>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend, and you're watching wall to wall coverage of VM World 2017 on the Cube here in Las Vegas. You know, third day of programming. We've done so many interviews. A lot of people went to parties last night, you know up early for lots of executive meetings, but you know we go strong through the whole show because we've got great guests, so happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Peter FitzGibbon, Vice President and General Manager with Rackspace, and welcome back to the program Ajay Patel with VM Ware. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Peter, you know, Rackspace, interesting transformation over the last few years. You know we've had the Cube at OpenStack for a bunch of years. I've heard almost no discussion of OpenStack this week at the show. >> Man: I'm not complaining. >> I talked to Rackers though, at Reinvent. You have, you know, kind of reinvented the business there, but the VM partnership is one that's been going on for many years. Some people I talk to don't understand. I mean this is a sizable business that you've been doing. I said, you know, let's measure the Rackspace managed VM Ware business against the entire revenue stream of OpenStack outside of what RackSpace does, you know, and it's an interesting comparison. >> So RackSpace continues through the multi cloud company, offering our customers the choice and flexibility they want, so our OpenStack practice continues to grow strong and we continue to invest there, as we do in our VM Ware practice, which we have a great partnership with. Ajay and his team, over the last 10 plus years. >> Also for us, the partnership's only growing stronger. If you walk around WM World with all the banners, you've walked into the airports, the investment RackSpace is making around VM Ware technology, I couldn't be much more happier, so thank you for that. >> So Peter, to Stu's point, RackSpace has been part of the VM Ware community for a long time. I've run into a couple of Rackers on the show floor, talked through kind of what they're doing with their feet on the ground, great work. Can you talk through the relationship with the customer to this point? I mean RackSpace is known for fanatical support. How has that conversation changed over the past three years or so as we've gone through this changing VM Ware strategy to where we're at today? >> Yeah, we're continuing to try to support the customer on whichever technology they really want to land on, so it starts with the planning and analysis phase that we sit with customers and analyze their work loads and try to figure out what's the best fit for them outside of determining is it OpenStack, is it VM Ware? Is it our fanatical support on top of AWS? From a VM Ware perspective, we're really helping people to determine how to move out of the data center, or at least not extend the data centers as they have them right now. We recently launched our RackSpace private cloud powered by VM Ware Cloud foundations. It went to general availability last week, so that's a global effort that we're discussing with our clients and it's proving a very attractive options for those looking for an alternative to their own private cloud and moving to hosting private cloud model. >> Peter, that operating experience is one of the things that customers have been challenged with, and RackSpace, you know, known for, you know, they know how to do this. Talk to us about some of this journey as to how your customers are seeing things. You know RackSpace has had a few different private cloud options you talk about. You've given your customers choice, but what's different now in 2017 and what's the mindset of your customers? >> Yeah, we continue to offer 24 by seven, 365 fanatical support. It's what we really see as our true differentiator in the market, or we have 150 certified VM Ware Rackers on the team that really go beyond, above and beyond every single day for these customers, and looking at not just how to migrate into our private cloud, but how to optimize them when we're there, when they've landed on a VM Ware private hosted cloud solution, how do we really optimize it and really get the full value of the technology? And these are expensive and difficult technologies to use, so you want to make sure people are really getting the true value out of NSX and VSAN, and now with VCF, which we're really excited about. >> Yeah, for us, it's, you know, as you were speaking, I mean the biggest challenge and the constraints exclude resources. Having 150 specialists out there with fanatical support with the great VM Ware technology. And in some ways the VM Ware cloud announcement is kind of making the awareness that you have a cloud stack, that you can now get through, you know RackSpace private cloud, so for us it's really all boats are rising as a result, and not having the skilled capability to then accelerate deployment and delivery and operations is pretty exciting. >> So Ajay, can you talk a little bit about working with RackSpace specifically because RackSpace has a tradition of having a very pronounced way of supporting customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 or you're a small ma and pa shop, RackSpace is going to come with full engineering might and help build the most reliable solution, and that comes with kind of, I imagine, a predisposed position on something like VCF, VM Ware Cloud Foundation. What has it been like to engineer? >> I'll speak the best thing from one of the joint customers that we had the opportunity to be on a panel with, Show Tell, right, and it was interesting to say how Show Tell said RackSpace is part of their operating team, so they enrolled up front in terms of having a partner who can help them with the choice, they made the selection based on the excellent support, but more importantly, they're just an extension of the operating team, and being able to have a single team manage both the on prem and the cloud without having to build a separate kind of cloud team, that was a critical piece of this decision, so kind of this common operating model, which they seamlessly augment with skillset, you know, that was really