, Andy had three guests on stage, and only one partner, and that was VMware. And that's an indication of the strength of this partnership. Vice versa, of the 50,000 people here, probably all of them have VMware on-premise. So if Amazon's going to do more on premise, why not do it with the leader in that area, VMware. And we want to be in the software industry. The de facto standard for software-defined infrastructure. Right? And that's a special space that we can fill. >> Well, the amazing thing to me, is, here's VMware, no public cloud, Amazon wouldn't even say the word hybrid, or private cloud, doesn't use private cloud, but it wouldn't say hybrid before. You've now emerged as the tandem, de facto leader in hybrid cloud. Overnight. With an ecosystem that all wants to connect and partner with VMware and all wants to partner with AWS. Overnight. I mean, it feels that way anyway, 24 months. >> I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we were the first to start using the term hybrid, three or four years ago. As we did, then it took a while, because I think a lot of customers, and some of the public cloud vendors, felt it was going to be binary, all public cloud and no private cloud, but they began to realize you need both. But your point on the ecosystem, also surrounding, I just came back from meeting one of the top SIs in the world. They're betting big with us because they see this as the place for both of them, and they're also betting big with AWS. The System Integrators are all over this. The security vendors, all over this. Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, want to see. Often, many of these companies come to us and say, "You have cracked something special "in your relationship with Amazon. "How did you do that and how can we follow that model?" We're happy to share our playbook of how we think about ecosystems. So, we want to create a platform, just like Amazon's a platform, where everybody, SIs, tech vendors, software vendors, can all plug in to. >> And the other observation I make is, you know, previously the distance between infrastructure players and the guys who really are driving application value, the application developers, was quite a distance. And now it's closing, with infrastructure as code. And it's just so transformative for organizations. >> I think, and one of the things that's making that is microservices and containers. And as you know, since we last talked, we acquired Heptio. If you think about Heptio, they are the founders of Kubernetes, okay? They left Google, started their own company, Craig and Joe, and we're excited about that. That platform will augment PKS, which was our big bet in containers, and become something that could run on-premise, or in a public cloud environment like this. We acquired CloudHealth. CloudHealth is a multi-cloud management tool for costing resource management. That becomes something that could send, a lot of Amazon reps actually refer CloudHealth as the preferred way to get your insights. So we're beginning to see this now a lot more clearly than we did two years ago, thanks to this partnership. >> So, Sanjay, I know that Outposts, super exciting, it's been covered on Silicon Angle, there's a zillion stories on our site on this whole event. But, it's not going to be shipping for about a year. But you guys already have some working products now. What's the current track to that shipping because when that comes out, that'll be a game changer. Why would anyone want to buy hardware again? Michael Dell wins either way because he's got VMware. But others who sell hardware, this is a real, it could be a killer blow. But, I don't want to (laughs), you can comment on that if you want, but what's in-between that one year, you've got a product now, how do customers move along? >> Yeah, I think there's some very tangible things that, first off, VMware Cloud on AWS is, as you've described Dave, the best hybrid cloud option. You get the best of the on-premise world and the public cloud. You know, we announced hundreds of customers, we have a goal to get to thousands of customers, and then tens of thousands of customers. We're going to continue down that march. I want to have a significant number, over 500,000 customers. If Amazon has 40, 50 percent market share, based on some of the numbers that Andy shared today, a significant number of our customers have Amazon, we should get them onto VMC. VMware Cloud and AWS. Secondly, we do have, we announced Project Dimension, some Edge computing capabilities running on existing hardware players, so we are beginning this journey ourselves, in terms of cloud managed on-premise environment. Right? Project Dimension was announced before this, and that will run on Dell and Lenovo hardware, and that's well and good to go. They will have Edge IOT use cases. And then when Amazon comes and gets us ready, we would have learned a lot about this market. Which is really kind of this Edge computing market, cloud-managed. So we're not going to be, we're going to plan and do the other pieces. Much of the software components that VMware is building is not completely from scratch code. We're taking NSX. One of the most important components that VMware is adding to Outposts is NSX. We're not rewriting NSX, we're taking the NSX and applying this now, to a use case that's very much like that because we've adapted NSX now to be container-friendly, cloud-friendly. We've added NSX into the branch, VeloCloud. So those are the things that we're, you know, there's no rest for the weary anymore. >> And that gives you a consistent networking model, which is not trivial, as we've talked about. >> One of the things that I'm excited by, intrigued by, is, I know it's nuanced, but I see it as a key point, containers sometimes don't meet the security boundary issue. So, you guys can run a VM around a container, and run it under the covers. With Lambda. At super lightning speeds. It's not like a ten second instance to stand up. So that means there's more opportunities to create more abstractions around Kubernetes. And maintain security. There's so many benefits from this integrated kind