>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE Live in Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We are covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22. John, this is day two of our coverage wall-to-wall three days of coverage on theCUBE. We've been talking a lot about the developer and how the world is starting to really revolve around developer and DevOps portfolios. >> Yes, developers, startups, big companies, all transforming. This next segment, we want to hear from how Dell Technologies cloud natives, big time strategy there and looking forward to it. It's good. It's going to be a great segment. >> Yes, please welcome back one of our alumni to theCUBE. Brad Maltz is here, Senior Director of DevOps Portfolio and DevRel for Dell Technologies. Good to see you. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, Dell at KubeCon, what's going on? >> Yeah, that's literally the most common question I'm getting. So for us, it's a lot about our customer base is making that transformation into a DevOps world. And they have a ton of Dell and they're like, Hey, from a Dell perspective, how do you help us make that transformation into a DevOps operating model? So we're here to explain that. We're here to talk about infrastructure as code, our container Kubernetes story, our multi-cloud story. We're talking about all of it. >> Tell us about those stories and what the value is in it for companies to work with Dell as they transition. >> So when we look at it from a DevOps perspective for us, it's all about the culture, the operating model shift they're trying to make. And what that means to them is they have to figure out how do they automate all of the stacks they have to deal with. Whether it's going to be server, storage, data protection, network, and all the way up through the hypervisor and Kubernetes. That means they need to work with an ecosystem of tools. Things like Ansible, things like Terraform, all that stuff. Our job is to make our portfolio more consumable in the infrastructure as code space. That's one part of the discussion. The second part of the conversation is Kubernetes won. Kubernetes won the abstraction in this multi-cloud world and we as Dell are helping our customers consume Kubernetes. Whether it's by bringing solutions and more appliance oriented mentality to the market or whether it's actually enabling them with our container storage modules and CSI drivers. >> So it as supercloud as we call or multi-cloud as some people call it, you're starting to see the abstraction for interoperability, but essentially just distributed hybrid cloud. Edge as you guys have a big presence. So Dell's supplying not just the data center anymore. Cloud models are moving to hybrid on-premises, edge is growing. We saw some great use cases where military applications are using Kubernetes and all kinds of new things. So this real examples happening right now. This is going to impact Dell's customers and Dell as a supplier of compute and servers. And the gear that runs everything. Like at a telco, you can have a data center at an edge spot, like a box could be a data center. >> Telco is a great example cause we created the business, the Telco business unit. And in the Telco business unit, our goal was, hey, telco is a little different than enterprise edge. Enterprise edge, retail, manufacturing, healthcare. They have certain needs. Telco, much smaller group of customers that have a much different set of needs. And that's very similar is how do we scale at the edge? How do we control things programmatically? How do we do it in a secure way? And how do we do it so that our people internally don't have to deal with the underpinnings of all that infrastructure. Just make it easier for them. That's our goal through the edge discussions, through telco and all that. >> Yeah. We've been doing a big thing on why hardware matters. Hardware's back. We look at all the hyperscalers, the big competition is faster, faster, faster chips, faster the physics. This is part of the supply chain both hardware and software. Okay. So developers want more power. At the end of the day, this community here wants invisible infrastructure and they want it fast. >> Brad: Yes, that's exactly right. >> There's a lot under the hub. It's still servers. >> You still got firmware, you still got bio, you still got to management operating system, You still got to patch things, kernels, security issues, all of that from a server perspective. We haven't even talked about storage or networking or any of the other stuff. So there's a ton of buttons and dials under the covers. >> And that's totally going to be awesome. And the question comes in, okay, now take me to the cloud native because automation, infrastructures code, these are now the hotspots. Software supply chain, not hardware, software supply chain. So these are all things that are going to be intersecting. What's your view? >> In the multi-cloud view of the world, what we really have are our customers are saying, okay, we started on one cloud, Amazon or Azure or Google. And they're like, you know what? We had to go to a second cloud for whatever reason, many reasons. Now we have to manage two clouds. And by the way, we never got fully off-prem. So now we have all of our on-premises stuff plus multiple clouds. How do we deal with the complexity there? And the complexity there is everything from data problems of data mobility, data protection, replication, all that stuff. How do we deal with the actual application life cycle management across that? And that's where a lot of the tooling we're discussing comes in. That's where Kubernetes comes in and they want to do it in an agnostic way. 