what resonated for Show Tell and was the reason they chose. >> The operating model is something I was just going to go to in terms of really helping people how they're going to live in this multi cloud world across multiple different technology stacks, and that's what our fanatical support is intended to be, to really be an extension of their, of a homegrown IT team so we can really get the full benefit of these complicated technologies. >> Alright, Peter, you talk multi cloud, and one of the things we talk to customers is a lot of times they say they have a cloud strategy, but how they got there wasn't necessarily as plan full as they might have liked. I had somebody writing for Wikibon a couple years ago said we have composite cloud because you kind of look at it and you always said, you know, do I have Amazon? Yeah, everybody does, you know. Oh I've got some app that somebody needed on GCP. RackSpace is a manage service provider for a lot of different pieces. How do you help customers get their arms around it, you know, and you know, maybe talk, the VM Ware on Amazon, the VMC stuff, how do you look at that in the future, how does that tie into kind of the skillset that your team has? >> So we often see customers coming in with that composite cloud situation where they're like we think we're multi cloud, but we're not truly because they don't have a defined strategy about why they put certain workloads in certain places, it just grew up organically, often through lines of business. VMC is a really exciting offer for us and we're going to be launching it in early 2018. It really gives more choice for customers in terms of where they're going to run their workloads, be it running them in different availability zones that RackSpace doesn't cover or potentially used as a DR solution. >> So let's dive into that composite cloud space, and I really love that comment. What, cloud, multi cloud is one of those things, you don't know you don't have a multi cloud until you don't know you don't have a multi cloud. What are some of the surefire indicators that customers are in where a composite cloud experience or environment versus a true multi cloud? Like what is that conversation like? >> Man: What's a good best practice, yeah? >> Well I think there isn't a lot of good best practices from our customers' point of view. I think they often come in and we lay out their, look at their architectures, look at their different applications, and they're often just, central IT doesn't know where most of it is running half the time, so it's really like okay, let's look at each part of this and decide for you what's the best fit, where should it go? Should we be putting something on Azure or Azure Stack? Should it be better suited to OpenStack? Or is it, they're very familiar with VM Ware and they want to continue to leverage VM Ware either on a host model or internally in their own data center. >> What we're learning is you just don't have visibility, so the biggest interest and the demand when we launched our cross cloud or cloud services, the notion of having visibility of what's running where. And the second question is how much is it costing me, and what can I move and what are the data security leakages that I want to put in place because these things weren't controlled. So those are kind of just knowing, right, knowing where your data is, knowing where your workloads are and how much they're costing you. That's the first baseline they're looking for help on. Once they've got that, then they're like okay, how do I still provide some level of self service and control to the end user while putting some structure by which I can go to a multi cloud strategy? So that's the journey we're just about to see with IT coming into play. >> Peter, I have to mention human interest viewpoint on the ecosystem. RackSpace, I think I understand better now than a few years ago what services you did. VM Ware just launched a bunch of SAS offerings. There were some launched last year. I can't count how many companies are helping people with cloud cost management, licensing, you know, you name it, 12 different aspects to take bites out of this giant elephant of multi cloud and do that. What are the biggest pain points you're hearing from customers? How do you help advise some of them and bring some of the pieces together? >> And it's not even what we see from a customer standpoint. You think of RackSpace, we have to integrate all of these clouds into our own internal system, so we get to experience it firsthand as the customer how we create unified billing systems, how we have unified monitoring, how we integrate all their own legacy systems to deal with these clouds, so we effectively learn from integrating into our own systems, then can advise our customers on the pain points we've seen and bring them on that journey to help them through their true multi cloud approach. >> So if we blow it out and a customer comes to you and they want a multi cloud strategy, and you know, you kind of show them the ugly, you show them the truth for where they're at, what's the next step, like from a practical tactical perspective? What's like step one to helping with SAS applications and for viability for each one of the RackSpace offerings? >> Yeah, so we have a framework which we call PADMO. It's plan, analyze, design, migrate, optimize. It took me a second to get the last part out, and trying to, that planning stage is really where we sit with the customer aside, okay, what does your environment look like and why is it that way? Were things made in a conscious decision or did it just happen organically? So we try to figure out what did they do intentionally and what, what just grew up organically? And move from there into designing or analyzing what's best fit for the different cloud strategies, then start designing it, migrating it, and then effectively optimizing it when they land on RackSpace and show the value of our 24 seven, 365 fanatical support. >> For us, it's about, for us the technology part, and we want to enable the core VM Foundation, but we also believe that network connectivity's the next big thing, so things like NSXT is something we're already