>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Special Cube presentation of Accelerating Business Transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Queue. We have Chief Dawan, Director of global sales, and go to market for VMware Cloud Ons. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi, John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally as on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Now, VMware Cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly, and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their GOs, bss, plat platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months, extremely securely. It's a VMware managed service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customer's >>Perspective. You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chassis and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey is as well. Customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud, get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they wanna refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, take decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step, you know, exit their data centers, come to AWS using VMC or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud ons addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster, and sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, even even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And v VMware clouds exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. And AWS is invested in that, right? We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it iot, be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them draw data is, is, is front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was seeing the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware, and there's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything, but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services, and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You're able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I wanna just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being ONS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vSphere platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software. It's got, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it, it literally used the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called VMs, VMware cloud on AWS, using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SASS app and, and basic platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world that used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long do these migrations take? Is it easy, is it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud on AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing ideal operations skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently. Like Dan, what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same. And therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as ve VMware, cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. Now, this is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Linsky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud radio based and happened very swiftly. >>That's not a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean I bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we, you just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or a market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give it an example of a success. Take us through a day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing interest. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, they were coming up on a deal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud gas. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another gallery to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon F footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that met their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the, to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. >>We can exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as well. >>All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can and move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna have data clouds. It's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable. And then, you know, distributed in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a a a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be a analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers. And, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, won't make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, Wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based when desired, they should use serverless, applic, serverless technology. They should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases. They should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that, you know, we were joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architecture lists. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage list, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecture kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. Now, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using our area, the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through. >>Actually, I say she the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah, at the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best parts to the cloud, right? The, the best parts to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing that, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they want to exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's in the central first step that we wanna help our customers with >>Wan, director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is showcase, We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I >>Appreciate it. Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

foreign [Music] welcome to this Cube showcase accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on aw it's a solution Innovation conversation with two great guests Fred Ward and VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan bardawaj who's the VP and general manager of cloud Solutions at VMware gentlemen thanks for uh joining me on the Showcase great to be here hey thanks for having us on it's a great topic you know we we've been covering this VMware Cloud on AWS since since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch The Evolution from people saying oh it's the worst thing I've ever seen what's this mean uh and depressed we're we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision but as it played out as you guys had announced together it did work out great for VMware it did work out great for a divs and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going obviously multiple years where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware Explorer just recently and going in to reinvent uh which is only a couple weeks away uh this feels like tomorrow but you know as we prepare a lot going on where are we with the evolution of the solution I mean the first thing I want to say is you know October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of I.T right when bad girls singer and Andy jassy came together to announce this and I think John you were there at the time I was there it was a great great moment we launched the solution in 2017 the year after that at vmworld back when we called it vmworld I think we've gone from strength to strength one of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also and the process is this notion of working backwards so we're really really focused on customer feedback as we build the service offering now five years old pretty remarkable Journey uh you know in the first years we tried to get across all the regions you know that was a big Focus because there was so much demand for it in the second year we started going really on Enterprise great features we invented this pretty awesome feature called stretch clusters where you could stretch a vsphere cluster using vsan NSX across two azs in the same region pretty phenomenal for lines of availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature and we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect Transit gateways with our own Advanced networking capabilities uh you know along the way Disaster Recovery we punched out you need two new Services just focused on that and then more recently we launched our outposts partnership we were up on the stage at reinvent again with Pat and Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well the federal Empire certification more recently so all in all we're super excited we're five years old the customer momentum is really really strong we are scaling the service massively across all GEOS and industries that's great great update and I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship and this has kind of been the theme for AWS man since I can remember from day one Fred you guys do the heavy lifting as as it's always say for the customers here VMware comes on board takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat continues to move their workloads that everyone's using you know vsphere and these are these are Big workloads on AWS what's the AWS perspective on this how do you see it yeah uh it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's that's evolving quickly and and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about uh but that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution uh to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads uh drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the for the customer so it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint from a business standpoint and obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and and responding to what customers want so pretty pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to uh BMC yeah that's a great value probably we've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud they can have their own super cloud as we call it if you take advantage of all the capex and investment Amazon's made and AWS is made and and continues to make in performance I as and pass all great stuff I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market what makes it different what's the combination you mentioned jointly engineered what are some of the key differentias of the service compared to others yeah I think one of the key things red talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one we were the earlier doctors of the AWS Nitro platform right the reinvention of ec2 back five years ago and so we've been you know having a very very strong engineering partnership at that level I think from uh we have a customer standpoint you get the full software-defined data center compute storage networking on ec2 bare metal across all regions you can scale that elastically up and down it's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency Global right on AWS ec2 Global regions now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service right and this was somewhat new to VMware this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers are to provision rack stack Hardware configure the software on top and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top so we took away all of that pain as customers transition to VMware cloud and AWS in fact my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for Jay debacle the industry was just going through that right favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race uh this issue to us we sent them a notification saying uh we already patched all of your systems no action from you the customers were super thrilled I mean these are large Banks many other customers around the world super thrill they had to take no action for a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing that's a great point you know the whole managed service piece brings up the security and you're kind of teasing at it but you know there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you're doing complex logic and as you grow your Solutions there's more bits you know Fred we were commenting before we came on cameras more bits than ever before and and at the physics layer too as well as the software so you never know when there's going to be a zero day vulnerability out there just it happens we saw one with Fortinet this week um this came out of the woodwork but moving fast on those patches is huge this brings up the whole support angle I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well because to me we see the value when we when we talk to customers on the cube about this you know it was a real real easy understanding of how what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS but the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle the support together well what's interesting about this is that it's it's done mutually we have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer including all the way up into the app layer as you think about some of the other workloads like sap we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them uh and on top of that we look at where where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies so from an availability and reliability standpoint it's it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land we're going to go help the customer resolve that works really well on the VMware side let's spend the feedback there what's the what's some of the updates same scene yeah yeah I think uh look I mean VMware owns and operates the service will be a phenomenal back in relationship with AWS customers call VMware for the service for any issues and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS in the back end for support issues for any hardware issues capacity management that we jointly do right all the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about uh I think on the front end we also have a really good group of solution Architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution do complex things like Cloud migration which is much much easier with VMware on AWS we're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways and so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day you know you had mentioned a list here some of the Innovations the you mentioned the stretch clustering you know getting the GEOS working Advanced Network disaster recovery um you know fed fed ramp public sector certifications outposts all good you guys are checking the boxes every year you got a good good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship the question that I'm interested in is what's next what uh recent Innovations are you doing are you making investments in what's on the list this year what items will be next year how do you see the the new things the list of the cosmos people want to know what's next they don't want to see stagnant uh growth here they want to see more action you know as as uh Cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications Cloud native you're seeing more and more containers more and more you know more CF CI CD pipelining with with modern apps putting more pressure on the system what's new what's the new Innovations absolutely and I think as a five-year-old service offering uh Innovation is top of mind for us every single day so just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer um first of all uh our new platform i4i dot metal it's isolate based it's pretty awesome it's the latest and greatest uh all the speeds and beats that you would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship we announced two different storage options this notion of working from customer feedback allowing customers even more price reductions really take off that storage and park it externally right and you know separate that from compute so two different storage offerings there one is with AWS FSX NetApp on tap which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well and the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex story vmware's own managed storage offering beyond that we've done a lot of other Innovations as well I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts you know host is 36 to 48 cores give or take but with VMware cloudflex compute we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vcpu memory and storage that maps to the applications however small they might be so this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year and then last but not least topper ransomware of course it's a Hot Topic in the industry we are seeing many many customers ask for this we are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud VR solution a lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots backups are actually safe to use so there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well a lot of networking Innovations with project North Star the ability to have layer 4 through layer seven uh you know new SAS services in that area as well keep in mind that the service already supports managed kubernetes for containers it's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines and so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMS and containers is sort of at the heart of our option the networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on every year it's the same same conversation get better faster networking more more options there the flex computes interesting if you don't mind me getting a quick clarification could you explain the address between resource defined versus Hardware defined because this is kind of what we had saw at explore coming out that notion of resource defined versus Hardware defined what's that what does that mean yeah I mean I think we've been super successful in this Hardware defined notion where we're scaling by the hardware unit uh that we present as software-defined data centers right so that's been super successful but we you know customers wanted more especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally right lower the cost even more and so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very very interesting as a way to think about you know here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customer's requested it would be for fiber machines five containers its size exactly for that and then as utilization grows we elastically behind the scenes were able to grow it through policies so that's a whole different dimension it's a whole different service offering that adds value when customers are comfortable they can go from one to the other they can go back to that post-based model if they so choose to and there's a jump off point across these two different economic models it's kind of cloud flexibility right there I like the name Fred let's get into some of the uh examples of customers if you don't mind let's get into some of these we have some time I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments one of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship they love the cloud positioning of it and then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great it's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level Services kind of that adoption Next Level happens um and because it's in the cloud so so can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware Cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there how does it evolve can you just walk us through a couple use cases sure um there's a well there's a couple one it's pretty interesting that you know like you said as there's more and more bids you need better and better hardware and networking and we're super excited about the I-4 uh and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds but what customers are doing with it like the college in New Jersey they're accelerating their deployment on a on onboarding over like 7 400 students over a six to eight month period and they've really realized a ton of savings but what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native Services too so connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this um the the options there obviously are tied to all the Innovation that we have across any Services whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS so so there's there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing which is moved quickly with full compliance whether it's in like health care or regulatory business is is allowed to then consume and use things for example with text extract or any other really cool service that has you know monthly and quarterly Innovations so there's things that you just can't could not do before that are coming out uh and saving customers money and building Innovative applications on top of their uh their current uh app base in in a rapid fashion so pretty excited about it there's a lot of examples I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here yeah but that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform now Ryan what's your perspective from the VMware psychics you know you guys have now a lot of head room to offer customers with Amazon's you know higher level services and or whatever's homegrown what is being rolled out because you now have a lot of hybrid too so so what's your what's your take on what what's happening and with customers I mean it's been phenomenal the customer adoption of this and you know Banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications tier one applications on the service over the last five years and so you know I have a couple of really good examples SNP Global is one of my favorite examples large Bank the merch with IHS Market big sort of conglomeration now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways and with the uh with the use case one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these Global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers and then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the globe of which there were many and so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand one thousand workloads to VMware cloud and AWS in just six weeks pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point a to VMware point B the the lowest cost lowest risk approach to adopting we have our cloud in AWS so that's uh you know one of my favorite examples there are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see the good thing is we're seeing rapid expansion across the globe we're constantly entering new markets uh with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap it's great to see I mean the data center migrations go from months many many months to weeks it's interesting to see some of those success stories so congratulations another one of the other uh interesting uh and fascinating uh uh benefits is the sustainability Improvement in terms of being green so the efficiency gains that we have both in current uh generation and New Generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic they're also saving power which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time they're they're seeing those benefits if you're running really inefficiently in your own data center that is just a not a great use of power so the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is are pretty phenomenal just in being more green which I like we just all need to do our part there and and this is a big part of it here it's a huge it's a huge point about sustainability for everyone glad you called that out the other one I would say is supply chain issues another one you see that constrains I can't buy hardware and the third one is really obvious but no one really talks about it it's security right I mean um I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago this is like 2013 and um you know at that time people saying the Cloud's not secure and he's like listen it's more secure in the cloud than on premise and if you look at the security breaches it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities not so much Hardware so there's a lot you gotta the the stay current on on the isolation there is hard so I think I think the security and supply chain threat is another one do you agree I I absolutely agree uh it's it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays we put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them run them more efficiently yeah and then like you said on the security Point Security is job one it is it is the only P1 and if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers there's nothing more important and Narayan your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better all right final question I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase it's really been a great conversation uh Fred you had made a comment earlier I want to kind of end with the kind of a curveball and put you guys on the spot we're talking about a modern a new modern shift it's another we're seeing another inflection point we've been documenting it it's almost like Cloud hitting another inflection point um with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side so the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market so it's kind of like we want more of the same here but also things have changed radically and better here what are the what's what's changed for better and where what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on can you share your perspective I'll I'll tackle it um you know uh businesses are complex and they're often unique uh that that's the same uh what's changed is how fast you can innovate the ability to combine manage services and new Innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today leveraging world-class Hardware uh that you don't have to worry about that's elastic you could not do that even five ten years ago to the degree you can today especially with the Innovation so Innovation is accelerating uh at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the the set of services that are available to them it's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of Engineers can go actually develop in a week it is phenomenal so super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that that's my take there I am you got a lot of platform to compete on with Amazon I got a lot to build on the memory which then you're right on your side what's your what's your answer to that question I think we're seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers [Music] I think uh what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly uh you know build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently I think we are seeing uh you know we're at the very start of that sort of uh of Journey um of course we have invested in kubernetes means to an end but it's so much more Beyond that's happening in the industry and I think we're at the very very beginning of this Transformations Enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we're inherently part of it yeah well gentlemen I really appreciate that we're seeing the same things more the same here on you know solving these complexities with abstractions whether it's you know higher level services with large-scale infrastructure um at your fingertips infrastructure is code infrastructure to be provisioned serverless all the good stuff happening Fred with AWS on your side and we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again being a cloud operator and developer so the developer Ops is kind of devops is kind of changing too so all for the better thank you for spending the time we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and it was getting getting along great together so thanks for sharing your perspectives they appreciate it thank you so much okay thank you John okay this is thecube and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation VMware Cloud on AWS jointly engineered solution bringing Innovation to the VMware customer base going to the cloud and Beyond I'm John Furrier your host thanks for watching [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the Special Cube presentation of Accelerating Business Transformation on VMC on AWS. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have Ashish Dhawan, Director of Global Sales and go to market for VMware Cloud on AWS. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >> Hi, John. Thank you so much. >> So VMware Cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and AWS. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on AWS? >> Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is, how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications to the cloud. Now, VMware Cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move the cloud safely, swiftly, and reliably. Banks can move their core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their GOSS, BSS platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on AWS because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months, extremely securely. It's a VMware managed service. It's very secure and highly reliably gets the reliability of the underlying AWS infrastructure along with it. So win-win from a customer's perspective. >> You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud, migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here. What are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, "I got to modernize" which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, data center real estate. They're looking at their contracts with co-location vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud or AWS is a perfect solution for customers who want to exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on AWS, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well. Right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as well. Customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud, get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can connect easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, take decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit their data centers come to AWS using VMC on AWS, and then the whole host of modernization options are available to them. >> Yeah, I got to say, we had this right on this story because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on AWS, addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster, and sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school IT ops now they got to come in and jump in. They're going to use data cloud, they're going to want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with a higher level services, you know, it's a no-brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >> Absolutely. I think you hit upon a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, there, most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform, right? Now, when the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to upscale immediately. And VMware cloud with AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill set suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. And AWS is invested in that, right? We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be AML, be it, be it IoT, be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately, the ultimate goal of making them draw data is, is, is front and center. >> I want to get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing because, if you look at what you guys have done at AWS, you've essentially, and Andy Jassy used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer, user or operator, you're used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now, you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware, and there's hundreds of thousands of VMware architects and operators, that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then, give an example. >> Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, migrating to AWS using VMware cloud or AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but, the advantages, that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services, and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >> And just one more point, I want to just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced, VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what "on AWS" means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, what does being VMC on AWS mean? >> Yes. This is a great question, by the way. You know, on AWS means that, VMware's vSphere platform is an iconic enterprise virtualization software. It's, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for this platform, to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it literally used the AWS platform under the name, right? And that's why it's called VMware cloud on AWS, using the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on AWS. >> It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SAS app and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just make sure that now Supercloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I got to get one more question in before we get into the use cases in customer success stories is in most of the VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, oh my God, that's going to take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk track. Complexity, how you addressing the complexity issue and how long do these migrations take? Is it easy, is it hard? I mean, you know, the, the knee-jerk reaction is month very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, they're like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >> Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes anything complex is if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've got to, if you're required to manage something differently. And as far as VMware cloud and AWS, on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. You existing ID operation skill sets on, VMware's platforms are absolutely fine, and you don't have to manage it any differently. Like, dang what you're managing your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as VMware cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. Now, this is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months because of VMware cloud and AWS. A lot of times customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens? VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? Speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same, because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelinsky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and that happened because they were using VMware cloud radar base and happened very swiftly. >> That's a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting out of the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean obstacles, bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about, was when you hit on data data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or market growth, people can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, almost a recession proof, if you will, cloud is. So use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day in the life of a data center migration in a couple minutes. >> Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a large bank who decided to migrate all their data centers outside their existing interest. (static) And they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the data, they were coming up on a review and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80 percent of their ID applications, (static) underlying vSphere platform. And we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud and AWS. And obviously it was a large bank. It wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed and therefore VMware cloud and AWS, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another corollary to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35 percent of all their carbon footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the carbon footprint, which is 35 percent down to 17 or 18 percent. Right? And that met their sustainability targets and their commitment to being carbon neutral as well. >> And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Which you guys take that burden, a heavy lifting there, and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. >> Exactly. And, because of the scale of our operations, we are able to work on that really well as well. >> All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money and move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons. There's a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the next gen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not going to data clouds, it's going to be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is S&P Global Ratings. As you know, S&P Global Ratings is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable. And then, you know, distributed in the wide variety of of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We did, again a very large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got access to, you know, our high level services. Be it our analytics services, our machine learning services, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right? Now, obviously going forward, they will have, the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. But you know, the VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >> The speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether it's a pivot or a new product. You see that in the startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, "are you thinking big?" I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and I think this modern application thing's a big deal, because I think the mindset has always been constrained, because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You got to get the hardware, you got to configure it, you got to stand it up, you got to make sure all the softwares validated on it, and loading and database and loading OSs, I mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, "wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that." What's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >> Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, obligations should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless technology. They should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases. They should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies that work for the speed of a startup. But it's important for them to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them modernize, take our partners along with us to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's what our customers need today and that's what we are working backwards from. >> Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're going to hear words like architectureless. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage list. I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the IT in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architectural a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >> Totally. That's a great thought, by the way, I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do your customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the real estate of a server. They wanted to use computer when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and that's exactly where the world is going to, right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using our area, the breadth and depth of our services to deliver those outcomes, right? And most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and AWS, the outcome is A. to migrate, then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through. >> Ashish Dhawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud and AWS. I want to thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on AWS. Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >> Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best path to the cloud, right? The best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customer's, customer's, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud on AWS is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they want to exit a data center or whether they want to modernize their applications. It's in this central first step that we want to help our customers with. >> Ashish Dhawan, director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on AWS. He's with AWS sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on AWS. This is showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers. Ashish, thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >> Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >> Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (techno tones)

(upbeat music playing) >> Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor, here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Paul Gillian. Paul, how you doing? We're now full blown into your first day of AWS re:Invent ever. >> Overwhelmed. >> Overwhelmed! >> Drinking from the fire hose. There's so much going on here. >> Yeah. There really is, isn't there? Anything stood out to you in that fire hose? >> I think the importance of data, hearing about a lot of tools here, a lot of talk about how organizations need to take advantage of the cloud to leverage their data more effectively, that's clearly a theme in the show. Hearing a lot about vertical industries and the move of the cloud into more verticalization which we're going to be talking about here with our next guest, among other things. Monty Bhatia, who's the Vice President of Global Systems Integrators at VMware, a company that really pioneered partnerships with AWS, as well as other cloud providers. And also Ranjit Bawa, the principal, US cloud leader for Deloitte, a company that has been a leader in vertical clouds as well as in cloudefying its customers, if you will. Welcome, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> We're happy to be here. >> Monty, I just have to say, I know I said it before, I think you might be the best dressed. >> You know, you may have to say it again. I've got to record this and show it to my wife, because she always says that I should wear age appropriate colors, and she thinks yellow and hot pinks are not age appropriate. So I've made a deal with her that when I'm traveling, and everybody else has heard the story, when I'm traveling and she's not around I can wear any colors I want. It is an attention grabber, it is a conversation starter, and I love it. >> I'm all for the talk trigger and you told me you have 32 different sets. >> That's right. >> And you're branded, right? Give us a little lapel peak. >> I am branded. (Monty and Ranjit chuckling) >> Brilliant. We don't always do a fashion segment to open each clip but I just, I couldn't let this pass, Monty- >> Thank you, I appreciate that. >> You're just absolutely, absolutely smashing it. Deloitte and VMware, you've got a unique strategic partnership. Ranjit can you tell me a little bit about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. We've been working together for close to a decade now with VMware. >> Nice. In Techland that might as well be a century. >> That's right. >> It is. (Savannah chuckling) >> And we've had a number of very successful large scale transformations across industries together, particularly as our clients are moving to cloud, which really in our world is a metaphor for modern engineering, modern technology, how tech shows up differently to support the business. So we're really excited about what we've done and where we are going together. >> I want to ask you about the transition that we see going on at AWS really going from being an infrastructure to provider to more of a platform provider for vertical applications for HPC, for AI, for specific uses. Is this a transition that you see your customers- are they applauding this transition? >> Yeah, most certainly, and we saw this coming a while ago, and as does AWS and VMware and others, that for more horizontal clouds we're going to start to move into vertical clouds that support industries and sectors and sub-sectors. So increasingly as we move from IIS to more PaaS and even into SaaS land, that is going to continue. The good news is that AWS has formed a really good foundation and a set of common frameworks that people can use to build upon. And then with VMware as well, we've started to build these vertical clouds and insurance and life sciences and healthcare and all kinds of other sectors, including manufacturing and you know, in our booth here, we have a demo of our manufacturing vertical clouds as well. So we certainly see that the direction of travel and our clients are really egging us on as well. >> So what is VMware's role in building these vertical clouds? Because you're not a vertical, I don't think of you as being a vertical services provider. >> Yeah, so from a VMware standpoint, we're going through a transition ourselves, right? It's a transformation happening at VMware. And while we are traditionally an infrastructure we're a plumbing company, right? We are, we provide all the horizontal space, that's where we need the partnership. So we do have some capability built around industries but that's where our partnership with Deloitte is very important to us because they have all these industry clouds. We have the tech platform that provides that. And then when partnering three way partnerships with you know, hyperscalers like AWS you know we can bring the scale and everything together to serve our customers. So it's very important for us to make use of our technology stack. We have customers in all industries, right? We have huge customer base, and we have customers in all industries, right? And so we want to really create that industry angle, working with our partners like Deloitte to serve those customers and working with, you know, our ecosystem partners ISV partners, hyperscaler partners. Obviously AWS is a big partner of ours and want to bring it all together to serve our customers you know, their journeys, basically. >> Let's hang out there for a second because you you see, you both see extraordinarily large customers across different verticals and industries. Talk about some of the trends that you might be seeing that transcend across all of them. Ranjit, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, it's a great question. You know, certainly more, you know, sort of fundamentally, we see this as a huge opportunity this decade. Many folks that I work with call this the roaring twenties all over again. You know, hopefully it won't end the same way as the last one. But in many ways, every client of ours, across every industry, is going through a huge disruption as they're thinking about the businesses they're in, the products they serve, the segments they support, the client demographics that are changing. So that's one big mega sort of trend. The other one is the rate of change. I think most everybody's dealing with the rate of change of technology, right? You come here last year and this year there are a thousand new services. Every day they release five or seven more and every other, you know, technology provider out there as well. So our clients in general are struggling with how do they embrace and adopt this change quickly. >> Right. >> And today they're not set up for that, right? >> Decision overload too, so much. >> Absolutely. >> That one, and then their ability to be able to absorb this change, right? A typical client of ours, enterprise client, has a three to four year journey to embrace new technology. That's the refresh cycle. But now we see that half life going down to three months and six months. So large part of this transformation is how do you build that muscle to be able to deal with this change that's only going to continue to accelerate. So not only are we helping them think about new products and new businesses, but also how to build this muscle and fundamentally change the way they deliver technology. And that's, I think also a place where our partnership is really valuable. >> It's like your sprint muscles versus your marathon muscles, you know? >> Right. >> You're totally fast, which is an entirely different set. >> Exactly right. >> What about you Monty? >> Yeah, and so from a technology standpoint, also one of the biggest trends that we are seeing, you know, two years ago when you looked at it, you know it was all about hyperscaler, public cloud, cloud first. Now we're seeing more of a multicloud approach, right? We're seeing that pull back in towards hybrid cloud. I know John talks about the- >> The Super cloud. >> The Super cloud, right? >> Yes, one of our favorite- >> I know Deloitte talks about Meta cloud, we talk about cross cloud services. So that's a trend that's coming up. And, and you know, we're, from a VM VMware standpoint we're very well positioned in the multicloud space, you know, our partnership with other hyperscalers, actually all cloud providers and then our partnerships with, you know, system integrators like Deloitte, it is really helping us propel, you know that solution to our customers. And so that's a big trend we're seeing around the multicloud and the modern application space. >> How, I mean the multicloud issue seem to be very hot a couple of years ago to die down, at least with, you know, the amount of coverage that's afforded to it. Is that because customers are less interested in multiple clouds or is it because that's become simply part of the landscape? >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it's there was a recent study done that over 70% of the enterprise customers are inherently multicloud, right? And multicloud just doesn't meet the hyperscalers, right? We take multicloud as the hyperscalers the private cloud, the edge cloud, the industry cloud. They've got data all over the place, right? So inherently, most enterprises are multicloud. They're realizing it now that the, when they're lock-in is an issue with them. And so, you know, over 70% of the hundred customers are actually looking at building that orchestration layer on top of the clouds which can provide them a, you know, a more meaningful and simplified decision making for their cloud workloads. >> And maybe to add to that, John, I think your point about the fascination with multicloud four or five years ago and how that tapered off I think the use case people were solving for back then was to have three different cloud options for the same workload. That they could swap between those three, maybe they could arbitrage on cost, et cetera. That in our view is a fool's errand because it's just the you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But what we are seeing now is for different workloads you want to give people optionality. So you an edge computing workload you're serving a restaurant, you need that to run on a different cloud provider because they have better analytics the better geospatial data, that's fine. But your main core application, we run on a different cloud. So you're still supporting multicloud but you're not confusing the same workload to be trying to run them on multiple clouds at the same time or things of that nature. So I think that's where it's kind of moving towards. >> So I, we've talked a lot about big