of concept of consistency of operations for the software developer. >> John, you're absolutely right. Part of what we're trying to do is that word you talked about. Consistent infrastructure and operations. Consistent infrastructure and operations. And the container, if you've been seeing some of the ads in the San Francisco airport, we have some in London, and a few of the airports in New York, you'll see an ad that says "Containerware." It's playing on the word "ware", VMware. We want to be everyWARE, W-A-R-E. And if you think about the container being as pervasive as the vm in the future, I'm not going to say we're going to change the name of the company to be Containerware, but we want to be as pervasive as vm has been in VMware. So we have tens of millions of vms, in the twenty years we've had, maybe there'll be ten times as many containers. We want to become that de facto platform and containerware starts to take over. Right? What is that? Kubernetes-based. And we'll partner with the best. We've partnered with Google, we've partnered with Pivotal. Some of it would land on AWS, some of it will land on Azure. And you get a lot of the flexibility you have with that microservices platform. >> So, since you guys are on more of the software side, obviously Amazon's got software, but you guys actually are going to be much more broader, multiple clouds, as Amazon moves up the stack, I would imagine that as customers, I'm not going to buy in to only one cloud, there's other clouds out there, you guys should become a real strategic, traversal between clouds. So, we were debating, will customers have certain instances in, say, different clouds for specific, unique things, but yet run still horizontally, scalable on-premises, with VMware across multiple clouds. >> I think, you know John, it's going to be a lot like the hardware market was 20 years ago. It started to evolve into two or three major players. What's today Dell, HPE, Lenovo, at the time it was IBM, they divested to Lenovo, Cisco. In the storage place, two or three. I think the public cloud is not going to be three, five, ten. It's going to be two or three. Maybe four. And then maybe, in like China, Alibaba. So already, we have certain tools. Like CloudHealth's proposition is to manage costs and resources across multiple clouds. So we began to be already thinking about what is a multi-cloud world do? That said, in areas like this, which is a data center offer, we felt it was good for us to focus and get VMware Cloud and AWS to be the best hybrid cloud option. Give that a couple years, rather than trying to do everything and do it poorly, when you peanut butter your approach and try to do a lot of things with various different, so this is why we put a lot of special attention on VMware Cloud and AWS. We have an offering with IBM. We announced something with Alibaba. In due course VMware will need to have multiple cloud offerings. But I feel like this partnership and the specialness of this has really benefited both sides. >> Well, it's going to be very interesting, because IBM just made a 34 billion dollar validation of multi-cloud, so, and we talk about competition all the time. And it's evolving. >> We have a very good relationship with IBM. And listen, you have to be reasonably nuanced in your partnerships. So we're going to partner very heavily with IBM Global Services. We're going to partner very well with IBM Cloud. We're going to compete really hard with Red Hat! That's okay! Well, we'll compliment Linux. The bulk of their revenue's Linux. >> Of course, yeah. >> But make no mistake, we're going to compete hard with OpenShift. That's okay! That doesn't mean our IBM relationship is competitive. There's one piece of that, a very small part of the Red Hat revenue, OpenShift, that we overlap. The rest of it is complementary. We can be nuanced. It's sort of like walking and chewing gum. We can do both. And that's how we play. >> Before you wrap, now you know what we think of you, we think very highly of you, you're a superstar in our minds. However, you got to interview Sushmita, in India-- >> You know who Sushmita is? >> a true Bollywood superstar. Yes, an amazing actress, beautiful, talented. That must have been quite an experience. >> Well I got to tell ya, I was very intimidated. I opened-- >> I'll bet. >> Cause somehow I get assigned all these interviews to do. Malala, I'm usually on the opposite end. Your end. Malala, and Condoleezza Rice, and I told her I was really intimidated by her, and she said "Why?" I said, it's the first time that, I'm usually not tongue tied, but I did not know how to explain to my wife that I was going to be interviewing Ms. Universe. Okay, and she's like "What do you guys do at VMware? What the heck does Sushmita Sen have to do" But it was a good interview, I mean listen, for the India audience, we were celebrating our 20 year anniversary. She is an amazing woman who has achieved something that very few Indians have. And we wanted our Indian audience there to see that women can be successful. She's a big supporter of more women in business, fairness, equality, no prejudice, equal pay, all those things that we stand for. Which is part of our values. And if it weren't for the India audience she probably, I don't know if she would have worked at a Vmworld. We had Malala there, we had Condoleezza Rice at our last sales kickoff. We do these because we want to both teach our employees something, but also inspire them. And sometimes these speakers help with that cause. >> Sanjay, great to see you, thanks for coming on. I know you got to catch a flight. Big day today for you guys at VMware, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Thanks for all your support, great to see you. Great commentary, great insight. Sanjay Poonen, COO at VMware breaking down the announcement of Outposts, its relevance and impact on the market, and more importantly, the VMware AWS relationship. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets, hundreds of video assets coming, tons of posts on siliconangle.com, where all the coverage is. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)