having conversation with, like how are we going to stitch these clouds together, how do we make it more software defined so as we move towards this kind of policy driven, you know management abstraction, how do we then open up the different clouds and service that capability? So that's really the next journey for both of us from VCM, or VM Ware Cloud Foundation to the broader multi cloud strategy. >> And Ajay, your, you know, cloud provider partners, what about services? Is there any joint engagement or things that VM Ware helps write that are? >> So one of the big service for all, we're kind of coming together is around DR. Consistently the easy step to get to a hybrid or a leverage cloud is disaster recovery. What if we made that a native feature of the VM Ware stack? We could have our customer right click on a VM and protected by all these service provider clouds. That's an example of something we're kind of trying to generalize. Now on each of them, the complexity of operating it, the scale, the visibility, the service levels, those are unique to each partner, but we're trying to make sure that the platform gives you this basic capability to capture workloads. >> I feel like DR is essential to everyone's road map right now. Most of our customers, maybe all of our customers are requiring DR when they land on RackSpace, and we're really looking at that on our 2018 roadmap to see how we make DR, as a service, consistently part of the offering. >> So what works well and what doesn't work well? When you go through that initial setup complication, so DR's a great example of oh, this is low hanging fruit. We either don't have a DR that's working or we don't have DR at all, and there's kind of this, you know, when you whiteboard it, it works extremely well. What are some of the practical business challenges that you see customers experience on that journey? >> There's definitely some easy options to move first for customers. DR is a common one that we see, DevTest as well in terms of okay, how can you test out our environments and do it in a low risk way? There's always going to be those more core applications, those mission critical applications that people will wait till the end until they migrate, so let's migrate them to RackSpace private cloud and see how it operates, maybe as a DR environment, or as a DEV environment test environment, and then as they build confidence and see what fanatical support we offer, then they start moving more mission critical workloads. >> I share the same. Tier one usually is high availability, high design, high touch, tier two often ignored, too expensive, too hard. We're trying to go after the tier two or tier three apps and just provide a convenient cloud economics for protecting those workloads. >> Peter, I'm curious, how often are customers trying one thing and then moving into another? You know I get calls all the time, you know, data gravity of course is a big issue, but you know if I'm building an application, sometimes it's like oh wait, you know maybe this isn't the best place to live. Lots of customers, you know, will build one place and run production in another place. You know we've seen that. How much is mobility in turn, is lock in still a challenge? You know, how much, what's real and what's not? >> I think lock in is still a challenge, but we're certainly looking into how we're helping our customers move from one cloud to another. We continue work in our different business units across RackSpace, be it VM Ware, AWS, Azure Open Stack, and see how we can offer flexibility for customers. When they realize they've gone too far on one or another, we're not seeing specific use cases of everybody moving from one to another, it's more of a pick and choose, and so we're helping customers migrate from one to another as needed. >> So I'd be interested to know what, not percentage, what type of customer kind of has this hybrid IT or hybrid cloud approach in RackSpace where they build cloud native applications and then connect them to a VCF or VM Ware private cloud, and I think more specifically, I think the question that I would like to get at is that a real thing that, not necessarily real thing, is that impacting friction between the public cloud with cloud native applications and your ability to manage that and add that fanatical support in the developer looking to consume that, to integrate it to VM Ware? >> I'm not seeing that friction between the different technologies. I think, at RackSpace we try work across all of them to offer the choice to our clients and our customers as much as possible, make sure we really offer them the best choice and put the workloads in where they really are best suited to run. >> And opposition is you know container and micro sourced architecture are going to provide an excellent frameworks and tools. The maturity's still in the works, and our goal is to say can we make, you know, either VM or physical, be it the best place for deploying, and what are the tools and capability you need to provide? So for us, networking, security, those are kind of fundamental problems regardless if you're building a cloud native app or a traditional app, and how do we insert our value into the equation versus trying to own the whole solution, right? >> Peter FitzGibbon, thank you so much for getting the update on RackSpace. Ajay, always a pleasure. I'm trying to remember what the five time award is. We'll talk to John Furrier, make sure we have it ready for the next time we have you on. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. This is VM World 2017 and you are watching the Cube. >> Man: Thank you guys. (upbeat instrumental music)