partnerships. One of the exciting trends at the show is all the new collaboration that's happening. I love that you've been partners for a decade. It shows a long term commitment to the community. If I'm an AWS customer who has not yet taken advantage of your fabulous partnership, what is it about it that makes it so magic? Give me a little bit of the pitch. >> So.. >> Go for it, Monty. You're rolling, I like it. (Monty chuckling) Let's go with it. >> Right. So I think for an AWS customer, so we have, VMware has an offering that we built with AWS VMC on AWS right? I think there is a real value in it. There are specific use cases that create a financial benefit an operational benefit for the customers, right? We've traditionally not done a great job of elevating that message. And that's our goal, right? That's our goal is to make sure that the VMC on AWS offering, it's not a competitive offering to AWS, it's actually a complimentary offering. It helps everybody, it helps the customer, it helps VMware it helps AWS in bringing all these pieces together to solve the customer problems. There are certain use cases that are really good for moving to a native cloud like AWS. There are definitely use cases, there are financial advantages, operational advantages that the customers will get out of doing the VMC on AWS offering. And again, our partnerships with our, you know, most strategic partners, who are bringing the industry expertise on top of it will even accelerate that even faster. >> I know you're not at liberty to talking at length about the Broadcom acquisition but can you offer our listeners any insight into what will be continued, what Broadcom's approach or attitude toward the partnerships that you've already built and how strong those are, how committed they are to continuing them. >> You know, there's things we can share, there's things we cannot share and I'll let Ranjit talk about it, but from our standpoint, I think, you know, know what Broadcom has openly stated, we'll say that again, right? They are looking at this as a very strategic acquisition. From their standpoint, they've made it clear that multicloud and modern applications are two of the big strategic initiatives they want to continue. They've also stated openly that, you know, in order for us to scale, we still need these partnerships. And so the partnerships and the ecosystem that VMware has built, you know, it's going to be looked upon as, you know, something they'll continue to do for at least for the near future. You know, what's going to happen in future, we don't know. But in the near future, they don't want to disrupt the partnership, the channel programs that we've already built, you know? And that's very important to us because that's one of our biggest go-to market routes through the partners. >> And most importantly, that logo isn't changing. So you get to wear all of your- >> Well, yes, I was worried if they change the logo then I have to reorder my T-shirts again. But now, you know, we're good for now. (Monty chuckling) >> We're good for now. You both are such wonderfully seasoned veterans so you don't look it like we talked about earlier, but both of you with 20 plus years of experience in the industry. We're doing a new thing on theCUBE this show, where we're looking for your 30 second hot take. Think of it as your thought leadership sizzle reel. What is the most important story or theme coming out of this year's show? I'll see who looks most ready. Monty looks ready. All right, let's go. >> Well, you know, I, you know, one of the things that I've seen, and I've been coming to re:Invents for quite some time you know, this is my sixth re:Ivent, but I really like the ecosystem story that is now building, right? It used to be from an Amazon standpoint, it used to be always customer obsession, which is still there, but they've added partner obsession now, right? And that's a new thing. That means now they are focusing on the ecosystem, just like we are focusing, just like Deloitte is focusing on ecosystem and that to me is a trend worth talking about. >> I love that. And very holistic and very astute. All right, Ranjit, what about you? >> Well, first I love the energy. It almost feels like there was no pandemic, right? So that's a good reminder- >> We're all ready for that feeling- >> and hopefully we're world beyond what we've been through. I also think, you know to that point, there's a lot more focus on ecosystem plays that move beyond just the less lift and shift with the cloud. But let's be thoughtful about changing the way you serve your clients, the capabilities you want to deliver. And a lot of that is through the ecosystem around client problems and working backwards from clients I think is also amazing. >> Yeah. >> And finally, I'm also always energized by the the team that's here or the folks that are here. I think it's become more pervasive, you know, earlier on it was more CIOs and, you know, senior execs. I think we're seeing a lot more across the organization, which is a great way to drive adoption and things. >> Really beautiful point. I love that. The diversity here is definitely noticeable. This is a cheeky thing to say live, but I noticed this is probably the first tech conference I've ever been to as a woman where I, there was actually a line for the restroom. Normally we're straight in at these and it's a silly thing. Yeah, now at breaks I have to allow a little extra time, but it was one of those moments where I very much noticed it earlier today and had to text to know I was going to be a little later back to the set, but I think it- I'm glad you brought that up cuz this community is special, it's inclusive, it's collaborative, it's massive companies as well as tiny startups from all over the world. It's very exciting. I really enjoyed talking with both of you. I hope we get to have you back on the show. It was fun. It was fashionable. Ranjit, Monty, thank you both so much for bringing your energy and your thoughts >> We'd love to come back. Yes, we'd love to come back in hot pink next time and talk about. >> I mean, the Deloitte consultants usually know how to thread up but (Savannah chuckling) >> I know. I'm seriously overshadowed >> And I'm wearing my neons next time. I wear a very brave pink. So generally speaking, although the sequence were- We'll definitely do it. Thank you so much for being here, and thank all of you for tuning in for our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillian. We are theCUBE and we are the source for leading and spicy, zesty, fashionable tech coverage. (upbeat music playing)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Day three of the cube coverage here at VMware VMware Explorer, not world 12 years. The Cube's been covering VMware is end user conference this year. It's called explore previously world. We got two great guests, friends of the cube friend, cube, alumni and cloud rod, Keith Townson, principal CTO advisor, air streaming his way into world this year in a big way. Congratulations. And course James Erhard principal technology, a at tan zoo cloud ARA. He's been in cloud game for a long time. We've known each other for a long, long time, even before cloud was cloud. So great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >>Ah, it's a pleasure, always happy to >>Be here. So day threes are kind of like riff. I'll throw out super cloud. You guys will, will trash it. We'll debate. It'll be controversial and say this damage done by the over rotation of developer experience. We'll defend Tansu, but really the end of the game is, is that guys, we have been on the cloud thing for a long time. We're we're totally into it. And we've been saying infrastructure is code as the end state. We want to get there. Right? DevOps and infrastructure is code has always been the, the, the underlying fire burning in, in all the innovation, but it's now getting legitimately enterprised it's adopted in, in, in large scale, Amazon web services. We saw that rise. It feels we're in another level right now. And I think we're looking at this new wave coming. And I gotta say, you know, the Broadcom thing has put like an electric shock syndrome into this ecosystem cuz they don't know what's gonna happen next. So as a result, everyone's kind of gotta spring in their step a little, whether it's nervous, energy or excitement around something happening, it's all cloud native. So, you know, as VMware's got such a great investment in cloud native, but yet multi cloud's the story. Right? So, so messaging's okay. So what's happening here? Like guys let's, let's break it down. You're on the show floor of the Airstream you're on the inside, but with the seeing the industry, James will start with you what's happening this year with cloud next level and VMware's future. >>Yeah, I think the big thing that is happening is that we are beginning to see the true separation of capacity delivery from capacity consumption in computing. And what I mean by that is the, the abstractions that sort of bled between the idea of a server and the idea of an application have sort of become separated much better. And I think Kubernetes is, is the strong evidence of that. But also all of the public cloud APIs are strong evidence of that. And VMware's APIs, frankly, before that we're strong evidence of that. So I think what's, what's starting to happen now then is, is developers have really kind of pulled very far away from, from anything other than saying, I need compute, I need network. I need storage. And so now you're seeing the technologies that say, well, we've figured out how to do that at a team level, like one team can automate an application to an environment, but another team will, you know, other teams, if I have hundreds of teams or, or thousands of applications, how do I handle that? And that's what the excitement I think is right >>Now. I mean the, the developer we talking, we're going on camera before you came on camera Keith around, you know, your contr statement around the developer experience. Now we, I mean, I believe that the cloud native development environment is doing extremely well right now. You talk to, you know, look around the industry. It's, it's at an all time high and relative to euphoria, you know, sit on the beach with sunglasses. You couldn't be better if you were a developer open source, booming, everything's driving to their doorstep, self service. They're at the center of the security conversation, which shift left. Yeah. There's some things there, but it's, it's a good time. If you're a developer now is VMware gonna be changing that and, and you know, are they gonna meet the developers where they are? Are they gonna try to bring something new? So these are conversations that are super important. Now VMware has a great install base and there's developers there too. So I think I see their point, but, but you have a take on this, Keith, what's your, what's your position on this? How do the developer experience core and tangential played? >>Yeah, we're I think we're doing a disservice to the industry and I think it's hurting and, or D I think I'm gonna stand by my statement. It's damaging the in industry to, to an extent VMware >>What's damaging to the >>Industry. The focusing over focusing on developer experience developer experience is super important, but we're focusing on developer experience the, the detriment of infrastructure, the infrastructure to deliver that developer experience across the industry isn't there. So we're asking VMware, who's a infrastructure company at core to meet the developer where the developer, the developer is at today with an infrastructure that's not ready to deliver on the promise. So when we're, when NetApp is coming out with cool innovations, like adding block storage to VMC on AWS, we collectively yawn. It's an amazing innovation, but we're focused on, well, what does that mean for the developer down the road? >>It should mean nothing because if it's infrastructure's code, it should just work, right. >>It should just work, but it doesn't. Okay. >>I see the damage there. The, >>The, when you're thinking, oh, well I should be able to just simply provide Dr. Service for my on-prem service to this new block level stores, because I can do that in a enterprise today. Non-cloud, we're not there. We're not at a point where we can just write code infrastructure code and that happens. VMware needs the latitude to do that work while doing stuff like innovating on tap and we're, you know, and then I think we, we, when buyers look at what we say, and we, we say VMware, isn't meeting developers where they're at, but they're doing the hard work of normalizing across clouds. I got off a conversation with a multi-cloud customer, John, the, the, the, the unicorn we all talk about. And at the end I tried to wrap up and he said, no, no, no way. I gotta talk about vRealize. Whoa, you're the first customer I heard here talk about vRealize and, and the importance of normalizing that underlay. And we just don't give these companies in this space, the right >>Latitude. So I'm trying to, I'm trying to rock a little bit what you're saying. So from my standpoint, generically speaking, okay. If I'm a, if the developers are key to the, to the cloud native role, which I, I would say they are, then if I'm a developer and I want, and I want infrastructure as code, I'm not under the hood, I'm not getting the weeds in which some lot people love to do. I wanna just make things work. So meet me where I'm at, which means self-service, I don't care about locking someone else should figure that problem out, but I'm gonna just accelerate my velocity, making sure it's secure. And I'm moving on being creative and doing my thing, building apps. Okay. That's the kind of the generic, generic statement. So what has to happen in your mind to >>Get there? Yeah. Someone, someone has to do the dirty work of making the world move as 400, still propagate the data center. They're still H P X running SAP, E there's still, you know, 75% of the world's transactions happen through SAP. And most of that happens on bare metal. Someone needs to do the plumbing to give that infrastructure's cold world. Yeah. Someone needs to say, okay, when I want to do Dr. Between my on premises edge solution and the public cloud, someone needs to make it invisible to the Kubernetes, the, the Kubernetes consuming that, that work isn't done. Yeah. It >>Is. It's an >>Opportunity. It's on paper. >>It's an opportunity though. It's not, I mean, we're not in a bad spot. So I mean, I think what you're getting at is that there's a lot of fix a lot of gaps. All right. I want Jay, I wanna bring you in, because we had a panel at super cloud event. Chris Hoff, you know, beaker was on here. Yeah. He's always snarky, but he's building, he's been building clouds lately. So he's been getting his, his hands dirty, rolling up his sleeves. The title of panel was originally called the innovators dilemma with a question, mark, you know, haha you know, innovators, dilemma, little goof on that. Cuz you know, there's challenges and trade offs like, like he's talking about, he says we should call it the integrator's dilemma because I think a lot of people are talking about, okay, it's not as seamless as it can be or should be in the Nirvana state. >>But there's a lot of integration going on. A lot of APIs are, are key to this API security. One of the most talked about things. I mean I interviewed six companies on API security in the past couple months. So yeah. I mean I never talked to anybody about API security before this year. Yeah. APIs are critical. So these key things of cloud are being attacked. And so there's more complexity as we're getting more successful. And so, so I think this is mucking up some of the conversations, what's your read on this to make the complexity go away. You guys have the, the chaos rain here, which I actually like that Dave does too, but you know, Andy Grove once said let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. So we're in that reign in the chaos mode. Now what's your take on what Keith was saying around. Yeah. >>So I think that the one piece of the puzzle that's missing a little bit from Keith's narrative that I think is important is it's really not just infrastructure and developers. Right? It's it's there's in fact, and, and I, I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, right? There's there's really sort of three layers of operations that come out of the cloud model in long term and that's applications and infrastructure at the bottom and in the middle is platform and services. And so I think one of the, this is where VMware is making its play right now is in terms of providing the platform and service capability that does that integration at a lower level works with VMs works with bare metal, works with the public cloud services that are available, makes it easy to access things like database services and messaging services and things along those lines. >>It makes it easy to turn code that you write into a service that can be consumed by other applications, but ultimately creates an in environment that begins to pull away from having to know, to write code about infrastructure. Right. And so infrastructure's, code's great. But if you have a right platform, you don't have to write code about infrastructure. You can actually D declare what basic needs of the application are. And then that platform will say, okay, well I will interpret that. And that's really, that's what Kubernetes strength is. Yeah. And that's what VMware's taking advantage of with what we're doing >>With. Yeah. I remember when we first Lou Tucker and I, and I think you might have been in the room during those OpenStack days and when Kubernetes was just starting and literally just happened, the paper was written, gonna go out and a couple companies formed around it. We said that could be the interoperability layer between clouds and our, our dream at that time was Hey. And, and we, we mentioned and Stratus in our, our super cloud, but the days of spanning clouds, a dream, we thought that now look at Kubernetes. Now it's kind of become that defacto rallying moment for, I won't say middleware, but this abstraction that we've been talking about allows for right once run anywhere. I think to me, that's not nowhere in the market today. Nobody has that. Nobody has anything that could write once, read one, write once and then run on multiple clouds. >>It's more true than ever. We had one customer that just was, was using AKs for a while and then decided to try the application on EKS. And they said it took them a couple of hours to, to get through the few issues they ran into. >>Yeah. I talked to a customer who who's going from, who went from VMC on AWS to Oracle cloud on Oracle cloud's VMware solution. And he raved about now he has a inherent backup Dr. For his O CVS solution because there's a shim between the two. And >>How did he do >>That? The, there there's a solution. And this is where the white space is. James talked about in the past exists. When, when I go to a conference like Cuban, the cube will be there in, in Detroit, in, in, in about 45 days or so. I talk to platform group at the platform group. That's doing the work that VMware red had hash Corp all should be doing. I shouldn't have to build that shim while we rave and, and talk about the power Kubernetes. That's great, but Kubernetes might get me 60 to 65% of their, for the platform right now there's groups of developers within that sit in between infrastructure and sit in between application development that all they do is build platforms. There's a lot of opportunity to build that platform. VMware announced tap one, 1.3. And the thing that I'm surprised, the one on Twitter is talking about is this API discovery piece. If you've ever had to use an API and you don't know how to integrate with it or whatever, and now it, it just magically happens. The marketing at the end of developing the application. Think if you're in you're, you're in a shop that develops hundreds of applications, there's thousands or tens of thousands of APIs that have to be documented. That's beating the developer where it's at and it's also infrastructure. >>Well guys, thanks for coming on the cube. I really appreciate we're on a time deadline, which we're gonna do more. We'll follow up on a power panel after VMware Explorer. Thanks for coming on the cube. Appreciate it. No problem. See you pleasure. Yeah. Okay. We'll be back with more live coverage. You, after this short break, stay with us.

>>Okay, welcome back to everyone. Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube. Two sets three days of live coverage. Dave Ante's here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all host of the cube 12 interviews today, just we're with Rocklin and rolling, getting down to the end of the show. As we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Steven Jones. Here's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon web service. Steven Jones. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. >>Welcome back cube alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah. >>Pleasure to be here. Great >>To see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously 10 years at AWS, what a ride is that's been, come on. That's fantastic. Tell me it's been crazy. >>Wow. Learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we, we, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of, of the cloud and, and we, we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that animals say that, but it really is. Right. If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on, on clouds, it's in the billions, right. And the amount of, of spend in it is still in the trillion. So there's, there's a long way to go and customers are pushing us hard. Obviously >>It's been interesting a lot going on with VM. We're obviously around with them, obviously changing the strategy with their, their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at abs, we've been, we've been, this'll be our ninth year, no 10th year at reinvent coming up for us. So, but it's 10 years of everything at Amazon, 10 years of S three, 10 years of C two. So if you look at the, the marks of time, now, the history books are starting to be written about Amazon web services. You know, it's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like >>Hardcore, for sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC two instances back in the day and the maximum amount of memory you could conversion into one of these machines was I think 128 gig of Ram fast forward to today. You literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of Ram just in insane amounts. Right? My, my son who's a gamer tells me he's got 16 gig in his, in his PC. You need to, he thinks that's a lot. >>Yeah. >>That's >>Excited about that. That's not even on his graphics card. I mean, he's, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just all >>The it's like, right? >>I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done, I mean, look at every it's changed. Everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS nitro, Dave ante. And I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantos, these guys have, are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the, at the level. I mean that, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, and the advances on the Silicon graviton performance wise is crazy. I mean, so what does that enabling? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side, we think that's enabling another set of new net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw snowflake come on, customer of AWS refactor, the data warehouse, they call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs. You see capital one, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx >>Is exactly right. And Ziggy mentioned graviton. So graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you know, you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. Every event Adam announced that we're working with SAP to, to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a, a database of service offering HANA flagship to graviton as well. So it's, it's definitely changing. >>And I think, you know, one of the, and we're gonna circle back to VMware is kind of a point to this. This conversation is that, is that if you look at the trends, right, okay. VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot, lot of other stragglers try to do cloud. They fell off the road, OpenStack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't wanna get into that, but the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem, you have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what pat Gelsinger said? And I was there, let's clear up the positioning. Let's go all in with AWS. That's >>Right >>At that time, 2016. >>Yeah. This was new for us, for >>Sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How is that going out? State's worked. >>It's working well very well. It's I mean, we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement what, five years ago at this conference. Yeah. 2016. So, I mean, it's, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And, and, and what's been different. I think about this relationship. And it was new for us was that we, we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't a, we've got a, a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a, a joint offering together. Talk about, about the main difference. >>Yeah. And that, and that's been working, but now here at this show, if you look at, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is like just, I think positioning for, you know, what could happen in, in a post broad Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction they're Tansu where, where customers were leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic. It, you know, mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm gonna go on continu, accelerate on, in the public cloud, but I'm gonna have hybrid on premise as well. You guys have that solution. Now they're gonna need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware is probably not gonna be able to get 'em all of it. And, and that there's a lot more cloud native options as customers want more cloud native. How do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. >>Yeah. There's probably two ways I would look at this. Right? So, so one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS. And then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center, evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers they're like, I I've gotta think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some net new application, more and more. We're actually seeing customers. They've got their assets. A lot of them are still on premises in a VMware state, right. They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this, this idea of migrate. Now you need to get the benefits of TCO and, and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the, the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now AWS native services are for use right alongside any that a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just, >>And that's, that's how you guys see the native and, and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's, that's important because this, I mean, if I always joke about, you know, we've been here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff, you know, on the bus to the event last night, walking the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets, there's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top. And I wanna get your reaction to this Steven, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference, there's conversations around ransomware and storage and D dub and recovery. It's all, a lot of those happen. Yeah. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air gapped. And a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations and then the other one is, okay, I gotta get the cloud story. >>Right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud. I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now not it serves some sort of back office function. Yeah. It's like, my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental siloed. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you, how do you see that evolving because VMware customers are now going there. And I won't say, I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. >>I think, I think, I mean, it's an interesting con it's an interesting way to put it and I, I would completely agree. I think it's, it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted. Right. And they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company. Right. I mean, if, if you look at where not too many years back, there were, you know, big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud. Right. Airbnb they're disruptors. >>There's, that's the >>App, right? That's the app. Yeah. So I, I would exactly agree. And, and that's who other companies are competing with. And so they have to move quickly. You talked about some, some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the general availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now, why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware. On-premises still, there's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp, NetApp filers, and the same enterprise features like replication. D do you were talking about and Snapp and clone. Those types of things can be done. Now within the V VMware state on AWS, what's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this, you know, petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these S from on-premises into AWS, this, this NetApp service, and then connected connecting that up to the BMC option. So it just allows customers much, much. >>You guys, you guys have always been customer focus. Every time I sat down with the Andy jazzy and then last year with Adam, same thing we worked back from, I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customer, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I observed, we talked about here yesterday on the cube was the observations of reinvent versus say, VM world. Now explore is VM world's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware. And the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements can compare that to the past, say eight years of reinvent, where there's so much Amazon action going on the partners, I won't say take as a second, has a backseat to Amazon, but the, the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS, because there's always new stuff coming out. >>And it's, it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or, or change between like the VMware ecosystem. And now Amazon there's, a lot of our interviews are like, they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show they're here. So you start to see what I call the naturalization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow, and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at the event this year, as you always do, but the partners are much more part of the AWS equation, not just we're leasing all these new services and, and oh, for sure. Look at us, look at Amazon. We're growing. Cause you guys were building out and look, the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level, the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How has Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some, some, a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or no solve the problem, addressing the need and this next level of growth. What's your reaction to >>That? Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I, I, I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS and partners are big >>By the way, you sell out every reinvent. So it's, you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that you, that there's no partner network there, but >>Partners are critical. I mean, absolutely naturally we want a relationship with a customer, but in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the, the needs of customers, we need partners. Right. We, we can't, we can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to. Right. And so partners have long built teams and expertise that, that caters to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And, and we love partners >>For that. Yeah. I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side, you don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon, but for the most part, you let competition come in, even on, so you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more the maturization of partners within the reinvent ecosystem, cuz we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there it's sold out as big numbers, but it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition of at a AWS because of the, the rising tide and, and now their enablement, cuz now they're part of the, of the value proposition. Even more than ever before >>They, they really are. And they, and they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right. We, we all do better together. >>Okay. So let's talk about the VMware cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show, what's your, what's your main focus cuz a lot of people here are doing, doing sessions. What's been some of the con content that you guys are producing here. >>Yeah. So the best part obviously is a always the customer conversations to partner conversations. So a, a lot of, a lot of sessions there, we did keynote yesterday in Ryan and I, where we talked about a number of announcements that are, I think pretty material now to the offering a joint announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some, some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like how, how do I take what I've got on premises and easily move into AWS and technology like HSX H CX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re IP applications. I mean, you know, it is super difficult sometimes to, to move an application. If you've got figure out where all the firewall rules are and re iPing those, those things source. But yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. >>A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action. You guys have probably seen an uptake on services right on the native side. >>Yes. Yes. For sure. So maybe I just outlined some of the, some of the assets we made this week. So absolutely >>Go ahead. >>We, we announced a new instance family as a, a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I, I, you mentioned nitro earlier, this is on, based on our latest generation of nitro, which allows us to offer as you know, bare metal instances, which is, which is what VMware actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nira done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I four, I instance, it's based on the, the latest Intel isolate processor with more than double the Ram double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabytes per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the, with the NetApp storage solution that we, we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision, compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your VSAN array, that was on a V VMware cloud. Yeah. You'd add another note. You might not need more compute for memory. You'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers. I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move. Now. We were waiting for something that like this, that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads yeah. Into VMware cloud. It's >>Like, it's like the, the alignment. You mentioned alignment earlier. You know, I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with the hybrid story that's that's seamless or somewhat seems it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you, you guys have that there talking that big here, you got vs a eight vSphere, eight out it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services and the horsepower. They have their stuff, you have yours that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree? And, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's, what's the motivation now to go faster? >>Look, it is, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together. And so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're, we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. >>What is that vision real quick? >>So that vision has to actually help an under help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay. So you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on premises. And why is that? Well, it used to be, there was big for data and migration, right? And the speed. And so we continue to iterate this and that again is a joint thing. Instead of say, VMware, just building on AWS, it really is a, a tight partnership. >>Yeah. The lift and shift is a, an easy thing to do. And, and, and by the way, that could be a hassle too. But I hear most people say the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that. >>We are doing that. Absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options, right? If a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They wanna buy from VMware for a similar reason. They could buy from VMware. So are >>They in the marketplace? >>They are in the market. There, there are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tansu, there's a Tansu offering in the marketplace. So yes. Customers can >>Contract. Yeah. Marketplaces. I'm telling you that's very disruptive. I'm Billy bullish on the market AIOS marketplace. I think that's gonna be a transformative way. People have what they procure and fully agree, deploy and how, and channel relationships are gonna shift. I think that's gonna be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation and, and we haven't even seen it yet. We're gonna be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're gonna be documenting that. So even final question for you, what's next for you? What's on the agenda. You got reinvent right around the corner. Your P ones are done. Right? I know. Assuming all that, I turn that general joke. That's an internal Amazon joke. FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the world. Obviously they're gonna go this, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is gonna be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? >>Yeah. So both of us are hyper focused on adding additional options, both from a, an instance compute perspective. You know, VMware announced some, some, some additional offerings that we've got. We've got a fully complete, like, so they're, they announce things like VMware flex compute V VMware flex storage. You mentioned earlier, there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware based offering. So we're hyper focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice >>Real quick. Jonathan made me think about the ransomware we were at reinforce Steven Schmidtz now the CSO. Now you got a CSO. AJ's the CSO. You got a whole focus, huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's PO more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. It's been more Lum and doom. What's the security tie in here with VMware. Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? >>Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like you don't have anything of security. And so what are the things that, that we're excited about specifically with VMware is, is the latest offering that, that we put together and it's called this, this ransomware offering. And it's, it's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today, just >>Air gap. >>Right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this, this option where CU we can be to be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, right. And a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up super easy. This is cloud. Remember? Yeah. We can spin up a, a copy of this environment, throw a switch, pick a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX firewall it off and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a >>Little bit of scam. We had Tom gills on yesterday and, and one of the things Dave ante had to leave is taking the sun to college is last one in the house and B nester now, but Tom Gill was on. We were talking about how good their security story is ware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could have here. I thought they could have done a better job, but this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. >>Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for, >>Okay. Now the, the real question I want to know is what's your plans for AWS reinvent the blockbuster end of the year, Amazon surf show that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's looking be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really come back and still had massive numbers. AWS summit, New York at 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting reinvent to be pretty large this year. What are you, what are you gonna do there? What's your role there? >>We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously. We're, we're planning on some additional announcements, obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP. And you should look for some things there as well. Yeah. Really looking forward to reinvent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think it >>Always ruins my, I always get an article out. I like, why are you we're having, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I gotta write this article. It's gotta get Adam, Adam. Leski exclusive. We, every year we do a, a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event to me. I think it sets the tone. And it's gonna be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscalers. Now, multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the CapEx goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new, the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone you get paid, cuz it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network, GSI other companies. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean we're really scaling. I mean we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. Yeah. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service, >>The sovereign clouds right around the corner. Let's we'll talk about that soon. Steven. Thanks for coming. I know you gotta go. Thank you for your valuable time. Coming in. Put Steven Jones. Who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business. Four AWS here inside the cube day. Three of cube coverage. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

(lively music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22 formerly VMworld, Dave 12 years we've been covering VMware's annual conference. Going next level explores bigger theme, Multi-cloud another inflection point for VMware. And again at the center of it is the partners Zia Yusuf is here senior vice president strategic ecosystem and industry solutions. You're the, you're, you got the keys to the kingdom for VMware, welcome to theCube. >> It's a pleasure, I mean, you guys are a legend here. This is my first time here. So, it's a pleasure and excited to chat with you. >> Well, great to have you, every single year, since 2010 we've always had great commentary and discussion and sometimes contentious discussion around the role of partners. Visa V, VMware's value proposition, VMware dominant and the enterprise data center, everyone knows that. Dominant and hybrid was first there, everyone knows that. Now going to the next level, the customer stay, they stay with VMware, they don't really leave. They still got a great loyal base but now the enterprise is going NextGen cloud native. The partners are energized with the conversations we're hearing is huge. There's changes of roles is clarity on value proposition. Monetization is hoppin'. It's great stuff, what's going on? You're new, but you have a view of this before. Take us through your what's going on in the partner network, what's the state of the union? >> Yeah, I think, thanks for the question. I think maybe just step back a second right, the word partners is a big word. It covers all kinds of things. VMware has had a rich history of partnerships you know, mostly technology related partnerships. So much of our products depend on other partners, OEM partners, and so on. We've also had a rich history of our channel. So, as you look at different channel partners as you look at going through different parts of the segment SMB and so on, in a cloud context, based on what's happening we needed to take an integrated ecosystem approach. That's the word I use, right. And for me it's, it's a little bit like a spider's web. Like no single strand in the web is that strong but when you put it together thoughtfully in a very deliberate way. That's what an integrated ecosystem strategy. And so we've got our VCP partners, longstanding history that machine continues. We've got our channel partners and OEM partners that machinery continues obviously Dell strategic partner, significant business. The parts of the puzzle that I've been focusing on is five other different pieces. So first of course, is our hyper scale partnerships long history with AWS, very successful history. We have GCVE with GCP. We announced, I think three, four months ago that GCP was joining our VMware cloud universal and a big announcement yesterday about Microsoft doing the same. And hopefully we extend that. So, as we work with this hyper scaler six or seven of these partners, it's a, as you can imagine kind of a multidimensional chess game, if you will a little bit competitive mostly cooperative and stuff, right. The GSI is very exciting piece of it. The essentials that Deloitte, Deloitte announced a new business unit on VMware, ACL did the same. That energy level has really gone up. You see it at the show here as well. We recognize that these significant SI's play a huge role in the decision making process with customers. And we want to enable them to build significant VMware businesses. It's a different game from that perspective. Last thing I'm point out is, industry and verticals. Right I mean, this is not being necessarily an area because of the layer of the stack we've been in. Obviously Telco is an end to end business unit for us. We have products, we have a go to market on Telco, public sector to some degree because you need all these three letter agencies and the security and compliance. But as you look at financial services as you look at retail, as you look at healthcare we need to be aware of the workload we need especially on modern apps, especially on the edge. So we kind of doubling down on some of our vertical capabilities. So, all of those things are connected as well, right. The SI to the hyper scale partners in a vertical context. >> What's the biggest change that you've seen? Because we've observed some partners are leaning out as they change their business. And VMware has got new partners coming in, leaning in. So you got mentioned, Dave mentioned Telco and you got new use cases with edge and multi-cloud so you know, some people kind of maybe age out or change their strategy, some double down the core partner network, and then new ones come in. What's been the biggest change, if you can look at that holistically? >> Yeah, it's a great question, right? Because it's so multidimensional and there is no such thing as a GSI global system because they build products. Sometimes they act as a reseller, they're a solution provider. Also they provide services. So as their business model changes, we have to adjust how we engage with them. We can't put them in nice clean buckets. And that's what I'm doing with my colleagues here is how do we really enable them? And one of the things, I mean, I've done this type of stuff, I was at SAP for many years. We need to figure out how do we make them successful? Not just, this is what VMware wants you to do. We need to understand their business model and how do we fit into that? 