'Cause if they can't begin to transition to do it in a standardized layer, then the end of the day they're still going to be managing three totally different environments with three separate engineering teams. >> So is your target audience primarily existing Dell customers, legacy customers, or is it really wide open? >> It's actually been opening up. So we have kind of, the way I view it is we have three different segments that we're going to be going after. We have what I would say is the top 10% of the industry that's really able to skill up into this DevOps world very quickly. They're going to go after the GitOps, they're going to go after all those things. That's a combination of existing customers, but also the really, really large customers that can build their own clouds on-premises. We then have the other end of the spectrum. People that aren't making the shift. People that are like, you know what this DevOps transformation it's not going to help us there, but we still need server and storage and whatnot. And then I like to call it the squishy middle. 60, 70% of the market that's like, we can't scale up in time, we can't hire the people, they're not available 'cause that 10% just got them all, but we still have the same problems. And how do we operate in a world where we have that multi-cloud type of a problem, but we can't find the people. Now you got to figure out more of the no-code, low-code packaged solutions, packaged automation coming from companies like Dell and others. >> So there's customers that are either at the beginning of their journey are not convinced yet. What are some of the barriers that they're seeing that Dell can help them overcome? >> Number one thing, education. >> Lisa: Really? >> We're hearing that consistently here at KubeCon and just customer meetings all over the place. There is a segment of the industry that they're empowered to move into a DevOps model. They don't have the ability or resources. They're not able to say, I've been doing this forever in this way in storage. How do I do that in another thing? And they're scared. They want somebody to come in and kind of handhold them a little bit, but somebody they trust. Somebody they've been working with for a very long time. That's Dell's role. Hands-on labs, training materials, how-to videos, but do it in the comfortable way that they feel like, okay we got this. >> And the success with the customers has been that well-documented. The success with the company, again, continues to survive and thrive in all conditions. So Michael Dell knows what he's doing. Love following his strategy. Michael, if you're watching, I know he watches theCUBE video, congratulations. But now the hard question for Dell is this, the applications used to run on PCs, now they're running PCs under the covers and servers. The application space here at this community is enabled by Kubernetes, is creating a new application runtime like environment. I like, compared to the old app server days when things were like just application specific, development got easier. We're in that renaissance now where the app runtime is being enabled by Kubernetes. You guys been there, done that in the old school, now the new school. What's your view on this Kubernetes? What's Dell's view on? >> Yeah, so back to Kubernetes won in my head. It's just flat out won and part of the reason, and it beat out a lot of things. You remember Cloud Foundry, which there's still a thing, but Cloud Foundry went a little too far up into the application stack and constrained the application developers a bit too much. Kubernetes success is two things. It's because they're not constraining the developer, but they're also figuring out how to enable that IT operations mindset. And they become that happy medium that's out there. So now all of a sudden, application modernization conversations and cloud-native app development, there is a standard package. There's standard load balancing and security paradigm, standard registration mechanisms, all built into the Kubernetes layer, by the way, enabled by an ecosystem. And because they're actually going through that, what's happening now is we can finally move forward. We can take that next step and we can build around that ecosystem of Kubernetes. >> That is thematically something that we've been hearing, John, for the last day and a half is the maturation of Kubernetes People, what's next? We are ready for the next step. Talk about Dell as an enabler of that. >> Yeah, so a funny, another part of that paradigm is Kubernetes does not equal virtualization. And this is a hard one in this industry right now. A lot of people say, well, yeah, we did the VMware pivot and then the KVM and everything else and they're like, this is just another one of those pivots. I'm like, no it's not. Virtualization was the pivot of physical hardware became virtual hardware, but you still thought of it in CPU memory disc and you managed it in the same way. Kubernetes, it's a such a different way of thinking about operationalization and all that abstraction that what we're realizing is people need to take baby steps into Kubernetes right now. The maturity of it is great because there is an ecosystem around it, but the majority of the industry isn't even aware of the basics of Kubernetes right now. So our job, we look at it as the education part, but also can we deliver the solutions together with the OpenShift's of the world and the Tanzu's of the world and the Rancher's of the world. Can we deliver more of that full stack experience going into the next few years? That's where we believe we can help accelerate them. Education and that delivery mechanism. >> And the community support is going to be there too. You got to have the. >> 100%. >> The community, not just education, which you guys done before, but doing it with open source vibe. >> That's where DevRel comes in. So the DevRel half of my world now is all about Dell in the community. And to be part of community isn't just to say, Hey, I'm going to go sponsor something. That's not community to me. >> It doesn't hurt. >> It doesn't hurt, but we're going to do that. We're definitely going to help with that. What our notion is you got to participate, you got to contribute, you got to be there, you got to be