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program two guests who are going to dig into what's happening in the cloud space. A big, big hot topic of the show. Dave Shacochis, who is the vice president of product management at CenturyLink, Ajay Patel, SVP/GM of now Cloud Provider Software at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Nice to see you again Stu. >> Alright, so Dave. Here's a question we've asked coming into this week. VMware was doing this vCloud Air for a bunch of years. They're a competitor, no they're a partner with the vCloud network ... vCloud air now went over to OVH, and I think they waited 48 hours before they made this big deal with AWS so, tell us how the relationship has been not just one of the 4,500 service providers, but you're sitting on panels with VMware, you're one of the larger partners. >> We were on a panel discussion and we were talking about this earlier today. I think when vCloud Air launched we had some of these same conversations, and there were probably cube discussions where almost the same question was asked. What I said back then, and what a lot of us in the service provider community said back then, and we say it again now, is that ... And this is true, not just of VMware, but this is true of any enterprise architect, you run a better system, you build better software when you're running it 24-7 as a live service. It's just better. The software is better. The user experience is better. You're thinking about integration angles, and availability issues. The software gets better when you run it operationally, and VMware's technology got better when they launched vCloud Air and figured out that their virtualization technology, what they had been working with the service provider community around for years, it improved when they went and launched it and lived the life of a service provider. So we're actually excited about that. We're aligning to the same architecture. What's nice is that what they're running in the cloud, in the VMware cloud foundation, is the same thing we're running in our cloud-neutral facilities inside of the CenturyLink data center footprint. So, it's very interoperable. >> Ajay please ... >> So my response would be there are a few things that I've changed. One is, there wasn't a Cloud provider software business unit. I am dedicated to making the likes of David successful. Taking that IP and commercializing that, that's fundamental to our strategy. Second one is, we rebranded this to VMware cloud providers. The idea is you can get VMware cloud in one of three ways. You can build it yourself, get it on VMware cloud or AWS, more importantly but get it through our partners. Your choice based on the best cloud that fits your needs. So it's that level playing field, both on go to market, in terms of Geoff Waters, now the cloud sales leader over all of the different programs, technology, IP being made available, compensation neutrality ... These are all the things we "learn" from our VCM experience, if you will to do this right. So that we continue driving multi-cloud strategy, and certainly about centered around customer choice. >> Can we talk about the basic difference between those three delivery methods? From a customer's perspective, what's the difference in the look and feel of those? >> I think at the end of the day it's about getting VMware value in an integrated fashion. But that's not just sufficient, so when you go to cloud it's no longer just say, "Give me a virtualized environment." That's the "hard bit" of packaging stuff infrastructure, but that's not enough value. On top of that is the application is really the value. Managing that application, and the life cycle of the value. This is where the likes of CenturyLink really come into play. So we believe we're kind of democratizing in terms of the consumption of a cloud stack in one of three ways. It's really customer preference, and really how much burden they want to take on. On the private cloud side they're building it instead of buying it as a service. They prefer to go on AWS for whatever reason for their cloud strategy. They now have a VMware choice. Or they can go to a partner like CenturyLink to help them manage the entire journey including managing multiple clouds. So it's really about the customer choice, what's right for them versus putting them in a silo. >> What's really been good for us especially around the VMware cloud foundation reference architecture is that it starts to make the private clouds react predictably. Our offer net has now been architected and based around VMware Cloud Foundation. It stands up with the software defined data center architecture at each layer of the stack. We don't have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets in order to make a private cloud app. We've been running hosted private cloud for as long as there have been hosted private clouds. CenturyLink has been managing as part of the cloud service provider program and all its earlier naming variances. But what this latest architecture allows us to do is not only remove the number of things that we need to integrate against, the integration code we need to write and all the different vendor technologies we need to orchestrate against it, it pulls it all into one scale out software, a divine stack, which makes our customer experience better. It drives better self-service, more reliable self-service, into the hands of our customers so that they can move faster. It allows our private cloud to become more predictable so that we can start managing it with our multi-cloud cloud application manager product. So we launched that earlier this year. It was a combination of some of the managed hosting tools and capabilities that we've had back in the days. It combines in the abstraction software we got from a company called ElasticBox that we acquired last year. We weave that together into one multi-cloud layer, so it now looks at private clouds and other public clouds as just another deployment destination on that multi-cloud managing journey. >> Effectively competition moving above the SVC layer. We're kind of making SVC common. Let's compete on the value, and the solution that we both want. >> Ironically this was the promise of open source projects to make this common platform across private, public, and multi-clouds. You use the term that a lot of people may not be familiar with, cloud neutral facilities. What is that term? >> A cloud neutral facility is one that can basically get you connected to a number of different cloud deployment form factors. It's not a one note show, a one approach kind of model. It's really about a service provider that from... When you said the term facility, that can