'Cause if they grow, then we grow with that. And that is honestly a little, it's a subtle point, but it's a little bit of a nuanced. >> Yeah, it's very nuanced, but you have to nail that. You got to overlay. >> 100% >> The strategy where the enablement is technically or product wise, economics and conflict. (John laughing) >> And profitably, if they're profitably is important to us it's not just their growth. >> So Zia, I want to test the premise on you, something, John and I have been working on this notion of super cloud. And we did an event earlier this month, but one of the aspects that's kind of nuance and futuristic is if I'm a, let's say a financial services company and I'm going through a digital transformation I would be looking strategically at what, say Amazon did taking it's internal IT and then pointing at the world. I would say, I have data. I have tools, I have software, I have expertise that's really unique and could be value add. And I would be thinking, how do I monetize that, create my own cloud. And I'm actually just going to throw it into a public cloud to do that. I've got mainframes running, I've got Oracle stuff on Prem. I'm not going to shift that stuff into the cloud and maybe some of it, but I've got transaction systems and proprietary data. And a lot of it is running on VMware and I've got cloud stuff too. I would be looking at, okay, how do I build my own cloud and put my data, my tooling, my software in front of a new ecosystem, my own ecosystem that I can you know monetize. Are you seeing- >> Without spending the CapEx. >> Yeah, without having to build data centers? Right, exactly. I want to take advantage of the gift that the hyper scalers are given. Are you seeing any activity bubbling up in that regard? >> It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And I think the terminology that we've used around cloud smart kind of goes into that. So let me take what you said. >> Okay please, yeah. >> And frame it in a slightly different way. You can standardize on public clouds and everybody's using the same thing. You're using the same services, and so on. Theoretically that could lose some of your differentiation. Right, I mean, especially for financial services companies that have built so much of their you know, trading test down to the milli, milli, millisecond and how do they do that, and so on. So, I think you have something there right. So, as they look at their technology and software strategy, yes there's cost reduction aspects of it. There's refactoring aspects of it that hygiene that needs to be done as Rughu talked about from this cloud chaos to cloud smart, if you will but then how do you differentiate on the business processes? How do you differentiate that then down into the workloads? And I think that's where to use an old term. It takes a village, right, you've got the system integrator that's providing this stuff. You've got other strategy firms like the BCGs and McKinseys of the world that have huge influence now. Then you've got technology players that are coming into that. And I think the cloud smart approach is to do exactly what you're saying. It's not just the refactoring, it's not just movement to the cloud. How do you retain your competitive edge from the processes the models, the thinking that you've built up over many years. So, I don't know if it's super cloud or what that means, but that at the end of the day, this is about business processes. At the end of the day, this is about having a competitive edge in the market and I think you could do it. >> It's industry cloud, right? >> It's, that's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> I think Industry cloud is a good way. >> Why is there security cloud, Why isn't there an insurance cloud? Why's there a FinTech cloud? So I mean if you look at Goldman Sachs capital one. >> Right. >> There, CapEx is handled by AWS. Snowflake built their entire business on AWS. Didn't spend the dime on CapEx. Well, they spent a lot of operating expense for that CapEx and the fees, but still they became successful. And then the rest is history. So, I think people are seeing this idea of I'll ride that back on the CapEx of the hyper scalers and then use the tooling from the partner network and what's available. To then, cobble together in an architectural engineered way, distributed computing way, a new way to do things. Okay, so if you believe that, which we do, then you say, oh, it's on the balance sheet. So, what we've been hearing from companies is like, "Hey it's going to be on the balance sheet", I better have an income statement impact on the top line. So, you start to see behavior change at the customers not IT powering the business and the back office and terminals and some app. >> Crosscutting. >> It's like, no, no, no this is a digital business. So, the integration of balance sheet income statement on the economics is driving a lot of the behavior at the customers. So we see customers thinking this way and it's like we've never seen this level of business model refactoring as well as partner vendor selection, product technology mix at the same time. >> And VMware. >> At this level. >> Need the connective tissue between the hyper scalers in the ecosystem and actually provide those cross cloud connections. >> Yeah. >> You know, to the extent there's a business case there, that's what we're trying to of squint through. Is it going to be hybrid with on-prem in one cloud or is there an advantage of going cross clouds beyond just avoiding lock in you know, to take advantage of global infrastructure? >> So and then the next question is the Tam then bigger which means the partners are better? >> Yeah right. >> Participate in that. >> Yeah, I think, and we look at economics of this, right? I mean, there's a huge emphasis on cost, right. Cost, and I completely get that. I think, as I've talked to customers both now that I'm here but before advising a range of companies the innovation process, the time to impact is equally important all right as you compete. There's no point in just getting your cost down. If you're then getting beaten up in the market and you're not able to differentiate with new digital services. And this is where call it super cloud, call it industry cloud. We need to connect up to the business processes and the business impact and not just in my view the cost infrastructure piece of it. >> Yeah. And that we can't do on our own, we're not an apps company. So we're, you're not SAP, we're not Oracle, but we need to work with those players to make sure that their workloads are optimized in the right cloud in the right configuration. And that is a job to be done as opposed to just let's take it to town. >> And there's clearly a technology business case, especially if we're working with companies like VMware who's going to help me you know, simplify. >> Right. >> My move to the multi-cloud but there's also a business and economic impact in that. Even if it's not, if it could be simple as if I partner with Microsoft I'm going to do more business right if I'm one of these industry clouds. So I see that as another potential tailwind, it's really, it's like when Dreesen says all your companies are software companies, to me all companies are cloud companies, now increasingly. >> Look the difference between cloud and apps and then stuff, I mean like. >> Yeah, it's all. >> It's like you know there's used to be infrastructure and then apps company and so on. We need to deliver with our ecosystem partners and integrated solution and solution with a big S not just the technology solution but the broader, I mean look at the change management. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We talked about culture, I mean, if you don't get that piece right and the change management piece. >> Everything, yeah. >> You know the rest of it is history. >> Well and it's got to be delivered as a service, >> It has to be. >> Which is huge implications as to how you deal with change management. >> And this goes back to my kind of first comment is I really try and think of this by architecting the ecosystem. I don't like the word alliances. Right I mean, let's say kind of a one to one relationship. You know, let's do an agreement, let's go have dinner, but architecting the ecosystem the spiders web, who are the different players how can we compliment each other? And if it, Deloitte and a Microsoft want to do amazing business together related to VMware technology I want to encourage that. And so those third party Connections. >> You guys your contextualizing the ecosystem, basically. And I think from a customers standpoint that's a benefit to them, in my opinion in fact, Dave, remember at our supercloud.world event URL supercloud.world is the plug for the site. They can check it out. One of the comments from the cloudarati panel was we had a title this session called the innovators dilemma you know question mark you know . >> Best book ever written. >> Yeah, yeah. And so the, one of the panels said, it shouldn't be, we should change it to the integrators dilemma because what's happening is that integration is now standard table stakes and, but integrating the right things now matters, right? So, integration for integration sake isn't necessarily the end game anymore. >> And this is where. >> And this kind of where you're getting at with the spider's web is that integrating properly is a solution mindset. >> And look, I'm integrating also, you know have to bring in data from that perspective. Right, at the end of the day data being the new oil, if you will, the integration allows that data to flow to the right place at the right time to make the right decision. Now, we are not doing all of those pieces but we are certainly enabling that. And as you especially start looking at what we can do on the edge and what we can do in a retail store and a factory and so on those kinds of things come together. >> Okay, Zia take some time. We got a couple minutes left, only two minutes left, I want you to get some commentary directly to the audience around what specifically you're doubling down on. That's new that you're investing in on the partner network or your partner strategy. What is a steady state that's being nurtured and farmed or whatever word you want to use, but here's our core thing. Here's the area of improvement we're going to be in you know, cranking the handle on take us through that. >> Sure. >> I know you got OAM, got telco, got new things going on. >> Yeah so, maybe a couple of things right. >> lay it all out. >> First of all it has to be linked to VMware strategy. So as we transition on this journey to subscription saas ARR, we need to bring our ecosystem along to do that. That has business model implications that has implications on how we engage with them, how we define success how we value things. So that's an important journey. Secondly, is we need to do a better job of enabling our partners. Right, I mean, we have our partner connected. We do a pretty good job on the channel side. We need to do a better job on the GSIs is really understanding their business model, how they're engaging with their customers and provide them the technology the support, the financial resources, so that they can be successful. That's very important. Third is, to connect the dots on the ecosystem, right? I mean it's a, I've spent a lot of time in this event as well in joint meetings between system integrators and hyper scalers with our technology colleagues on Intel or NetApp or AMD. And these are companies that we have a rich history with. We're trying to connect, because that's how customers look at it. So, connecting the dots between the ecosystem super important to us, and then look, there's a change management journey within VMware. We also need to understand how we can engage with partners in a more productive, effective way. How do we scale this up? I believe, I think our leadership in Raghu and Sumit we are not going to succeed unless we have a profitable, engaged, passionate ecosystem around. >> Yeah I mean, they got to make money. They got to. >> Exactly. >> Be successful, have successful customers, their end customers your customers. Well, all good, question of where you're investing the most right now. If you had to put a kind of the pie chart together, I mean some of it's steady state like it's a machine, some of it's new like Telco for instance I mean here's. >> I think again, rich history on the channel side, we continue to invest there. Very valuable to go do that. I think some of these newer areas around the system integrators, especially the large ones, the Whipple's the HCLs, Deloittes essentials of the world, very important. The hyper scaler relationships directly leads into ARR. You saw the VMC cloud Universal will continue. >> We have Google on great props from Google. >> Yeah, We love it you guys. >> Yeah, and so look, I think we are not multi-cloud unless we go do this. Right I mean, Raghuram made a joke about this. We were single cloud and now we're multi-cloud, we want our customers to be able to procure these integrated solutions through VMware and our hyper scaler partners will continue to do that's when multi-cloud really become. And so the GTM motion, the discounting the commission structure all of that machinery is an important radio for me. >> Zia thank you so much for coming on theCube. I know you've been super busy. You got to go out and hit all the partners say hello, compressing you know, got to hit the pavement, say hello to everyone. >> It's been fantastic, the partners have too many, too many parties and so. (Interviewers laughing) But that's a fun part of my job, but appreciate your time. >> You got good stamina. >> Thanks Zia. >> So you got to have that in this game. Not about the faint of heart here at VMware. Zia thank you for coming on. >> Of course. >> This is the cube coverage, back after lunch. After the short break day two of three days of live coverage here in Moscone West on the street floor level of the event I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante. We'll be right back. (lively music)

>>Hi there. Welcome back to the cubes day. One coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from San Francisco, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Dave, we've been here all day, having some great conversations with the VMware partner ecosystem >>With real live people >>Within in 3d. Yeah. People actually sitting down next to us still >>Appreciated, even though, you know, we've, we've done a few of these events, but yeah, it feels like things are getting back to normal. >>It does. You and I were both in the keynote starting this morning, standing room only. We're hearing somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 attendees. Yeah. We're in Moscoe west. So we're kind of away from a little bit of the, the main action. But talk to me about some of the things that you heard this morning in the keynote, some of the announcements from VMware, did it meet your expectations? >>Yes. And because I didn't expect, you know, this is very, very different than going to say an AWS event where they're going to launch 300 new shiny objects. This was very much in my mind so far about VMware focusing on its core value proposition and an aspect of its core value proposition that is the cloud stack and how they are shoring up places in that strategy that needed shoring up like addressing issues with licensing. So you don't have to have separate licensing for on premises, VMware things. You're doing separate licenses in hyperscale cloud providers for doing those very same things that looks like something that's going to roll out over time. That's very, very interesting. Something that wasn't really wasn't mentioned directly, but, but, but actually one of our guests mentioned it. It's this idea that if you take the VMware cloud provider partner, community VCP P is the inside term for it. >>There are thousands of VMware partners that deliver VMware cloud software on top of infrastructure, all around the globe. If you take that VCP P community as an entity, you can argue that it is the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. If you look at that as a core value proposition and you look at Broadcom, acquiring VMware, assuming everything goes through it, isn't just vSphere. That is exciting to Broadcom, or it shouldn't be at least because you have the entire cloud stack when you look at it from that perspective. And I think they were trying to get some of that across today. >>So they address the Broadcom acquisition obviously is the elephant in the room. It was right. Impossible. >>Well, well, they have OC 10 stand up in wave. OC >>Tanon stood up. Did, did a wave, just >>Crowd because he can't say anything. And you know, I've got European approval still pending, right. You know, all sorts of stuff. But >>What we are, what we heard today from, I'll say the partner ecosystem, we talked with NetApp, we talked with pure storage. We talked with Phoenix, snap, others. I I'd have to look through my notes. Everyone's actually quite positive. Yeah. On the acquisition and what it can mean for the future of VMware. Did you hear the same? >>Yes, absolutely. And I think partially that's because the partners that we talk to are really close to the core of VMware's value proposition. That's never going to go away. So if you're talking about NetApp and AWS partnering with VMware to deliver NetApp storage services into that environment, that's core VMware proposition, it's nowhere near the bleeding edge of what, of, what, of what VMware has been doing. So they're going to be bullish. The other thing that's interesting from some of the partners that we've talked to, if you had asked us five or 10 years ago, would those partners be successful today? We might have predicted that they'd all be gone, right? NetApp what's gonna happen. Well, all storage is going to cloud. Guess what NetApp's doing? Pretty darn well with its partner, with its cloud partnerships and card and, and cloud strategy, VMware old school virtualization on premises. Ah, what are they gonna do? I'll tell you. I was skeptical when pat Gelsinger first pursued the VMC strategy with AWS. Hey, it's worked out pretty well and now they have the same capabilities everywhere. So I think that it's, it's interesting to see how solidly positioned some traditional good old fashioned blue gene technologies are how well positioned they are in this era of cloud and how VMware is such a, such a core part of that. So of course they're happy. Yeah. >>Yeah. We talked, we had AWS, NetApp and VMware on, on set for a segment and talked about, and you and I were talking about that segment before it went live. Just the power of look what AWS is doing, how you know, how, how many years ago, 10 years ago would they have been, I'm not gonna partner with NetApp and VMware and now look, it's a core to their business unit. >>Yeah, no, they wouldn't have acknowledged it. They, in fact, there was a time when AWS thought that they could maintain their stratospheric rise at the level they needed to while just letting all legacy existing stuff, just sort of fade away, you know, they'll just do it on the backs of everything new. They ran headlong into something. We call stickiness specifically around the area. VMware, they found that application environments for a variety of really good reasons belong in this context. And it's hard to rip them out by the roots. It's, you know, AWS might have told you five or 10 years ago. Well, if people don't move to cloud immediately, it's because of one reason they're stupid. The reality is there are a lot of really good reasons to maintain that VMware context. They embrace that with VMC. And now I think the it's really interesting. The NetApp announcement is another indication that the world of hyperscale cloud sees VMware as something that is part of the future. That is a very, very long tail. That very, very long tail is clearly what Broadcom is interested in. They don't see this as a flash in the pan. Let's make revenue really quickly. This is about a long ti a long time of future long future >>Long future. Well, VMware's coming off solid quarter earnings that just announced speeding estimates growing the top line by up to 6%. So there's, there's momentum that they're bringing with them into this acquisition. >>Yeah, definitely momentum big argument over what the strategy might be moving forward in terms of growth versus efficiency. I think that virtualization that includes the traditional VM with a resident full blown OS is definitely something that is behind us, but that we're carrying forward for good reason. The transition in, from a VMware perspective into the world of Zu critically important, it's critically important that they get that right as they move forward. So that net new cloud native applications could be, can be created in the VMware context that way. So it's, it's really gonna be interesting to watch over the next couple of years, the direction that this goes, but, but it's easy to get immersed in the Kool-Aid when you're at an event like this, I try to be as skeptical as possible. And I'm actually feeling pretty, I'm feeling better about VMware's future than I did before I arrived today. So that's >>Interesting. Yeah. >>Yeah, no question about it. I think, I mean, there, there, there is such a large core that I think it's gonna take it into the future a long way. >>Well, they definitely have a lot of tailwind behind them. The, the one thing that I, that we didn't get to do today was talk to any customers. We will get to do that tomorrow. When I always love hearing from the voice of the customer, we heard voice of the customer stories from the vendors, from VMware, from NetApp, from >>Little skewed, eat a little skewed. Exactly. They're all happy. All the customers are happy >>They're and very >>Successful and very successful. >>But tomorrow we get to actually rack open and talk with some VMware customers, obviously, right. Customers in the ecosystem as well. And I want to hear from them what their thoughts are on the acquisition. Yeah. >>We know they're, they're not bringing their disgruntled customers. Right. You know, this is my, this is my ex-wife's my, my ex-mother-in-law. And she's here to tell you that she didn't have a good experience. Yeah, no, that's not >>Gonna happen. We're gonna hear good stories tomorrow, but it's always nice to, to hear the stories from the customers themselves. Yeah. I always like doing that. >>No, it's always, it is informative. It's all, it's interesting from the perspective that you, you hone in on what they care about, because even if they have sort of an idea of, of, of the message that they want to get across in terms of what they're doing, still build default to that core of what they really care about. And that's interesting because what the customers really care about is part of that core. And as VMware becomes part of Broadcom, potentially, it's gonna be all about those things that are important, that you know, that customers find important. >>And that's exactly what it should be about. You know, of course we, every conversation that we had today, probably every conversation was inclusive of customer outcomes. What outcomes are you helping businesses achieve regardless of industry, especially as we're hopefully coming out of the pandemic, still in a, in a dynamic, remote hybrid work environment, but it's all about enabling businesses to, to achieve their goals. So I always wanna understand from, from VMware's perspective or AWS or NetApp procure, what are the goals that your customers are coming to you with and who are you having those conversations with? We also heard today a number of probably almost everyone that during the pandemic, the conversations are going up the stack. And maybe they've been talking with the director of it. Now it's the VP of engineering. Maybe it's the CFO. Yep. We're seeing much more strategic initiatives and focus here as customers in every industry have to pivot and have gotta get to the cloud. >>Yeah. I think that's why we work together. Well, Lisa, because you have the virtual leash and you can yank me back from diving into the technical stuff because, because I just, I, I get a pit in my stomach when someone says, oh, technology doesn't matter. It's all about outcomes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Try doing this on technology that doesn't work. Your outcomes are gonna suck both Arely but no, no, no, they are. I know. And, and, and, and it's important that we focus on those things cuz that's what customers really care about. They do, they really care about the business outcomes >>They do. And, and on the cube, we care about those as well. And we wanna get that message across. >>I wish they would care more about speeds and feeds though. It's super interesting. It's like horsepower and torque and it's all >>He does. He gets really excited about that. But the good thing is tomorrow we have more opportunities. Yes. Got a great guest line up tomorrow. Dave and I are gonna be talking to them from right here on this set. So we encourage you to come check in for day two of our coverage of VMware Explorer live from San Francisco. We hope you have a great rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the CUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest. The executive vice president of products at Phoenix NAP. William, welcome to the CUBE. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Happy to be here. >> Talk to us a little, and the audience a little bit about Phoenix NAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. >> Absolutely, yeah. So we're global infrastructures as a service company, foundationally, we are trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service, so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just, you know, program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. >> I like flexible and easy. >> Flexible and easy. >> You guys started back in Phoenix. Hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. >> Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right. And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company, it's called Secured Servers no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to Phoenix NAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. >> Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explore. There's about seven... We're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware and it's partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six, the SPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, vCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on, there was only 10 of us, 11 of us. And most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking, Terramark, Blue Lock, some of these guys. Good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot. And here's plucky Phoenix NAP, still, you know, offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. >> What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? You know this... I love the theme of this event. The center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers both in the right home. But if you drill down on that right home for right applicator or right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right. If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal. Right? And there are other ways to do that, right. If you need a... If your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, you know, there are hyperscalers for that, right. And people need to learn how to make that choice. Right app, right home, right infrastructure. And that's kind of what we help them do. >> It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructures as a service. Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? >> I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis, efficiency, uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware's kind of abstracted. But that actually, I would say is a boon for infrastructure as a service, as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right. People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not. They're cloud platform companies, right. And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right, but it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler. And ultimately that infrastructure's very expensive if you look at it that way. >> So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software-- >> Yeah. >> People who said, eh, IaaS as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future, people also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So to talk about that. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you agree. I mean, if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? >> Way more than people think. >> Well, there you go. So what are you doing in that arena, specifically with VCPP? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so I think a good example of that, right, so last VMworld in person, 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we had been working with Intel on for about two years at the time which was Intel persistent memory DC, persistent memory. Right? And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC persistent memory onboard. So that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in seven more, right. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business, right. Helping people identify, you know, this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper, right. That kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot. And VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves, right. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. >> Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right. And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been a acquiree. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately, I don't know anything that's not public, right-- >> Well, they rebranded. By the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if there's beneficial. Is that a-- >> Well, that's been-- >> But that's the word, right? >> That's what they've said. Well, but when a Avago acquired Broadcom they said, "we'll call ourselves Broadcom." >> Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? >> So yeah. So I imagine that what's been reported is likely-- >> Likely. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense and we can start to see even more great intellectual property in software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform and they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. >> It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? >> You know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business and doing very, very... Using very specific technologies to do very interesting things, makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smartNICs, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix NAP story better. So I'm super excited about that, right. Yeah. >> Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you. >> Absolutely. >> In exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with it, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be and foremost, I'm not trying to-- >> No, yeah. >> I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. >> Come on in. >> But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service, as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the STDC-- >> Yes. >> Consists of. >> Absolutely. >> So, I mean... Am I on the right track? >> No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right, is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right. As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or Accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially and possibly ever. Persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity but we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right. When, you know, the discreet GPUs coming from the just announced Flex series GPU from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right. Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one. Isolate came out, you could get it in our metal as a service platform the morning it launched on demand, right. Those types of agility points, they're not... Because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right. And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware cloud foundation which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware cloud foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own, into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you are still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. >> Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value that you guys are delivering? >> We definitely, you know, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, you know, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different or what not, save money, that money's going into helping some child that's in need, right. And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as the plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff. We've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build cure, well, not cures but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that, you know, this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking... If you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, "this is my problem. This is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically." Yeah. >> And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C level conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be... I think most companies would love to have that, you know, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering, increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would've said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today, it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right. And those guys are, you know, I guess, that's even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for. Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right. It's just like, VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right. But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's... Yeah. >> When you're in customer conversations, maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? >> Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay, but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so, I think that increasingly we are finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is just reliant on x hyperscaler forever, or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it. And the bills that are coming in are just like, whoa like, how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. We are just... It's not... If I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. You know, I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If that's going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native. Move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but, you know, if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. >> Good advice. >> So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on premises environments into going back to the VCPP, STDC model? >> Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and re-platforming? What does that look like? What's the typical-- >> Yeah. I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind if exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in the close story, right. And so even when we get customers, you know, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, you know service, right. Better service, right. We've been part of VMware for 12 years. We love the technology behind VMC's, now AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all right, right. They're going to be there to support their technology but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud. And then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are, you are leveraging public cloud for a certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later. But I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. Like no one's doing that, right. But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right. Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape. And VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world. Right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. >> Last question for you as we wrap up here. Where can the audience go to learn more about Phoenix NAP and really start test driving with you guys? >> Absolutely. Well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will re-target you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. (Lisa laughs) But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, "I want to upgrade to Ubuntu," you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. >> Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me, talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes. So stick around. (upbeat music)

foreign welcome back to thecube's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West we're with about seven to ten thousand folks here so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the First with the new name Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff seraki the senior director of product management at Lumen as our next guest Jeff great to have you thank you for having me welcome so looked at the website I always love to see what taglines are and and lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen it's Mission Vision value prop would love to so much like a lot of the Enterprises that are out there today in the market lumens in the process of transforming we're transforming to a technology company from our Network routes but we also have roots in the I.T infrastructure business so we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things uh we believe that our purpose is if you further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution so moving in to the digital age where everything is it's all about data it's about real-time use of that data you machine learning artificial intelligence autonomous Cars Smart cities so the key tenet that we have around the fourth Industrial Revolution is data you need to acquire it and once you acquire it you need to analyze it then you need to act upon it because when you think about it data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us it's not going to stop and information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers so um so with that the I totally lost my train of thought sorry um uh the ability to to leverage that is critical um you know driving driving the revenue from that so for example like machine learning you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures like oh look this is a picture of a dog this is a picture of a kangaroo so that's what our platform enables and that's what we're building we're building it brand new sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities of Global Network one of the largest IP backbone providers so we're super excited about what we have so these days every company has to be a data company to be competitive to you know well even to survive talk a little bit about enabling lumens customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution those two seem to be hand in hand yes so with the services that we provide particularly with our partnership with VMware we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises or so whether it's a corporate office manufacturing facility a you know logistical facility so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 Edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros so you don't have to put equipment on premises that's all connected by the Lumen Network Dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer Prem to Edge data center third party data center all the way into the public Cloud so we can stitch all of that together so I know you mentioned that you know you're you're you know based on your history you're moving further up the value chain with your customers but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of lumen and when you when you refer to this Lumen Network um tell us a little more about that because that that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing yes so roots and Telecom roots and fiber and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world and with that comes not only breath but also capillarity going to the markets we have over a hundred and eighty thousand fiber fed Enterprise buildings so with that imagine if your compute's there or if it's in a one of our Edge data centers how quickly you can transmit information from that Prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire analyze and act on that data so that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that as you mentioned is that is that fiber backbone so I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week that's one of my favorite words awesome awesome word in it because and it actually it's evocative of exactly what I know you're what you're referencing but so you you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be you can communicate between between environments um you've got that you've got that down so that's a very very strong Foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to see if I was correct definitely understanding and um just with that capability it really it comes down to outside the data is the user experience and with application performance you know one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is is network but also location so you can put more bandwidth at it you can take put it on a network with less hops that's one of the advantages of our large backbone or you move the compo compute closer to the point of digital interaction which is what we're doing with our Edge platform so whether it's an edge data center on-prem yeah one thing one thing at the cube that we like to do is we we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are we have a whole series on the question of does Hardware matter and so so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that Foundation yes underneath yeah and we're I mean the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up this stack they don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds well the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute customers want to run their applications they don't want to worry about everything underneath it so that's why we're moving up so we want to be able to create that platform you worry about your applications you worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else talk a little bit about the VMware partnership I see Lumen Edge private Cloud on VCF talk a little bit about that how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer okay we've been working with for VMware for decades they're one of our best partners and our Flagship private Cloud product is based upon the cloud Foundation and it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in so it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in so they're not trying to learn something new like trying to go out and find resources that can manage kubernetes like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there probably took the wrong career path but anyways it's it's new it's emerging whereas VMware people know it there's a lot of people that know it so why spend time as an Enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform so with that VMware brings that foundation and the security of that that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they Trust trust is critical right I mean it's it's table Stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers you know here we are at the VMware explore event that called uh the center of the multi-cloud universe which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me haven't seen any superheroes yet but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume in any event talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage uh sure it's tied to the network um as much as I'm trying to say we opsificate it but it's um network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere so there is a physical behind everything but with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem Edge data center third party data center or we can also provide that service with uh vmc and AWS we can provide it in the cloud so you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is and then that's critical to our customers again that the switching costs of learning it's it's a great product VMware is a great partnership to help bring that all together so what is a delighted customer sound like you're interacting with a delighted customer they're not gonna they're not going to pick up the phone and tell you you know what I love your network what what are they going to be what are they going to tell you they're happy about a delighty customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all our virtual machines work our applications work our software Engineers they can develop against it our costs are optimized that's what they're going to care about if they start talking about oh our virtual machines or servers and that means there's probably something wrong so we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works so it's really if your application if you want to talk to me about your application that's what's top of mind for you we're doing our job now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works right yes you let them know it's like look no no one is no one is touting what you do but it really still is important it is very you want to make sure keep those folks happy yes very important talk a little bit Jeff about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw you know two and a half years ago businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital have you seen priorities shift up the c-suite stock over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations yeah I mean over the past couple years with the proliferation of public cloud you know the edicts of got to go to the cloud we got to go Cloud go to the go to the cloud so everything goes to the cloud it's great it's good for a lot of applications but not for all applications and the customer conversations were having a lot of it are okay what what comes back because with Cloud cream and costs it just yeah if you're looking at a permanent VM basis you know public Cloud works but when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support entire Enterprise that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly are you saying that we we yeah we hear the term repatriation yes used are you saying a fair fair amount of that yes we're seeing that then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business that's expensive especially if an Enterprise has their own like that's you're talking about 10 million dollars per megawatt just of capital cost there so and then if they're in a third party you still have physical space and power you have servers there you have to assume someone's optimizing those servers and even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it that's a lot of work that's a lot of resources and human capital that our private Cloud solution with VMware takes away so that they can again they can worry about their applications providing business value providing customer experience versus is there anything on this server or not does somebody need this virtual machine what are all these public Cloud spend items we have how's this out of control it allows them to focus so that's kind of how things have have evolved and changed over the years one of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey the cloud journey is going from cloud chaos which is where a lot of businesses are now to Cloud smart how does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to Cloud smart what is a cloud smart strategy from lumen's lens look like first of all you have to have a strategy as an Enterprise you'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do and part of not knowing what to do is do we even have the right people looking at this and so what Lumen what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues so maybe they do have a hybrid Cloud strategy okay have you implemented it no why not we don't have enough people okay those are resources we can bring in because not only you provide network and infrastructure but we also have managed surface capabilities managed Services capabilities we can sit on top of that we have Cloud migration practices we have centers of excellence around sap and other services so let us help dissect your problem let's take a let's look at the landscape you have out there find out where everything's buried and dig it up and then we figure out okay how do we move from one place the other you don't just lift and shift and so that those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them and our private Cloud product we have it sitting on our Edge right in those 60 metros they can spin up a private Cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there you know move it to another place or move it into the public Cloud if that's where the application needs to live I'm curious about lumen's go to market strategy customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out like what you just were referencing you know what what do we do next uh what's lumen's path to a seat at that table are you are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end user customer or are you going in partnering with others what does that look like in the real world in the real world it's Partners working together no one single entity can provide everything we have to work together and with our infrastructure layer we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific Solutions that then you know they can be Hardware Partners they can be software Partners but then we can collectively go talk to the market talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed Services capabilities that's how we can kind of glue it all together so that's the direction we're going in so be very focused we're focused on manufacturing you're focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there that's where we have a strong customer base strong customer relationships and that's how we're doing it we don't want to have an infrastructure conversation we want to outcome and application conversation that's what every customer is talking about it's all about outcomes is there Jeff a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together yeah it's a yeah we kind of use this one a lot but it's it's uh it's a really good one um and we've seen um uh clones of this and and other opportunities manufacturing smart manufacturing you need to have the equipment that takes that information again that data from all the iot devices analyze it operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now so you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute you don't necessarily want that compute you know a thousand miles away you want it as close as possible particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut your network goes down okay then your factory goes down that's millions of dollars so with that compute there we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities and that's running on Lumen private cloud based upon VMware on vcloud foundation and it's working great and it's it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand I've seen similar use cases in logistics it's yeah I mean it's phenomenal what we can do when you're in conversations with prospects what's the why what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their Edge Solutions it's really the resources we bring to bear like you know we we keep talking a lot about Network and uh trying to get away from the sniper that's my cousin the network is is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first but it's those other resources the ability to to manage I.T infrastructure which have been doing for decades a lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time and then with those areas of expertise managed Services it's providing that all together and with lumen's history the Partnerships we have I mean we have a lot of Partnerships so we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer and we like to use the term best execution venue so each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help help customers find that out and it's really I mean it's that simple we just need to sit down and have a conversation we can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer is ready so obviously some some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so what are you excited about as you continue this long-standing partnership and evolving it forward I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have not only do we have our private Cloud products uh we're leveraging them for kubernetes but also our sassy product we're partnered with VMware on that so we're really tight at the hip with these Cutting Edge Products that we're taking to Market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about so I'm just looking forward us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people threatening of the partnership excellent Jeff thank you for joining Dave and me on the program talking about what's going on with Lumen how you're enabling the fourth Industrial Revolution enabling customers to really become data companies we appreciate your time on your insights thank you for Jeff saraki and Dave Nicholson I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube live from VMware Explorer 2022. you're watching thecube the leader in Live tech coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. We're back at VeeamON 2022, we're winding down coverage to The Cube day two. We've done a lot of VeeamON. We're at the Aria hotel, smaller physical audience, huge hybrid audience, little different program. Great keynotes, really loved the keynote yesterday and today kind of product day today. Sean Smith is here with myself and David Nicholson. He's the staff Solution Architect at VMware. Sean, thanks for coming on the Cube, taking some time with us. >> Hey guys. Great to be here and great to be in person again. >> Yeah, it sure is. Hoping to see VMworld is no longer VMworld, right? >> It's VMware Explore now. Yep. >> Okay. Awesome. Looking forward to that. That was one of the first shows we ever did. It's kind of got that same vibe, I hope you don't lose that, the core of VMware. >> What we've been told is it's still going to be, the core of what we do and it's going to be the showcase