(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to New York City. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with theCUBE here live covering the AWS Summit NYC 2022. There's about 15 different summits going on this year, John, globally. We're here with about 10,000 attendees. Just finished the keynote and two guests from SoftwareONE. Please welcome David Torres, the director of cloud services and Asim Khan, a North American AWS services delivery lead at SoftwareONE. Welcome, guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Talk to us, David, kick us off. Give the audience an overview of SoftwareONE. What do you guys do? And then tell us a little bit about the AWS partnership. >> Sure, so SoftwareONE, we are one of Microsoft and VMware's largest resellers. We help customers with our IT asset management services, managing their on-premises license real estate, but we're definitely a company that's undergoing a transformation. And when I say that, essentially we're focused on three key pillars with our go to market, supporting the hyperscalers. So we do support AWS, Azure, GCP at modernization because we do see this with a lot of our customers, you know, they're moving from on premises to AWS. They have a lot of technical debt and they're looking at options to modernize that, and mission critical workloads like SAP, Windows, Oracle, and we offer, you know, a suite of professional services, managed services, migrations, quite quite a bit of services. >> Asim, can you kind of double click on the services that SoftwareONE delivers to customers? Maybe some key use cases? >> Yeah, sure. I think in the Amazon space, I would say we're currently focusing in the area of funding programs that Amazon currently has, for example, the Migration Acceleration Program, which is a map with supporting customers basically with the entire cloud journey that they might have, or helping them define that cloud journey. And then we can help the customer in any phase of that journey as well to basically take them a step step above. So that's what our area of focus is right now to basically help enable customers. >> So on the Microsoft, AWS, you mentioned Microsoft, I mean, they've had the enterprise business for years and, you know, developers was their, you know, ecosystem. Back in the day, "Developers, developers, developers" as Steve Ballmer once said, and that was their crown jewel. But then, you know, .NET now has Linux. They got a lot more open source. So those enterprises, their customers are changing. A lot of them are on AWS. So talk about that dynamic of the shift to AWS. And now that Azure's out there, what's the relationship of those hyperscale? How do you guys navigate those waters? >> Sure, I mean, it's always the concept of work backwards from the customer, right? What are the business outcomes they're trying to drive and, you know, define a strategy from that. And it's still a function of change management for a lot of customers, people, process and tools. So, you know, in a lot of cases, our customers are evaluating what's a skillset of our people, do we need to upskill them, the tools that we're using, how do we use those on the multiple clouds, right? And then the processes. So for us, you know, we have some customers that prefer one cloud over another. We have customers that run cross multiple clouds. They deploy different workloads. And then we have some customers that transformation and modernization are really big top of stack for them. So in some cases, those customers are going to AWS and, you know, we're helping them kind of with that journey. It's interesting, Amazon literally won the developer cloud market early on, going back 15 years. >> Absolutely. >> But not all developers, enterprise developers who, you know, in the enterprises, they're stuck in their ways, but are changing. This is a digital transformation moment 'cause cloud native applications, the modernization piece, is developer centric. >> Absolutely. >> That's key, the developers. So I'm interested in your perspective and reaction to what's going on in that developer market right now with DevOps exploding in a great way, the goodness of the cloud coming more and more to the table. >> Sure, no, absolutely, great question. So I think with enterprise developers, you know, we see just the businesses driving a lot of the outcomes, right? So the modernization aspect of needing to get to market faster, needing to deploy applications faster, having a more efficient operating model, more automation. And for your point on the .NET modernization, you know, we work with customers too as well. We made an acquisition a couple years ago, a company, InterGrupo. They actually specialize in this in .NET modernization. So we know we're seeing some customers that are moving to Linux, right? And they want to go .NET Core and, you know, they're kind of standardizing on Linux. So we kind of see a, you know, wide spectrum, but yeah, maybe. >> Where are your customer conversations as things have changed so much in accelerated dramatically in the last couple of years? >> Sure. >> Obviously we've talked about the developers, but talk to me about, you know, business imperatives for businesses in every industry to digitally transform, number one, to survive the last couple of years, but, two, to be at a competitive advantage. >> Sure, no, so I think with businesses, you know, obviously, 2017, innovation, 2022, it's a little bit different, right? There's obviously macro conditions, you have COVID. So, you know, we're seeing where customers are essentially really doing their due diligence, right, when they make their choices more than ever before. And they're trying to maximize, right, their spend and their ROI when they move to cloud and that involves, you know, the licensing advisory, what they can move, what they can