really just be a service provider environment that basically gets the particular workload to the best execution venue for that individual set of run time conditions. To us, being in more of a cloud neutral posture, certainly means we're bringing some parts of our hosted environment, whether it's private or We have a multi-tenant environment that we can provision to as well. We use that multi-tenant environment to actually speed up our own development of higher level services. And then we partner across the different cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. We tie into that. It's really about looking at the data center as an extension of all the potential run time venues, both ones that you might build on your own, and then ones that are available to you. >> Dave, I want you to expand on that. One of the things I've been getting out of this week is that maturation of how we've been talking about clouds. A couple years ago I was critical of VMware. It was like, any device, any application, one cloud. I was like "Wrong". No. Amazon. Absolutely, 100 percent public cloud ... I think they understand, if not 100 percent, we'll see where Amazon goes in the future. You said you're tying into the likes of Amazon and Azure. I'm assuming that's direct connect, and those kinds of services. How do we think of CenturyLink? Where do you add value? How do you make money in these various pieces? I remember (old company name) was one of the vCloud era data centers, and boy margins were going to be real tight on something like that. >> Our multi-cloud posture and the direction we see things going is really one that starts and the largest anchor point for CenturyLink's strategy is the strength of our network. It's all the places that that network can take us. A lot of the investments that we've made in virtualization management, a lot of the investments we've made around managing workloads inside data centers we control has really been a precursor to how we need to evolve the core of our network, and how our networking is becoming more software defined. We built and we launched, as I said before, CenturyLink Cloud which is a multi-tenant hosting environment. That has been a huge IT accelerator for us. As we've started to advance and start to figure out how do we manage virtualization inside the core of our points of presence on the network, and as our network starts to expand, as most folks know, we're in the closing stages of the announced acquisition of level three, as that transaction completes and the whole network gets even stronger, and now we have more software assets to be able to drive even further into the core of that network. So it starts from the network and everything we do from either a cloud neutral or multi-cloud perspective is really around helping customers at the workload layer to really thicken that network value proposition. >> I'm also excited about the whole notion of competing on the edge. And once you have a network of this scale, and the ability to then distribute, compute, either on the edge, consult in the back, or even leverage third party probably clouds, seamlessly with a high bandwidth, low jitter network. I think that's a foundational infrastructure that's needed. These guys have really done a good job of kind of bringing that to bear. Pretty excited about that opportunity. >> Ajay, wondering if you can give us a little color on service providers. When I go to most service providers, most of them, networking key strength, obviously we know CenturyLink, Telco, all that kind of background. Management layer. Most service providers build their own. So there's a lot of pieces now, when I see the cloud foundation suite and they're embracing it. How did you work through some of those, "Hey, no, we've got our way of doing things. We know better." As opposed to embracing them. Where is that give and take? >> I think what's happening is, depending on the sophistication of the service provider, the larger ones have the ability to kind of create a bare metal service, kind of drive higher automation, have the infrastructure spend to drive that. As you go a little bit down the market, they're really looking for "a cloud in a box". You and I spoke about this last year, right? They want an easy to type experience for the end customers without the cost and the complexity of building one. So my opportunity as a service provider business is, how do I give them that platform? That multi-tenant platform that can cover resources? But in the future, elastically leverage a VMware cloud on AWS, right, as an endpoint that they can start to use for geo distribution, DR, or simply new capacity. So we're going to see a world where they're going to start mixing and matching what they build, what they buy and how they drive that. And the management solution around that, around a high performance network, is going to be the future that I see together. >> So one of the buzzwords over the past few year in the industry has been the invisible infrastructure. This concept that infrastructure should be something that people use and don't see. How does CenturyLink help support, not necessarily making an invisible infrastructure, but this concept that this is something we use and don't see. From the network, to the software layer that we're now talking about. Where's the differentiating value that CenturyLink brings versus me rolling my own? >> Yeah, I think where we've been making most of our investments, and where we've been driving and focusing on success for our customers has been up at that managed services and application layer. The way we view the infrastructure layer of the stack ... When we think of stacks, we think of the network at the base level of the foundation, data center infrastructure at the next tier up and then workloads and applications. It's not a groundbreaking tiered model, but it's helped me kind of think and organize a lot of what's in our business. When it comes to the infrastructure layer, as I said before, we're in a highly interoperable posture with a lot of the other partner clouds, because our network can link us there pretty seamlessly, and because we still know how to orchestrate enough at the