part of the community. That's part of my developer relations team is to become part of it. >> You got to be part of it and belong. Belonging is earning. >> Brad: Yes. >> And that's the key. And the other thing we were talking about standards and Dell has won a lot of business 'cause the PC and the servers all had standards, standard components. Standards now in the community are being driven by developer consensus. >> Brad: Yes. >> So that is an interesting new paradigm. So if you make cloud native work where all the hardware and software that's powering the builders is invisible. The developers will tell you what they want. >> 100%. >> And that's why your Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry example is so on point. It's a little bit nuanced, but what happened there is, let's explain Kubernetes was loosely de facto enabling. They didn't try to take too much territory. They didn't over push. >> Brad: Exactly. >> They were very flexible, lightweight at first, but it was enabling. >> It was organic. >> And we called it on theCUBE, I'm not going to lie, we called that early on. So props to us. >> Brad: Good job. >> Pat on the back. >> Lisa: Pat your own back. >> We get it right a lot. But now there's impact though. But the Dell I think speaks to the theme here, which just we talked is that you got startups here. We had from Envoy, we saw the donator there. He started his own company. You got Dell, which has large enterprises running massive workloads with a lot of legacy and modernization. So you got a combination of both coming together. This is going to be a collision of innovation. >> Oh I look, that's exactly right. Part of what I've been getting is not just the end users, the infrastructure developers, and whatnot around here. Startups look, come to Dell, and they're like, why are you here? Like we build this and we don't talk to you. And we're like, why not? If we come to market and start delivering more of those Kubernetes oriented solutions and the Kubernetes stack experience, that's where you guys should be working with us. You're part of the ecosystem. >> Well, your job is to say to them, look it when you want to write your software for the edge and we have market share of the most hardware at the edge, 'cause we perform better on the edge. No one wants to write software on the slower platform. >> No. >> Name me one I want to write software that's just, this is something, but people don't understand that's why you're here. >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> The game is about performance. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Cloud can do it, you can do it with a machine. So it depends where in the distributed computing chain you're at. >> You bring up one topic that actually isn't a core discussion topic around DevOps, but I am seeing more HPC and a AI/ML conversations popping up in this DevOps cloud native space. 'Cause even the market of HPC, which is a very traditional market, commodity server driven in the past, they're starting to say, how do I take advantage of Kubernetes and all of the benefits that we've been talking about. >> What are some of the things that you've heard like in your sense is the key theme or the talk track of Kubernetes, its evolution? What's on the developer's minds the last day and a half at this conference? >> Oh, okay. That's a hard question, but a good one. So the way I look at it is probably it's the robustness of the features within Kubernetes, not the native features, but even partner included features. They just want to be able to handle security in a much more, I hate to say zero trust, but secure cloud native way. There's tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem that are so integrated into Kubernetes. They don't have to think sometimes as much about how do they do it themselves. They can go find through open source or off-the-shelf startup and say, I need that and I can spin it up in about five minutes and now I'm doing that without having to spend weeks or months and having to build that. And that's security is one example. You can go through the networking discussion, you can go through so many different areas. The fact is because of community and the ecosystem, that is the winning formula for Kubernetes to enable the development. That's all I'm hearing here is they're like, give me more, give me more startups, give me more of these technologies. >> And ease of use has been a big topic here. We've been talking before we came on camera about VMware has done great since it used the virtual machine example versus Kubernetes. That is millions of developers and operators on VMware. They have about 200,000 plus just in VMUG alone. So they are going to transform their careers. They're looking for a home. They're looking for a community for the next 10 years. I mean, VMware will still be around with Broadcom, but I'm speculating that it will be much more in maintenance mode. But to get someone's career in fourth gear, fifth gear, you got to go and get that next skill set, and that's the question. Where do all these operators, IT operators go to become enterprise operators? >> Brad: That's exactly right. >> That is a big topic. What's your reaction? >> Sp I'm actually a living proof of that. I grew up in the VMware ecosystem. And for me making that pivot, it took me many years. One of the ways I did that was I actually have run in Dell, our advanced development pivotal Dojos, if you remember Pivotal. >> Yes. >> And doing the Pair Programming in Agile. It took me that mental shift to say, okay, we were doing it that way and now there's a new way to do it through code with developers and using all the new buzzwords. And that pivot is different for somebody that's just starting now, and they don't have access to a Dojo that they can go handle like a whole bunch of pair programmers. How do they make that pivot? That's 100% what we have to do. >> Okay, so my question is this, this is a hard question for you, maybe