modernize, migrations, and just the roadmap and what strategy. But what I see is, it's the business outcomes, what they're trying to drive, and, you know, we're seeing some trends too with maybe a more conservative segments like healthcare, public sector, right, utilities that they are really investing and moving towards the cloud. >> Asim, I got a question from Twitter, a DM, I want to ask. You guys are on the front line. So you see the customers, which is really great 'cause it's primary data. You guys are right there. And you're not biased. You work with whatever hyperscaler. So it's really good. So the question that came up was, "Can you ask them the following, 'What's going on in the data warehouse front, cloud warehouse front, you got Redshift competing with Synapse, Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and then you got Snowflake and Databricks out there?'" So you got this new data provider, but it's not a data warehouse. And you got data refactoring on AWS, for instance as well. So, you know, this whole new level of data analytics with how you're doing cloud data. And you call it a data warehouse, I guess for categorically, but it's really not a warehouse. It's a data lake and you got lake front foundation. What are you guys seeing on the front lines with customers as they try to squint through how to deal with the data and which cloud to work with? >> That is a good question. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time. I've worked for some major financial institutions as well and data or big data was big for that industry. (John chuckles) So I've seen how the trends have changed, but from our perspective, because we are an agnostic services company, as you mentioned, we basically can work with any hyperscaler, we initially see what the business needs are for the customer. If the customer is already, for example, using Amazon, we initially want to have the customer use native tooling available within that hyperscaler space. If the customer is open for us to give them any recommendations, of course, we look at the business needs. We look at what type of data is going to be stored. What the industry is. Based on all of those inputs is when we basically give the right recommendation, it could be a third party data warehousing solution. It could be an area one. It all depends on what the business needs of the customer are. >> So for example, and most companies do this they build on say AWS, who is one of the first big clouds. And then they go, "Hey, we got customers over there at Azure, that's Microsoft they got thousands and thousands of customers. Snowflake's done, and they have marketplaces as well." So you guys are kind of agnostic it sounds like. Whatever the architecture is on the stack that they choose. >> Correct, so that's what makes us special. I think we are one of those services companies which is quite unique in the industry. And I don't say that just because I work for SoftwareONE, (John chuckle) that is a fact that gives us a very unique perspective of giving the customer the right piece of advice because we've seen it all and we've done it all. So that's, I think what puts us unique and regarding technology, all the different hyperscalers, they might have a very similar backend technology stack, but what the front end services each hyperscaler is building are very unique. Amazon being the leader in this space, they've been ahead of the curb by a few years, they will always have certain solutions which are above the rest. So I mean, I've always been an Amazon person, so I'm slightly biased, but, hey, I mean, I'm not complaining about that. >> The good news is the customer has choices. >> Right, absolutely. And we do see customers that want to be agnostic, right, >> Yeah. >> With their technology choices. Actually, that's a good segue about our partnership with AWS. We recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement between both parties. So there's going to continue to be big investment from us, scaling out our professional services, our practice areas, and then also key focus area for a fin ops. >> Is that your number one area? >> It's one of the areas, yeah. >> Okay, what your top three practice areas? >> Top three, mission critical workloads. So enterprise workloads like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, two, app modernization, and, three, definitely fin ops and the hyperscalers, right? Because we see a lot of customers that have already heavily adopted cloud, they're struggling with that cloud financial management aspect. >> So if they're struggling, what are some of the key business outcomes that they come to you, to SoftwareONE, and say, "Help us figure this out. We have to achieve A, B, C." >> Sure, so depending on the maturity of the customer and where they are in the journey, if they're already very heavily adopting cloud, you know, AWS or Azure, we see in a lot of cases that the customers are unsure if they're getting the most out of their cloud spend, and they're looking at their operations, and their governance, and, you know, they're coming to us and basically asking us, "Hey, we feel like our cloud spend is a little bit out of control. Can you help us?" And that's where we can come in, you know, provide the advice, the guidance, the advisory but also give them the tooling, right, to have visibility into their cloud spend and make those conditions. And we also offer a managed fin op service that will end to end do this for the customers to help to manage their resale, their invoicing, their marketplace buy, as well as their cloud spend. >> So obviously the engagement varies customer to customer. What's a typical timeframe? Like how long does it take you to really get in there with a customer, understand the direction they need to go, and create the right plan? >> Sure, again, comes back to the cloud