infrastructure layer. But the investment has really been inside the core of the network, as we start driving that virtualization capabilities into the core, and then up at the workload layer, what we're really trying to work around is creating, as in all computer science problems, an abstraction layer. The trick about an abstraction layer in our part of the world, and in our part of the industry is not creating one that creates a new layer of lock in. That allows each of the individual underpinning infrastructure venues to do their thing, and do what they're good at. We build that abstraction layer with the idea of a best execution venue mindset that lets each of those individual underpinning infrastructure offerings, whether its the VCF architecture or hosted up on AWS, or whether it's one of the other particular software platforms because of geography or performance, or service capabilities that they're good at. The trick of creating an abstraction layer is not locking anybody in or reducing those platforms to lowest common denominator. So what our cloud application manager offering being able to manage our private cloud based on VCF, as well as manage other environments down the road ... That's really where we try to make that infrastructure invisible is to sort of create a lightweight abstraction layer that they can think more at the workload layer than at the individual nuts and bolts layer. >> The great thing about creating an abstraction layer, when you own the underlying infrastructure, it makes it a lot easier to support. So I want to make sure that I understand this concept from the ground up. You talked about the network as being the glue or the foundation that ties all this together, especially with the level three acquisition. From an ILT perspective, if I need those far flung services I have the physical network capability to get it there. If I need to put (data terminology) in at the edge, we just had a guest on talking about (data terminology), and at the edge. And get that data into a CenturyLink data center using VCF to get it there and consistently have that same level of abstraction, and then I can build cloud native applications on Azure, Google Compute... (cross talking) and it's a consistent experience across that whole abstraction layer. >> Right. Right. Going back to that idea that, what we call the hybrid IT stack of network infrastructure and workloads, what we're trying to build is a platform that spans those layers, that doesn't try to own or be one or indifferentiate at one of those layers, is build a connective tissue that spans them, so a workload running on the right infrastructure venue connected to the right networks. We're investing in orchestration that crosses all of that, and it's really some of the great conversations we've been having this week with VMware about what they're thinking, we think PTS is interesting because container based deployment models are going to be what makes the most sense as you get further into the core of the network and out towards the edge. We think Pulse is interesting. As we start to do more things in our smart cities, and smart venue type of initiatives, that we're doing at the Internet Of Things solutions base as well. >> Ajay, last thing I want to get to is when you look at your partners, how do you see them? Both that similarity that they're going to have, but how do they differentiate, and also how will they participate in the VMware on AWS piece that we've been talking about? >> Yes, so I think I'll break it into two parts. As I talk to customers, the consistent feedback I get is we made resource consumption ubiquitous. And we're hoping to standardize that with VMware Cloud Foundation and other approaches. What's hard is the experienced skillset and knowledge of how to use this technology. So increasingly we're constrained with the folks who know how to take this complexity, put an organized plan together, and drive the set of value in our own applications. So I believe the cloud provider program and the partnership is really about moving up from trying to build infrastructure, to build solutions, and offer value to our partners. And the differentiation is really moving up stack in terms that manage services value. The second part is- They themselves now have a choice. If I'm a regional player, or customer who, everyone's a multinational nowadays, you always have some customer who happens to reach beyond the boundaries ... How do I now go into a new market? How can I leverage VMware Cloud on AWS as another data center? So the management technology we're trying to provide is we will priority manage your endpoint, customer endpoint, or even VMware Cloud. You mix and match what makes business sense. Then abstract the complexity. As we talked about the cloud as a new hardware. How do we take that infrastructure and really make it easy? And the issues are on security, management, are going to be different ... So, application usage, value added services, being able to leverage resources, build or buy is really the basis of our strategy. >> Yep. So we're excited to ... As we know that that program starts to expand a little bit more in 2018 and we've had some early discussions with the VMware team around what that starts to look like, but at our most foundational level, because what we're already launching and what we launched here this week at VMware is just what we call our dedicated cloud compute product, which is now based on the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture. It's going to look the exact same as the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture that runs in AWS. Our approach towards managing both is to let their own individual control panels do what they do best, but then manage over the top of it with our cloud application manager service. >> Dave and Ajay. Thank you so much for sharing with us all the updates. Look forward to watching the continued maturation and development of what's happening in the cloud environment. >> Great chat, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Keith Townsend and I will be back with lots more coverage here of VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)