you can answer or not or maybe you can. What's different now than the attempt in the past from Dell EMC to do work or align with the developers? I think, was it five, six years ago, it was an effort. Was it timing? What's different now from then? >> So that attempt was awesome. That team was great. I was very close to that team and that was from the EMC side originally is where they have built that out. And the notion of that was that we just have to go start contributing knowledge and technology into the community and start really taking the brand and trying to expand the brand to be relevant in that community. Nothing wrong. That was actually an amazing way they did it. I think through the merger there was definitely a little bit of, okay, well, maybe this isn't one of our top priorities right now and that's probably what happened through the actual merger. >> John: It's a little bit distraction. >> It was distraction. >> Timings wasn't as good now. >> You try merging a 67 billion merger. I mean it's just really hard to do. What happened here is I think we finally got past a lot of that with the merger and now we're in steady stage/growth mode, which is a notion that now we can go and do this again in the new world, taking our lessons learned from what we did before, and try to actually go and update that in these new power apps. >> And you could point to some specific timing issues. Like at that time this community wasn't as advanced along. Kubernetes wasn't as clear. Visibility to that value proposition. Although a lot of people were speculating what happened that way. >> Exactly. >> But now with multi-cloud, I think developers starting to see the reality that it ain't going to be one cloud. >> Well, multi-cloud is not one cloud, so 100%. >> Well, I mean there's multi-cloud today, but it's really not multi-cloud by the way it could be. The people have multiple clouds. I think that gives developers comfort that existing enterprise players. Remember Microsoft wasn't really in the cloud game six, seven years ago. Look where they are now. Significant progress, nipping at the heels of AWS. So all the enterprise players are back at the table. >> Brad: Yeah, definitely. We're here. >> And that's timing issue. >> We're here. >> Talk about, you're here, you are helping customers get to the basics of Kubernetes. You talked a lot about the importance of the education. >> Brad: Yes. >> That screams to me that Dell can be a facilitator of cultural change within organizations, whether it's a bank or a hospital or a retailer or whatnot. Another thing that I'm curious about, what you guys are doing, how you've evolved, Dell is a massive partner ecosystem. How is the partner ecosystem involved in helping customers build their DevOps portfolios and really start embracing, understanding, and learning about Kubernetes? >> So that's an ever changing world right now. And that's part of why we're here at KubeCon is to help expand that. We have a very, very strong partner community. Not even just channel, but like technology partner community. And our goal is to understand with our DevOps portfolio what needs to be the next step of that partner community. Do we have to go partner up with like the, I'll use examples, the Solo.io. Do we have to partner up with all the mesh companies, the HashiCorp, which we are, We have to understand where the layers that make sense and where don't. There are some that don't make sense because they're so often to an app developer land or they're so far above even Kubernetes sometimes that maybe they don't make sense in our partner community. >> How influential are, I know we got to go soon, but how influential are your customers in helping to make some of those decisions? It's all about the customer at the end of the day. >> They're the only one that's deciding for us. They have to come to us. We have to see the need. We have to understand the discussions through our sales mechanisms, our other mechanisms. We're using that data every single day, every hour to make those decisions. >> Awesome. Brad, it's been great to have you. Sorry we took more of your time than we planned, but it was so interesting. >> No, this is awesome. >> Dell at KubeCon, you've done a great job of explaining why that absolutely resonates, the relevance, and why customers should be looking at Dell as their partner for this. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. >> Thank you guys. >> All right. For John Furrier and our guest, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit, Michigan. Stick around, our next guest will be here in just a minute. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at VeamON 2022, at the Aria in Las Vegas. You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Danny Allan here is the Chief Technical Officer at Veeam. And he's joined by Ope Bakare who's the Chief Technical Officer at HBC Dave. One of the few companies that's older than my home. >> Unbelievable. >> Ope. >> That's right. >> Danny, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. It's true by the way. 1670, we're going to learn more about HBC. But I wonder, Danny, if you could set it up. The kind of topic of this discussion here is hybrid cloud, we've got a pretty interesting use case, give us the high level, what should we be focused on here? >> So lots of customers today focused on digital transformation and moving into the cloud, everyone talks about that, I can take my workload and move into the cloud. And one of the interesting things that we saw originally was, you know, I'll just lift it and move it over there. That's not necessarily the best model for the cloud. So you see people doing that. What I actually think is really interesting, and I know Ope has been very focused on is actually transforming the application so that works most effectively in the cloud model. >> So Ope, maybe give us the background on HBC, for folks who aren't familiar with the company and your role there. >> Sure, so HBC is 