journey. You know, if the customer is still, you know, very much on prem and maybe more, you know, conservative, it may start with licensing assessments just to give them an idea of what it would cost to move those workloads, right? Then it turns into migration modernization, you know, it can be an anywhere from one to six months, you know, of just consulting, right, to get the customer ready. And then we help 'em, you know, obviously with their migration plan. But if they're already heavily adopting cloud, you know, we do remediation work, we do optimization. Obviously, SAP, that's a longer cycle, so. (chuckles) >> So I got to ask you guys, what is the PyraCloud? SoftwareONE as a platform PyraCloud. What is that? >> I might want to answer that. >> Sure. (chuckles) >> It's pronounced PyraCloud. >> How do you pronounce it? >> PyraCloud. >> PyraCloud, okay. I like PyraCloud better. (chuckles) >> With the Y in there. It's basically our spend insight platform. It gives customers an a truly agnostic single pane of glass view into their entire cloud enterprise spend. What I mean by that is with a single login, the customer has access to looking at their enterprise spend on AWS, on Azure, as well as GCP. And in the future, of course, we're going to add other hyperscalers in there as well. Because of the single pin of glass view, the customer has a true or the customer leadership, or, for example, the CTO has a single pane of glass view into the entire spend. We allow the customer to basically have an enterprise level tagging strategy, which is across all the hyperscalers as well as then allowing a certain amount of automated cost management as well, which is again agnostic and enterprisewide. >> Can you share an example of a customer for whom you've given them this single pane of glass through PyraCloud, and by how much they've been able to reduce costs or optimize costs? >> Yes, mostly the customers who would be a very good fit for PyraCloud would be a slightly more mature customer who already has a large amount of spend, or who is already very mature in their different hyperscalers. And usually what we've seen once a customer is mature in the cloud over a certain period of time, controlling costs does become difficult, even though you might have automation in place, but to get to that automation, you have to go through a certain amount of time of basically things breaking and you fixing them. So this is where per cloud becomes very helpful to help control that. And building a strategy, which once in place is repetitive and helps you manage costs and spend in the cloud year after year then. >> One of the things I want to get your guys reaction before we wrap up is this show here has got 10,000 people which is a big number, post COVID, events are coming back but in the past five years, or six years, or seven years, since like 2015, a lot's changed. What's changed the most? Shared to the audience what you think is the biggest step function change that's happening right now? Is it that data's now prime time? Everyone's got a lot of data, hasn't figured out the consequences with it. Is it scale? Is it super cloud? Is it the ecosystem because this is not stopping ,the growth in the enterprise on the digital transformation is expanding, even though GDPs down, and gas prices are high, and inflation, this isn't stopping. Now, some of the unicorns might be impacted by the headwinds, the big overfunded valuations but not the ecosystem. What's changed? What's the big change? >> Well, I think what I see is this cloud is becoming the defacto operating model and customers are working backwards from that as their primary goal, right, to operate in the cloud. And as I mentioned before, they really are doing due diligence, right, to really understand the best approach for seeing kind of maybe some of the challenges other customers have had when they first moved to AWS, so. And I'm, you know, seeing industries that maybe five years ago, you know, were not about moving to cloud, like healthcare. I can tell you a lot of our healthcare customers, they're trying to get to cloud as fast as possible. >> It's a wake up call. >> It's a wake up call. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Asim, what's your reaction? >> In my point of view with what's happened these last few years with a lot of companies having their employees work from home and being remotely, I think end user compute was one of the big booms which happened about two years ago. We support a lot of customer in that space as well. And then overall, I think we actually saw that there was much more business focus with employees working for home for some reason. And we saw that internally in our own organization as well. And with that focus, the whole area of being more lean and agile in the cloud space, I think became much more prevalent for all the enterprises. Everybody wanted to be spend conscious, availing the different tools available in the cloud arena, like autoscaling like using, for example, containerization, using such solutions to basically be more resilient and more lean to basic control costs. >> So necessity is the mother of all inventions >> It is. >> That got forced. So you got wake up call and then a forcing function to like, okay, but exposes the consequences of a modern application, modern environment because they didn't, they're out of business. So then it's like, okay, this is actually working, (chuckles) why don't we like kill that project that we've doubled down on, move it over here." So I see that same pattern. What do you guys see? >> Yeah, no, I mean, we see that pattern as well. Just modernization, efficiency. You could just move faster, more elasticity, you know, and, again, the wake up call, you know, for organizations that people couldn't go to data centers, right? (chuckles) >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> We actually have a customer, that was literally the reason they made the move, right, to AWS. >> And I would add one more thing to that particular point. With the time available, I think customers were able to actually now re-architect their applications slightly better to be able to avail, for example, no server type of solutions or using certain design principles which were much more cost lean in the cloud. That's what we saw. I think customers spent that time available over the past couple of years to be much more cloud centric, I would say. >> Yeah, the forced March was really an accelerant and a catalyst in a lot of ways for good, and there's definitely some silver linings there. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining John >> Oh, awesome. >> And me talking about SoftwareONE, what you guys are doing, helping customers, what you're doing with AWS and the hyperscalers. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you. >> Awesome. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Really appreciate it. >> All right, for our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from New York City at AWS Summit at NYC. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

Cisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors now your host still minimun welcome back to vmworld 2015 here in San Francisco this is SiliconANGLE tv's live broadcast of V emerald 2015 I'm stupid a man with Wikibon calm happy to have on this segment talking about the future of software-defined storage hyper converged everything there is Christo's Carol Manolos who's the CTO and principal engineer in the vmware storage group because those first time in the cube thank you for joining us thank you for having me here all right so you know the buzz over the last year when one of the hottest topics inside the vmware ecosystem has been this whole you know virtual sand v vols of course has had you know quite a bit of activity can he first set for us you know what what's your role inside vmware how long you been there sure i've been a long time ER at vmware I've been with VMware for 10 years almost now and for most of this time I've been working on storage and availability products the last few years I've been working on virtual son specifically I was one of very original architects of the product and the people that had the original idea and most recently the last few months have have had a wider olam now the the city of the business unit with a responsibility for technical insight and robot for a range of products not only this on but also our availability products course Torres features and included in this yeah sir Sir sir Sir Christos Charles said I think their stuff ever member 8 500 engineer's inside that the storage unit 10 years ago yeah I'm curious how many were in that group oh we were a handful we could you know you could always walk down the hallway to the engineer you need to deal with so yes it has been a no a very big change in that respect even though invent a new york teams we still maintain a a mentality of a small company startup of you is where everybody works closely with everybody else and even though now we're distributed we organize our projects such a way that teams are very agile they work very closely together yes so I mean I think everybody that watches this space knows that you know VMware's always had a lot of storage pieces and interaction you know back to you know what happens with SRM wood storage vmotion when that came out but the role has become a lot more front and center when you talk about what's happening with v Vols and virtual sand can you just give us kind of your personal journey and insight as that dress actually this goes back many years I would say probably sometime around two thousand nine where we started thinking a little bit more fundamentally about what is the stores how is the industry what in this industry evolving and what do we see VMR all banking this a new world and we made an explicit decision that we need to drive the narration that we need to drive the industry in a direction would be we believe this the best direction for our customers current and future so our vision around stores from back then in 2009 when actually we we shared a white paper with a many partners back then was twofold on one hand we're going to introduce a management model from from storage that is much more application centric a model where the owner the application that administrator can require in at a high level in the form of policies as we call them what they want from the storage without necessarily having to know all the gory details of the hardware or implementation details of every individual vendors products so you say what you want know how to do it and then the storage platform should be able to automatically configure provision your stores and so that you get a quality of service the properties you want for your application that is one side and that led us to a number of projects and features now that range from storage policy based management to virtual volumes and a number of data protection as solutions around that on the other hand we also decided that we should really give to our customers a storage platform that implements that vision in the best possible way so that was that you know the genesis of a virtual son essentially virtual son is vmware's own storage platform that follows a certain architecture we decided that a hyper converts architecture is the best way to go because meth emits the best possible way the requirements of our customers requirements for streamlined simple procurement deployment configuration and operational management of of their stores infrastructure and do that in a way that does not require specialization that doesn't require to be expert in any specific vendors products or you know