of VMware. >> Which is the ecosystem, great vibe. You always know a million people there, which is great fun. How's it going at VMware today? I mean, let's start there. It's been a while since we've talked physically with... >> Yeah. VMware is, we've come through the pandemic, fairly well, relative speaking to what others have done. I'm part of the VCPP Program, the VMware Cloud Provider Program, and I look after cloud service providers, cloud builders, people who are actually building out networks for customers and environments that are very specialized and focusing on their needs and VMware is forefront with cloud service providers these days, doing really well. >> The last time we were physically proximate to VMware executives, I think Pat Gelsinger was still the CEO, Dell still owned the majority of VMware. So that spin happened. So that's good. I think the ecosystem in particular is probably really happy about that. Does it have any effect on your world? >> From a day to day business perspective, not really, right. Obviously we still have a very tight relationship with Dell. We still do a lot of innovative solutions and products with the Dell team. We have a tight integration there. It really gives us the opportunity to also work with many other vendors as well. And focus on solutions that our customers are looking for really, is where VMware is tryna focus. >> Yeah. It's funny, we were at Red Hat Summit last week. IBM Think was right across the street there was very little mention, if any, I think they talked about an IBM mainframe at Red Hat Summit. That was it. I mean IBM fully owns Red Hat, but a lot of people said, we hope that it's going to be like VMware and you guys have always had that independent culture. >> Fiercely independent. >> Fiercely independent. Yes. >> Yes. It's like when you coach, I don't know me anyway, when I coach my kids baseball, I'm a tougher on them than am with the other kids. I think you guys were sometimes tougher on your own or... And rightly so, you have a huge ecosystem. >> We do. >> That is epic. And so you have to look out for that. VMware has always done that. VCPP the V is for a VMware what's what's the acronym. >> So the CPP is Cloud Provider Program. It's a program that's specifically aimed at our cloud service providers. There's several solutions within the program, which are really focused on helping them build business, helping them go to market, helping them with being able to, for certain part of it compete with the hyperscalers and our support several cloud providers, mostly out of the Northeast, and they're doing really well. They're doing well against the hyperscalers, they very often provide solutions that are not easy to get on a hyperscaler. When you want to have customer interaction and things like that. So the VCP Program as I said, is really tailored, it has solutions which are very much focused on allowing them to build their businesses as a cloud service provider. >> Just a follow up if I may. >> Yeah. >> So the history of VMware Cloud has been really interesting. At one point vCloud Air, we know what happened there. This is not vCloud Air. >> This is not vCloud Air. It's got nothing to do with vCloud Air. It's really a program where we provide solutions that the cloud builders build with, right? So it's software solutions. There's no hardware involved. There's no VMware having the environment, it's really cloud providers building solutions. >> So it's interesting, Dave, this has come full circle, you used to work at Virtustream. There was point Rodney was like, bring it on AWS, correlation and back said, we can't lose to a book seller and all that was just, fun marketing talk for media people like us. But the interesting thing is, well, so VMware Cloud on AWS. Huge success of VMware Cloud Foundation. Doing really well. And obviously you've got momentum. Everybody thought, not everybody. >> It's in Google's, in Azure, it's in Oracle. >> Yeah, yeah. Sorry. >> It's an IBM. >> IBM a... >> It's an IBM. >> Number one in IBM. Yeah. >> And so a lot of people thought, I shouldn't say everybody, but a lot of people thought, MSPs, the cloud service providers, non-hyperscalers are cooked through 2010, 2011. The exact opposite happened. >> It's 100%. >> It's growing like crazy. We want to understand why, but it's come full circle. >> Yeah, it certainly has. I mean, the industry has changed considerably and especially over the last few years with COVID, I will say that the cloud service providers that are support and by the way, Virtustream was one of them, when I first joined VMware, I supported Virtustream. And they have had to adapt their businesses, the hyperscalers have come at them with everything that they've got and honesty, the cloud service providers that I support are phenomenal growth. They they're growing on a par with what some of the hyperscalers are doing. So there's definitely a place for cloud service providers, they've got great business, they've got great customers, great relationships. And it's as I said, it's growing a huge business. >> So we've talked a lot about theme from the perspective of the idea of a Supercloud. Something that can overlay a variety of on-premises and off-premises providers and provide sort of a unified view, unified management methodology. How much is what at least was formerly known as the SDDC stack, the Software Defined Data Center stack, still a part of VMwares vision that is right in line with that, from what Veeam is doing. How much of your business is deploying SDDC stacks that are then customized in one way or another. >> 100% of it. >> 100% of it. Right, okay. >> Yeah. So, when you're talking about having that single view of everything in the cloud provider program, there's a product called VMware Cloud Director. and it is the multi-tenant view of the infrastructure and the environment that the cloud providers are building. Right. So VMware Cloud Director has gone through many iterations and we've recently launched Cloud Director Service, which is a SaaS offering of the product. But what it actually does is you put it on top of VMC on AWS. you put it on top of GCVE, you put it on top of the cloud service providers, SDDCs, right. All of these are SDDCs underneath. >> AVS and Azure. >> AVS and Azure. >> I was associated with that. So I must have it mentioned. >> Exactly. >> They're all SDDC's. >> SDDC's, yeah, yeah, exactly. And as well as your on premise environment. Right. So all of these federate together through the VMware Cloud Director, and you end up having a single pane of glass across all of those environments. So whether it's running in the hyperscale, or running on your premises, running in a cloud service provider's environment, you have a single view, a single interface that you log into and you can see everything that's going on inside your environment. So it really brings that holistic, single view of everything to reality. >> How about from a licensing perspective? >> So from a licensing perspective... >> I'm a non-premises customer, I'm running VMware on-prem, I have been, I was at world VMworld 2004 and enjoyed BattleBots. So hopefully you'll start bringing BattleBots back. >> We will have to. >> And now I'm dealing with a service provider. That is one of the partners that you're working with. How does that licensing work? >> So the Cloud Provider Program actually has a slightly different licensing model to what you would have on premises, right? They have a rental model with VMware, it's a PAYGo model, right. One of the great things about the program is that it's consumption based. So it makes it easy for cloud service providers to build a consumption based business, which is kind of where everything is moving, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> So whether you have an on-premise environment that's licensed through what we call perpetual or ELA licensing, from a VMware perspective, you can still layer on top, that cloud service provider solution VCD, right? And you would obviously have a financial relationship with the cloud service provider in terms of the environment that you have with them. And they will be able to hook up that environment to your on-premises environment and get that single view. So the licensing is not a restriction, right, you can still continue to have your traditional licensed environment in your data center, as well as being able to connect into these seamlessly, right. That's the great thing about it. And that's where VMC, AVS, GCVE, the OCVS, the Oracle version, the RBM one, you can bring all of these together and really look at it from a holistic perspective, bring in things like NSX-T and other solutions like that VM as well, it works seamlessly across all these environments. >> I am talking about Supercloud, I asked Raghu last year, who's virtually at VMworld, I kind of explained that concept of hiding the complexity, the abstraction layer, being able to hide the underlying primitives and APIs, seems like it's evolving. One of the things he said was yes, but if developers want to go there, we let them. And that was a key point, because you're getting more into that DevOps. >> Correct 100%. >> And I would imagine the cloud service providers really oftentimes need for their reasons to get to those underlying primitives and APIs. >> And actually VCD is the enabler, right? So VCD allows you to provide a container based service sitting right alongside your IAS in the same SDDC, right? We're not even talking about segregating them out, you can have it inside the exact same SDDC, all linked together, all taking a common security approach to what's going on and providing you with that ease of use. So from an end user perspective, the DevOps type of people, VCD is an awesome solution, because they can go in fire up a new VM, or fire up a new container or whatever, without having to go through the rigmarole of asking IT for a VM, or asking somebody's permission, as a organization, you would give your DevOps teams certain amount of resources, how they use it's up to them, right? Whether they put containers in there or they bring VMs, it's all there. And it's all in one single solution. >> You mentioned that your community is doing very well growing it let's call it 35, 40% a year. And it's a market that's quite large worldwide. Because it's a lot of local, regional CSPs, a lot of big country CSPs and you said... >> It's four and a 1/2 thousand of them. So, it's huge. >> There you >> Versus four hyperscalers. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Include Alibaba. So, they might be individually smaller, but collectively they're larger. But you said that the hyperscalers coming after them with everything they had was a comment that you made, are customers choosing CSPs over hyperscalers? If so, when and why. >> Sometimes they are choosing CSPs over hyperscalers, but not always, very often they're choosing CSPs and hyperscalers, right. And it really depends on what their needs are. So historically speaking, it's been everybody rushing to the hyperscalers because that's the flavor of the day let's move out of our data center. It's much cheaper to run everything in these hyperscalers, and they do it. And then the bill comes in and reality suddenly hits. And it's definitely not as cheap as they thought it was going to be, right. So there's many aspects that cause tenants to not only rethink that, but also repatriate, right. Repatriation is a big thing for our cloud service providers. Things like egress costs, most cloud service providers have no egress costs, right? They encourage movement of things amongst themselves and for their tenants, because that's what they want, right? So egress costs are a huge problem for many tenants who come into these environments and that's sometimes why they would choose a CSP over a hyperscaler. But really, it's more about choosing the right place for your workload. There are workloads that belong in hyperscalers, right? And if you have a solution with a CSP like VCD, that allows you not only to be able to connect your on premises and the CSP, but also the hyperscalers and actually have a much more holistic solution where you can determine where you want to put stuff and put it in the right place. It's more about that, than it is about choosing one over the other really. >> Yeah, and sometimes it's more of a business differentiation than a technical one. Is it a hyperscale or is it a CSP? If you're licensing the SDDC stack and you're running it on IAS in Amazon or in Google or Azure? >> I think the other thing too is the CSPs oftentimes they manage service providers, right? Is that true? >> The relationship, right? And that's one of the things if you talk to a cloud service provider and yesterday I was, I had a session and I was talking to a bunch of people about VMware stuff. And I said to them, how many of you have tried to pick up a phone and talk to somebody at AWS? And there was laughter, because the reality is that what AWS does is a kind of one size fits all approach, right? There isn't somebody on the end of the phone that you can pick up and call, if they have a major outage that outage is affecting 1000s of different customers and you one of those thousands really means nothing to them, right? Whereas a cloud service provider, generally speaking, has a very tight one-on-one relationship with both from an engineering perspective, right. With their tenants, but also at a higher managerial level. So they create those relationships and those relationships often drive these things. It's not always financial, there is a financial component to it, but very often it's the relationship, have they got somebody that they can talk to? If they getting many different solutions, can they get all those solutions from one provider? And if they can, it's much easier for them to manage from a... >> And I think so does that manage service... There's also a lot of things that despite their breadth and portfolio that the cloud service providers don't support, you can't do Oracle rack in the cloud, right? But you can in a service provider. >> Exactly. >> And Oracle, look you can negotiate with Oracle, so you can get similar pricing AWS, but this price is two x. They're either on-prem or in Oracle. So I could take my Oracle instance, stick it into a managed service provider or cloud service provider, do whatever I need to, and there are I'm sure 1000s of configurations like that, that aren't necessarily identically supported, security edicts that aren't necessarily exactly the same, so many specials that managed service say welcome to your point. AWS is as long as it's black, it's good. >> Yeah, exactly. And that's the thing, right? Those cloud service providers are doing exactly that. They have Oracle racks in there, they have all sorts of those solutions that are there in their data centers. And proximity is also an issue, right? Very often the people who are using those systems need their ancillary things to be close by, they can't be 10s or 20s or 30 milliseconds away, they need to be sub millisecond connectivity. And those are the areas where the cloud service providers really shine, they can offer those solutions that really enable their tenants to get what they want at the end of the day. Again to your point, you can negotiate with Oracle, but these cloud service providers do it day in and day out. Who wants their business? >> Who wants to do that with Oracle anyway, their lawyers are smarter than yours. Veeam, what are you doing with Veeam, in resilient architectures and cyber recovery? >> Yeah, we are a sponsor here at the event and Veeam is a great partner with VMware and we're great partner to them. A lot of cloud service providers actually use Veeam as their primary backup solution for their tenants, right. VMware Cloud Director that I was talking about just now, the thing that gives you a view of everything over the top, Veeam was actually one of the very first vendors to integrate with VCD. And you can use your Veeam environment directly from the screen, you right click, and you say do a backup and that's as easy as that from a Veeam perspective. So we have a lot of integrations with Veeam. We help the cloud service providers, ransomware is a big talking thing around this event, but all over the place, right? So a lot of the solutions that Veeam brings to the party, these cloud service providers are also deploying into their environments to help with ransomware. They have so many solutions that help those cloud service providers provide a holistic solution. >> Well, Veeam was basically founded saying, Hey, we're going to better our business on VMware. I first saw Veeam at a V mug, I think in Boston, and I was like, who is Veeam? VMware is that their product? It was just so you guys have had a long relationship, even though initially VMware was probably saying the same thing, who the heck are these guys? Well, how do you like them now? Sean, thanks so much for... >> Thank you. It's been great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back shortly. We'll get a couple more segments left. Dave and I are going to wrap up later in the day, you watching The Cube at VeeamON 2022, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> "theCUBE," presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to "theCUBE's" live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante joins me. Dan O'Brien joins us next. The senior vice president of technology solutions at Presidio. Dan, welcome to "theCUBE." >> It's great to be here. Great to be in Vegas too. >> Is it great to be back live in person, three dimensional? >> You have no idea. >> Oh, I know. >> Yeah. >> Just the seeing people again and the vibe here day-one is already fantastic. >> Yeah. >> Talk to us about Presidio and Dell's relationship? What's going on with Presidio? >> Yeah, so I'll tell you just Presidio as as a whole, and part of why I joined about a year ago and I'm still just excited as I was on day one. We're a digital services and solutions provider with deep engineering expertise in networking, cloud, security, collaboration, and modern technologies. And we'll help our customers acquire, deploy, and then operate and manage the solutions that we have. So, we're a Dell titanium black partner. We just got that, we're a super excited about it. And they're a critical part of how we deliver solutions to our customers. >> So, you joined during an interesting time during the pandemic. What are some of the challenges your customers are facing now? Aging infrastructure, labor shortages, supply chain. What do you, what are you seeing from the customers lens? >> Yeah, you know, all of the above. I think when the pandemic first hit, every customer that we spoke with basically said, Cash is king. We want to preserve it, we don't know what the future holds. So, all of the spend that happened was on the things that drove their business forward. So, I got a distributed workforce. How do I go invest in technology to make them productive? A lot of them had to take a digital agenda that was five years long and do it in three months to survive, so they spent it and that generally meant cloud. But what they didn't spend money on, was infrastructure inside the data center. And now what they're finding, is things are old, maintenance bills are going up, the cost to get it is going up. And sometimes supply chain is over 12 months long to be able to actually do something about it. >> You know, when "theCUBE" first started in 2010, it was EFC World 2010 now, 'cause Dell is really our legacy here. So, we said that companies that sell, it's kind of a pejorative, but sell boxes are going to be in trouble because of the cloud. Interesting, right? So, it was partly true because the cloud just intermediated a lot of that sort of box selling business. We said they have to become more value added players, identify. And so, when I watched Presidio, the transformation that you guys went through, and you're relatively new. Cloud has actually become an opportunity. And you're doing stuff around digital, a lot of stuff around security. It's cyber, probably automation, life cycle management. >> True. >> Talk about that transformation? And I'm interested in why you joined Presidio? >> So, I'll tell you why I joined Presidio, is I was talking to a lot of customers every day in my old role, I love doing that part. And the conversation started with, "Dan, I can't spend money on my data center right now because we're in a pandemic. I've got to innovate faster and the answer is to cloud. I don't know how to actually make my workforce productive because they're all over the place now. And we didn't invest in technology. And now I've got a threat surface with people working everywhere in workloads in different places. I don't know how to approach that." And I looked at what Presidio had built, I'm like, that's exactly what we did. But what's been fun for me, has been the answer to most of our customers is this the end? It's not the public cloud, it's not the private cloud. It's, you need to do both of them really well and have the skills and expertise to leverage 'em for the right application, or workload, or use case. And that's why I'm super excited to be here, 'cause we're really helping our customers in both areas. >> You mentioned security. We've seen a number of announcements today from Dell Technologies with respect to cybersecurity. We know the stats are what they are. It's no longer a matter of, if we're going to get hit by a cyber attack, it's when? Most organizations are going to get hit by 2025. Where is security in the conversation now? How high up in the priority is it? >> I would say it's, we don't have a single customer meeting without having that conversation. And what we're finding, is you look at the stats that say, you know, 30% of companies that have a cyber attack, don't come back from it. 20% pay the ransom, and then they don't even get their data back. So, while we want to stop the attacks, I think you're right on that the answer is, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when? But what's great about Dell Technologies, is we have a complete portfolio that can meet any SLA of our customers. It's in backup technology, it's in primary storage, they can do a mutable backups and recoveries everywhere. But what happened this week, where they announced partnerships with the cloud, that's huge because the same resource constraints that customers have in their data centers today, are the same ones you have to deploy infrastructure to be able to make this work and be able to accelerate recovery. So, the partnership and the integration with the public cloud, really gives a great integration point for a lot of our customers. >> At the analyst of the event today, we had a meeting with Jen Felch, the CIO of Dell. And I said to her, you know, our survey data from ETR shows that security now, number one priority, it kind of always was, but it's distance itself from the number two, which is cloud migration. And I asked her, I said, "Obviously, cloud migration is not your number two, 'cause number security number one was number two?" And she said, "Let me help you interpret that data. Because for us, we have the scale, we can do our own cloud essentially." What her interpretation, was what those customers are really saying is modernization. Now, you must see that. Now, of course, you're leaning into cloud. Dell is not defensive really more about cloud, like, hey, we could take advantage of it as well. So, what are you seeing in terms of the changing priorities of IT kind of pre-post pandemic? Is it like a rubber band that goes and then comes back to where it was, or is it kind of permanent? >> I think that the both worlds together are absolutely permanent. And there's no way we're going to go back from one or the other. And then we're always going to have a world where you might lean more into one. To innovate, you might lean more into one for disaster recovery. But I truly think the world and the answer for us and our perspective, has to be both. But you said something to interesting earlier, is the key I think to what customers are doing is you can't just pick up a workload and move it to the cloud, it doesn't solve a problem. You use that term modernize. And we've invested, acquisitions and continued engineering resources that were hiring around modernization because the economics and the true benefit of actually running a workload and running right at the right SLAs and meeting your customer's objectives, aren't going to work right if you're just picking an application up and moving it over there. So, we're really focused there. >> So, Couch Base, just ran a survey. We did a power panel on it with a bunch of database analysts. And it was a survey of 650 CIOs and CTOs. And it was really interesting 'cause it's an IT bias. But they said like 2/3 of the survey base said that IT is responsible for setting the digital transformation strategy of the company. And I went, "Well, I wonder what the business guys say to that. It was sort of a red flag to me. But I wonder what you're seeing 'cause there's obviously you get a difference when you talk to different worlds. So, I guess what is modernization, was kind of one of the big questions that came out of it? And who's driving the agenda? >> So, it really depends upon the customer, right? But the key to what you said, and there was an article that came out. I won't say where it was from, but it really kind of opened my eyes. But the article was titled that, "It's Time To Get Rid of the IT Department." And for someone like me and a lot of customers, that kind of scares people. But the whole underpin of it, was they were studying customers that took IT and actually disparaged, like broke 'em apart and put them into business units. So, it said, it's your turn to wake