don't need to even know the gold details of their storage hardware instead of that we want to offer to the customers a way to manage stores in the same way they manage today their computing infrastructure the computer resources and now with NSX also the network resources a unified model we can manage their clusters that provide all the fundamental services they need for their applications yeah I think Charles Phan had a good way of looking at it he said we don't think of a visa and cluster it's just a vsphere cluster that uses V Sam so it's very different operational model you know we know that the growth of the virtualization admin you know highlighted always this year and we see you know record numbers of attendees so talk a little bit about you know is this you know a major shift or you know it just kind of a continuation an expansion of what you know we've been seeing from vSphere so last decade I would like to differentiate here since you know I'm an engineer that's how the technology and the product the the visa on storage space room has been designed as its genetic storage platform and here at vmware will have a number of sessions where we actually talked about that and we stress some of the advantage of that approach now for the specific product we have we're releasing we have released and we are supporting now we decide to take a certain packaging approach if you wish which is make this product very easy to manage by essentially taking making the storage cluster to be the same as your computer pastor that has sounds like a very simple idea but has tremendous benefits starting from the fact that we'd only need to introduce new management obstructions you don't have to configure and provision your store ads and then decide which host has visibility which data store all those no fencing and zoning techniques that you probably are very familiar yourself with which actually the kind of complex management operations we try to eliminate moreover by making this simple constraint very simple constraint on the product we allowed management to be done with simple extensions to existing management abstractions and workflows and even api's that are extremely common among our customers that they're used to write scripts or code that automate the management of every infrastructure so with virtual Sun now we have added a few new API s and extend a few existing API so for the vSphere at mean this is a natural extension of managing their computer clusters yeah I I thought just came to me because you know you think back as to what happened in storage kind of last 15 years you know there was a many attempts to do what we called storage virtualization and what a layer of abstraction in there and try to help clean it up well storage is pretty complex and while virtualization from a compute standpoint we've seen huge benefit from a storage pan standpoint there were usually real limits as to I couldn't leverage the functionality underneath it true head of genera tejan 80 underneath was difficult um you're not trying to virtualize storage here at all i don't think what you really help to simplify what's happening and you're leveraging the platform that you have is that a fair statement it is from from a customer's perspective yes it is but from a technology guess there is there are some complexity there obviously but that is the whole point we're trying to hide the complexities and deal with some of those I've worked on some of those early virtualization products myself what we're trying to do is hide all that complexity that we were exposing to the administrators before and help them in a way which is automated where the options are the obvious ones and because we we have certain constraints we have the class as we have the certain types of hardware we can afford to do some of those things automatically now and so that in addition to an extensive card compatibility list certification process who have allows to deal with a broad range of hardware without having to expose some of the gory details of the decisions of how you configure that hardware up to the administrator so but as you pointed out very well from the administrator this is not really about stores this is about the data consumption needs of their applications and that is exactly that the abstractions were exposing upstream to the application of the administrator yeah thnkx it could practically break down some of the technology versus the packaging one of the frustrations I've had when people look at this market is they tend to say okay when the first version comes out there and we shrink wrapped it and you know and shipped it out as here's the skew and here's the sheet metal and they're like oh okay hyper convergence it's a box and it's like hyper convergence as a trend the box is the least interesting piece of this it's super important to have the stack the hard worked out a bit early list who have tested that out I mean that if we simplify that that that's such a huge savings because operationally we know how things break but I want to give you know you're CTO hat you know what do you see as the vision you know this dissolution is good today but it's not the end where does this journey take us and what what's the vision going for this is the few billion dollars question I guess so I see two two directions there on one hand we today we have a platform that as we discuss already the management which is centered around the management of your corner of your computer clusters and those compute classes those management obstructs exists in vsphere today because they they're the core around which we do distributes resource scheduling around which we deploy features such as AIT's a DRS vMotion and why do you have those because applications today are the so-called monolithic applications they do not have natively the ability to be fault tolerant