up every day and figure out what that business unit needs to be successful. Because the answer is, David, it's both, right? You need both parties on board, right? Where, you've got a business stakeholder that clearly knows want to do, understands technology's the answer but you need IT to be able to go make it work and be a true partner, and help go actually make it work. >> It reminds me of when Nicholas Carr wrote that article if you're, you guys are probably too young to remember, "But Does IT Matter?" It was kind of post Y2K, right? And then everybody went crazy. All the CIO was when nuts. And in fact, IT matters more than ever, but it's a different context, as you're saying. A question on things like skill shortages, supply chain, I mean, obviously, top of mind. >> Yeah. >> Are you helping people with that? And if so, how so? >> Yeah, so two ways I would look at this, is when you look at the supply chain, I mean, Intel I think spent a $100 million on standing up new Silicon plants. We won't see a benefit from that from 2025. So, it's real. So, a lot of what we're doing on a supply chain is how can we help a customer reach in and have certain targeted ways to leverage the cloud? Because we can't physically solve for the physics issue. The other part of it, the people shortage. I mean, it's real. I mean, everyone's sitting at home they're pondering whether or not, you know, what they're doing is fulfilling their dreams. Now, geography doesn't matter, you can do a job from anywhere. And technology is the heart of everything. So, the people shortage is real. So, we're finding that our focus on managed services we're essentially allowing our customers to run and deploy things across every technology aspect, is something that we used to have to drive to our customers. And now, we can't get out of a conversation without them asking for it 'cause they just don't have the people- >> Yeah, they're calling you into that need. >> Yeah. >> Can you share that customer example that you think really articulates the value of the Dell Technologies that Presidio is delivering? It's really been able to truly modernize in the last couple of years? >> Yeah, so looking specifically to Dell, I mean, for us, one of the taking technical data out of the data center and modernizing, their HCI portfolio together with VMware, is a complete home run. It takes multiple products, brings it into a single common solution, uses a common tool set for all the operators that are there so you don't need the number of people to run it. But if you do it right, it solves for the portability issue in some of the public cloud options, especially with things like VMC where you can have an on and off-prem and an automation between 'em, so you can pick and choose dynamically. That for us has been a home run in driving modernization strategies. >> From a multi-cloud perspective, it's going to be a big focus of this event the next couple of days. What are you seeing from customers' perspective? They're probably in multi-cloud environments for a variety of reasons, that's going to be persisting. The hyperscalers are all growing. What's going on there? How are you helping customers to manage the multi-cloud environment with just much more simplicity? >> Yeah, so I think there's a couple parts to that, right? I mean, obviously, Dell together with VMware has a great set of technologies to be able to manage the deployment of that. But what we're trying to do, is number one, help a customer determine which workload should be running in which place, right? Understand application dependencies. But as we work through a migration strategy with a lot of our customers, the key part that a lot of people don't realize, is we all think security but the networking is probably the hardest part if you want to have portability in a well running cloud. So, having years and years in network heritage, it's been a great synergy on us kind of moving in that direction to help our cloud customers make sure that the right SLA, the right connectivity, and the right availability to make that world work. >> Yeah, so multicloud, obviously, a big topic of of discussion this morning with Chuck Whitten. And that's another one of those, well, what do you mean by that? I have a sort of a premise I want to test on you, Dan. I've always said, it just comes from talking to customers, multi-cloud is kind of multi-vendor. I got to run some workloads in AWS, I run some On Prem. I run some in Google, some in Azure, and many of them, a handful like the big banks, for instance, they say, "Well we're building our own abstraction layer so we can control the policies, the security." And it seems like that's a direction that the industry generally in Dell specifically is headed. Do you buy that? And what's driving that need? >> Yeah, so I would buy it based on the size of the customer. So, when you take a big bank, a lot of what drives them to go to one cloud or the other, is that the big cloud providers they're innovating constantly. Every day there's a new tool or capability that exists there. And certain ones of them are going to match, a use case that, that large customer has- >> You can't resist? >> So, they're going to end up with multiple clouds, so it makes perfect sense. When you get into smaller customer, they really have to want to be successful. They got to pick one, right? They can't afford the people, and the scale, and the process. So, I think that's... The answer would depend based on the customer. The larger ones, I think they're going to build a full orchestration stack and small customers are going to look for one and someone maybe with managed services to help them augment the skills and staffing to make it work. >> For a while, I haven't heard it much lately, but you'd hear about repatriation, people come to me like, "Dave, you got to look into this repatriation thing." And I did, and I was like, "Eh, I really see, it a little bit, little pockets." But I do see hybrid. I mean, that's very clear. And I do see a lot of people went into the cloud, they didn't have a great experience. And okay, so there's some of that going on. I guess you could call that repatriation. But what are you seeing in terms of both of those? Is repatriation a trend or is it really an hybrid? >> So, I've interesting perspective coming from Dell, right? Where we're a very infrastructure focused in there. I see a little bit of repatriation in like a workload, like virtual desktops where you picked it up and you threw it in the cloud and make your workforce productive. But generally speaking, what we're seeing is not repatriation, which is, "Hey I move things. My cost is out of control, I don't know how to manage it. Can you help me get better controls on cost? Can you help me automate a lot of the things that are running here so I've got better control of cost and we're where things are running in my security posture?" So, it's much more about optimization that we're finding than it is. Let's bring it back. >> So, it's fine tuning the knobs? >> There you go. >> Right? And that seems to be the trend over the next couple of years? >> 110%. Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Have you seen any industries, in particular the last year that you've been with Presidio really leading edge in terms of modernization? >> Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting enough. I mean, I could give you a few examples, right? When we look in our public sector business, a lot of the educational institutions had to invest in new platforms they interact and engage with students. Our financial institutions, believe it or not, continue to innovate. I mean, what people don't realize, is the mainframe still has the transaction where your money lives in the ledger, but all the supporting ecosystem is digitalized and is completely modernized to interact with you. And, of course, retail for us. I mean, retail, they had to change their business model in many cases overnight, not even to survive, but to serve the communities they were working in. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we've all learned in the last couple of years, is just the access, the e-commerce, the access online. We expect that now in the brick and mortar stores to be able to deliver that connected store, make sure that they have the inventory that I'm looking for with a frictionless experience. >> Yeah, and I tell you my favorite one, is you look at the healthcare industry, and while obviously with loans, and healthcare, and billing, all had to change. But that was really exciting for us, I mean, as consumers, right? Is the fact that we can interact with doctors online at the click of a button now. I mean, that part for us has been super exciting. >> Everything's at the click of the button now. >> Yeah. >> Oh, my gosh. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, sharing what's new with Presidio, what you guys are doing together with Dell, and how you're helping companies in every industry to modernize. >> Perfect. I appreciate it. >> Great to have you. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> With Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of Dell Technologies World live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Stick around, and Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode two. I'm your host, John furry with the cube. I'm joined by two cube alumni as Andy Langston, SVP and GM at Veem and Sabina Joseph, the general manager of technology partners at AWS. We're here talking about speeding the innovation with AWS. Welcome to the show. >>Ready to meet you >>And good to see you, Andy again. >>Great to have you guys back on. I hope you guys are doing well. Great to see both of you Veem. Obviously we've been covering you guys for a long time. You got your VIMANA event coming up in person, which is great. Congrats on the continued success of the company and the product you guys have always been all in on AWS. We've been covering for many, many years. Andy, what's the innovation going on now at Veem? Lots of lots happening, lots going on. What's the new innovation. >>Well, I think, you know, clearly people are in, you know, when we talk to people they're interested in, in ransomware, so ransomware protection, we they're interested in a hybrid cloud hybrid. Um, you know, AWS in particular, we get a lot of interest there. Um, clearly modern data protection, uh, what we're doing in office 365, people are looking at all those things >>And what's the, the platform, uh, approach that you guys have with AWS. You guys have a broad range. It's not just the classic. I call it the green classic solution. That's also a good product. What's some of the new platform advantages you guys got going on with the cloud native with AWS. >>Well, you know, look we are, our strategy is to protect as many AWS services as possible, you know, and, and, you know, from the ECE to EBS, S3, RDS, uh, VMC, and many of the services that they're coming out with. And in many times they come to us and say, Hey, you know, these are important to us. We'd like you to, to support these. So clearly we're, um, we're focused on those, uh, Kubernetes workloads is, is a newer set of workloads on AWS. That we're a very interested, we made an acquisition and have a product called, uh, Kasten that we've been investing in and working with AWS with their, uh, uh, EKS anywhere. So very excited. >>Great. So being on the partnership, you guys, it's growing a lot's going on. Can you tell us more about how Veeam and abs AWS are jointly helping customers? >>Yeah. As, um, as both of, you know, right. Data is exploding. And, uh, that means, you know, we have to keep backing up this data and finding new ways to back up this data because people are stepping away from the traditional backup methods, tape libraries, secondary storage sites and things like that. And they're backing up data into the cloud. And we AWS offers a number of different storage services, data transfer methods and networking solutions, which provide unmatched your ability, reliability, security. And of course, uh, AWS and Veem have been partnering together enough for quite a number of years and the cost effective. And so you mentioned that Veem has on AWS really enables customers to have offsite storage solutions, providing that physical separation between their on premises, primary data, and also utilizing the pay as you go cloud economics. So we have a great collaboration and, you know, beam has a great solution on AWS and they're constantly innovating and providing capabilities for our customers. Just like Andy said, providing as many capabilities for our services to back up, >>Andy, the volume of data I'll say is always the story. Every year, the volume is tsunami of data. It's getting worse it's every day. Um, and as you got more cloud scale, you guys have been doing a lot integration. You guys always have, you have demanding customers, you have a lot of customers actually. So as you leverage Amazon for data protection, the security conversation is front and center these days. Can you give us an update on how you guys are doing, uh, the data protection security in the cloud with AWS? That's, that's, um, that's hot with your customers, >>You know, it's a great, it's a great comment. You know, you've talked about a lot of customers. Veem has over 400,000 customers now it's, it's truly extraordinary when you think about the size and scope and scale. And if you think, uh, my belief is a majority, almost all of them will tear up two and move their data up into the cloud at some point in our, in the next few years. And so we've just, I think we've described the surface and we're moving hack, you know, hundreds of petabytes or more per year up to the cloud at the same time when I make customer executive calls. It's kind of interesting. A lot of times you think they're going to want to talk about backup and disaster recovery. They want to talk about security. And when this first started happening, I thought, Hey, why don't you talk to your security vendor now? >>And what I realized was that data protection is front and center because of the, we just, we just published a study where a number jumped out at me, 71% of the thousands of people that responded said that they had already been a victim of, or had had a ransomware attack. It's a staggering number. And, um, so, you know, when we look at our relationship with Amazon and we look at the integration we've done around what we call cloud during that's moving, are moving data up to object storage. AWS has a capability called immutable data sets. And so that allows you affords you some great protection against ransomware as an example. And that's one of the areas that we're investing in very heavily. And by the way, our mutual customers are backing up and restoring with Veem and we're doing it on AWS and, and, uh, the data volumes are exploding, I think, because of that. Yeah. >>You know, it's interesting. And you made me have a throwback for, you know, 10 years ago, we used to talk about backup and recovery. And you know, the big thing back then was, was the conversation was don't think of backup as a, as a last minute thing, think of it at the front end, it was always kind of an afterthought and a, of the it decision makers. And you mentioned that security comment about call your security vendor. It's almost the scripts has flipped backup and recovery is the security solution. And so it's not, it's not an afterthought. This is 10 years ago. It was the primary message. It's the primary thought. So when you talk about automated tiering, that's kind of a networking thing. It's like, policy-based hearing. I mean, I mean, if you go back 10 years and we're talking, policy-based hearing, you were like, what? So this is a really different dynamic. And I want you guys to comment because this is the, this is the market right now. This is with the flip, the script has flipped. >>Yeah. Sabina. What do you, what, what do you from y'all's perspective kind of in, in your technology, partnerships, storage vendors, Veem security, what, what do you w what do you see? >>Well, I think that there is an interplay here because I think customers are looking at various ways, right? When I look at those five cybersecurity framework, right? First is identifying what you need to protect, protecting it. And then that's a very important step of, out of those five steps is recovery, right? How do you get your business back to normal? But you cannot do that if you are not protecting and backing up your data. And that's where our partnership comes in. Right? So I believe that all of those five stages in the NIST cybersecurity framework kind of go together and be in place nicely into the very critical phase of recovery. Would you agree, Andy? >>I would. You know, and, and I look at, um, you know, when you're doing a recovery and your gut, your secure backups and AWS, it's, it's like your last line of defense, you know, beam and AWS deliver a mutable backups and has three tiers through S3 object lock integration. And I think that's, that's pretty much, you know, even if a ransomware attack is successful, we can, we can ensure that the backup data hadn't been changed and encrypted or deleted. And, uh, that's pretty exciting, you know, for customers and prospects, they're really worried about this. And I think the teamwork and the, the, the partnership between the two companies to build a solution like this is pretty awesome. >>Yeah. Let me, let me just double, double click on that for a second. You mentioned it got a lot of customers. Ransomware does not discriminate with the size of the company. It could be, it could be a hospital school. It could be a big company. Ransomware is bad, and we see that, and it's a great conversation. And how do you take that solution out to the customers? You got hundreds of thousands of customers. So Sabine, I guess the question is, how is this 80 of us in Veem work together? There's this channel first concept you guys are talking about, tell us about how you guys work together, because there's millions of customers who want this, and you guys actually have hundreds of thousands of customers that Veem, how do you get the customers to leverage that, the relationship and what can you bring to them? >>Yeah, I'll give you like four numbers, right? So AWS has millions of customers and we have, um, hundred thousand partners across 150 countries. Now Veem has, as Andy mentioned, right, has over 400,000 customers and 35,000 partners worldwide. So somewhere in these four numbers, we all intersect both of us intersect both on those customers and also on those partners. And one of the initiatives that my team is heavily focused on is triangulating between the partners that Veeam has. We have, and also our technology partnership. And how can we provide value to our customers by bringing together these partners together with AWS Veeam and Veeam is a V it's a hundred percent channel driven business, and they know how to do this. That is why we are heavily partnered with them to see what we can do for our customers through our mutual partner. >>And he wants you to weigh in here, you know, the channel business, it's gotta be easy, it's got to add value. And I got to wrap services around it. That's what partners love. Well, how does this work? How does that work? >>Well, I, I think to extend beyond what, what did take, what Sabina had said is, you know, we have kind of been subsetted. Our partners are the ones that, that do business with AWS and, and which is a exploding number of partners. And so they have a relationship database. We have a relationship at S and we have this solution set that have, are of interest to our customers through these partners. And AWS has customers through these partners. And so a lot of times we'll share, um, information and customers, uh, information on, around, um, how we can kind of go to these customers who are both AWS customers and Veem customers and market, this joint solution protect them from ransomware. >>And how's it been going so far? What's your, what's your assessment? >>It's been fantastic. I think the, I think one of the, the, the real proof points is that we've moved, uh, over a half a petabyte of data, you know, uh, recently up into their cloud. And, uh, you know, that says that people not only are using the solution, but they're, uh, they're actually delivering on it. >>Well, why got you here, Andy, I want to ask you for the, all the people watching the customers, what's the biggest change that's happening in this market right now. Again, I love this shift that we're seeing backup and recovery. Isn't a point solution anymore. It's the solution it's baked in, and everyone's talking about this, it's integrated in, it's not, it's, it's totally front and center. What's the big change that customers should be thinking about now as they move forward. And, uh, obviously ransomware is still front and center. That's not going away anytime soon. What's the big thing to focus on for customers? >>Well, I think, you know, I always say, you know, listen to the customer and focus on what their specific needs are, right? You can assume, obviously in the business war and everybody, everybody has a backup solution. And, uh, so you're not trying to create a market there, but like I said, you know, people are very focused on security. They're focused on cost, they're focus on skillset or lack of skill sets, right? I mean, we have a shortage of skills in the industry. So we try to make our products easy to use. We try to work with our partners, putting AWS to deliver the best solution we can for our customers. And, uh, you know, I think we have the broadest invest, you know, ransomware protection, uh, and recovery in the storage space. And so we're very focused on that, leveraging all of our technologies across the platforms, physical, virtual Kubernetes, uh, type environments. >>And you have this and you get the beam on event coming up and that's going to be good in person. Right. That's a confirmed, >>It's a, it's a, it's a hybrid yet. In-person and virtual. >>Awesome. Great to see you guys in person. So being a, for the folks, watching the Amazon partnerships, as you guys scale up these, these partnerships and take it the next level, what's your, what's your closing comment. Yes. >>Yeah. I also want to say, write something that I should mention, right. We miss also invested in AWS marketplace. So it's not just the direct consulting partners and the partners that I mentioned, the a hundred thousand and 35,000, right. They, customers can also purchase beam on AWS marketplace through consulting partner, private offers. And that's why Viva's embraced many of these aspects to try to help our customers and continue to grow that 400,000 customer base, which is a pretty phenomenal number. >>Yeah. I've always been impressed with beam's customer base and they've got a very loyal base as well. I point that out and give props to the VM team. Andy closing comments for you, the V natives relationship, how would you summarize that? >>I'd say it's fantastic. You know, years ago it started as just a normal technology partnership. You know, now we're an advanced technology partner with storage competency, numerous programs like APN, uh, customer engagement. We're a marketplace seller. And I would say that it's not only that, but, but customers can take advantages of their, um, EDP with AWS to purchase on the marketplace and get credits against that. And our partners can as well. That's a, that's a very important thing because we're seeing more and more interest in that today. Uh, we're a public sector partner with them. We're an ISV accelerate SAS revenue recognition program. We're, we're, uh, I think we're checking a lot of boxes, but really taking advantage of it. The last thing I would say is, uh, I've known Sabina for quite a few years now. And I think it's the people relationships in the two companies that make this work. >>We have a lot of people, a lot smarter than me on the, on the speeds and feeds here. But at the end of the day, um, Sabina has a team of people that work with us on a, on a, almost a daily basis to solve customer problems. Right. We get people calling in all the time. How do I make Veem work on AWS? How do I get AWS solutions to work with theme? And our job is to make it as easy as possible because we both believe, uh, that customers, they say customer first. I always say, customer always are always right, but, but, but, but you know, at the end of the day, that's what makes this >>Yeah. Customer is always right. Customer obsession, working backwards from the customer fucking customer first Sabina. This is really interesting. This is a good point. I just come quick, go back to you real quick. This integration of relationships and also cloud technology integration is a big theme this year, post re-invent. Your thoughts >>Absolutely means, um, uh, to be candid. Uh, one of the goals that me and my team take is how do we bring technology partners together to add more value to our customers in end to end solutions, along with technology partners and consulting partners. So that is a huge focus for us because we need to do that in order to scale, not just for each other, but also for our customers and bring that, bring together meaningful, comprehensive end to end solutions. >>That's awesome. Andy, great to see you. We'll see at Veem on as well, coming up for the Veem show and your conference. You've been conference hybrid conference in person and virtual and digital to be in a great to see you again. Thanks for sharing all the great updates. And this is the season two. It's all about the data and the innovations with AWS. I'm John for your host of the cube season one episode, two of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for watching.