to be highly available to be able to tolerate and co Tori's resource changes themselves so this is why vSphere has been so successful because we add all these business continuity features to applications that had no idea about such concepts when they were in similar design now we're moving gradually towards a wall of cloud native applications their platform applications whatever you want to to call them where we see that the application by definition is more aware of the infrastructure scalability distribution and even fault tolerance features are natively integrating the application so Rick needs for things like DRS or HEA are very different or may not even exist in some of the new applications however now we see these applications having scalability requires which exceed the current limits of vSphere clusters computer classes which are up to 64 node as you understand so one set of challenges and opportunities I see ahead of us is how to deal with storage infrastructures that can meet the demands of those applications how can we use a plot from like a virtual Sun to extend it and deal with the management of infrastructures that span thousands perhaps tens of thousands of physical cause with applications that even our distribute across geographical location so one set of challenges is management of storage infrastructure at very large scale and we have a few interesting ideas and I had the opportunity to talk to customers today in a couple of events about those on one hand what we are exploring as we speak with a few prototypes in the lab is new management models where we collect and process a lot of data that have to do with the physical infrastructure with the application workers that ran on that virtual infrastructure we store them we process them and through that processing and analytics we run on them we provide the users we fed a holistic view of their infrastructure allowing them to zoom in and air in the areas of interest where that those areas have to do with problems and help them do troubleshooting and help them decide what is what are the right remediation actions or there is just a awareness of how the application is doing how it is evolving and what are the chances that should be aware of so they're prepared in terms of investment in hardware infrastructure and so on so that is one one dimension that's I'm very excited that we have some really cool ideas there are other dimension has to do with this consumption of storage I said all these nice things about fine grain policy based management where an application gets the quality of service requires without the administrator need to having to do any fine grain configuration of physical hardware well we want to take this model to go beyond traditional virtual machines with the ritual skazhi disk to a model where applications that use other obstructions perhaps file systems or native blog protocols like nvme or perhaps even object stores like ancestry and similar types of stores that they can really take advantage of a single platform with a unified management model along the lines of what I described a few seconds ago but still be able to consume different types of storage and manage them with the same approaches so that is the other thing offered to the applications for example containerized cloud native applications file systems distribute file systems that solve some of the critical problems that we know the address image management sir data volumes and so on well Christmas I feel like I'm looking back to my year to summary that I did on servers and and one of the critiques I gave is current solutions today they're using the same applications typically that sat in your traditional standard ass environments and they hadn't been it's not the modern applications it's not that you know the cloud native hugely scalable architectures you laid out a bunch of the challenges there do you think we're going to hit from a technology standpoint that the growth of those applications and the maturity of this solution set do you think they match pretty well you know yes that's a good question which is you know what we all are not debating here but I believe at a high level we have the building blocks for the technologies that are required I believe we have the ability to scale to infrastructures of thousands of physical we have the ability to provide the storage even a third model of storage with high availability and served by the platform for cloud native applications where I think the bigger the biggest challenges are and where things really you know make a difference is the model of managing those infrastructures and this is something which is a little subjective that is something you have to develop in an iterative fashion jointly with customers and see you know what is the right motor because nobody quite know these things today with this a few of software development teams that have currently built such applications they are very sophisticated or they build applications for very specific environments I think the talents and the opportunity for companies like VMware is to develop a model a management model that allows and facilitates many different software organizations from different companies to take advantage of these new ideas without having to reinvent the wheel from Scrubs all right well Chris does really appreciate you taking time I know you've been talking a lot this week as with all of us trying to keep our voices through the final sprint here lots of stuff to look forward as to the maturation growth of you know this really important trend so then you offend you forget I'm here it was an opportunity to talk with you and appreciate it awesome thank you for watching we'll be right back wrapping up day three here over the next couple hours here were SiliconANGLE tv's coverage of v emerald 2015 thanks for watching you