350, somewhat years old. It's the oldest corporation that's continually existed in North America. I have the privilege to serve as the chief technology officer there. And, you know, HBC is a company that has innovation kind of baked into its core DNA. We have to keep reinventing ourselves, otherwise, we get stagnant and we get left behind. Clearly, we're still around so--. >> So far so good. >> We must be doing something right. But kind of pivoting to what you were saying earlier, you know, our journey to the cloud was multifaceted. Some of it was to improve the pace of innovation, some of it was to improve on quality. So you know, we have typical data center technologies, and, you know, we had some of the typical issues you would have, right, so some older equipment, you know, failures, etc, etc. When you're in the cloud, a lot of that is just managed for you. Again, it's about what I talked about this morning, it's about moving your team up the value chain, towards creating value, right? So you start with the managing of core basic infrastructure, and you start consuming them as services. The interesting thing is, as you mentioned, for the vast majority of people, your first foray into the cloud, is pick up all those virtual machines that you had on-prem, and put them in the cloud. And that's great, you get, immediately you get a better, possibly a better or more available under a cloud platform there. But you're just barely scratching the surface. You don't really get into cloud until you start consuming cloud native services, until you go serverless, you go stateless with containers in Kubernetes, you can use platforms like, you know, Kafka for streaming your data, as opposed to, you know, constructing cumbersome, easy to break data pipelines and all that. So it's a very interesting pivot. And I think a lot of people sometimes struggle with going past that first step, they have the VMs, it's familiar to what they're used to. But for us, we had a digital transformation in the works. We were replatforming from a legacy platform, some of you may know, Blue Martini. But we were moving to a more modern, more flexible platform that was really suited to accelerate our omni channel strategy. Thank goodness we did because the pandemic came around and proved it exactly correct. >> Good timing. >> Yeah, so that's really what happened for us, that actually forced us forward in the cloud journey. >> So Alan Nance, who was at the time, he was like a CIO slash CTO at Philips. And he said to me, if you just lift and shift to the cloud, this is early days of cloud, he said, he's not going to change your operational model. The company, if you want to save billions, you got to change that operational model. But listening to what Ope just said, Danny, what does that mean, from your perspective, I mean, cloud native, and what does that do for your business? >> Well, cloud native,. The benefit of the cloud, of course, makes completely portable, and it's elastic, you can scale almost infinitely, and you don't have to build it. However, the hard part is not the technology. I always say the hard part is the process, you actually have to rewrite your applications to take advantage of all the things in the cloud. And that is not an easy thing. So what we're seeing a lot in the industry across our customer base, is when they have a greenfield opportunity, a new project, they always start in the cloud. We're not seeing a lot of, hey, am going to completely modernize my applications, because that's expensive. It's already built. And so customers will sometimes pick that up and move it to the cloud. And sometimes they'll actually move it back on premises, because the cost model isn't there. But I do think in the long term, if you're looking at four or five years, all the new applications will be designed for a cloud native experience. What that means is written in containers, with container orchestration, you know, seamlessly orchestrating the entire portfolio and data lifecycle. >> So Ope. >> Spot on. >> Translate that into what actually happened at HBC. So as Danny said, we're not going to just going to move everything into the cloud, we've got a hybrid setup, maybe some of the new stuff. What did you do? You have the, your back end systems, your database kind of protected that? How did you go about this omni channel journey? >> So, you know, for us, you know, by the way, that was completely spot on. You know, it's not a fallacy to really examine some cost, because we all have to, we'll have to live in the real world, right? We understand that there are budgets, and there are limits to what we can accomplish within a fiscal year. So you look at an application that's already built, that's already fulfilling the business purpose for which for which it was built. What's the value in immediately going and taking it all apart and containerizing it? If there is a small or easy lift, sure, it might be worth it. But if it's a major system that you have to rewrite, the ROI is just not there, right? So a lift and shift model in that scenario, kind of makes sense. But what you said earlier is exactly what we did. When we had an opportunity again, with the omni channel strategy, we're looking to strengthen our digital arm. And so we were moving from our legacy platform to this new one. And that required us to do a bunch of work. So we had to modernize some of our services, we had to change some of our data, our data process, how we stream data into and out of the e-commerce platform. And all of that actually provided sort of almost a groundswell of support for all of this transformative works. Apologies, for all this transformative work we had to do. So it totally made sense in that case, we actually were able to kill two birds with one stone, really transform and go cloud native, at the same time as deprecating a bunch of legacy technologies that to be perfectly frank didn't really have much of a place in the cloud. >> So many questions. I hope, go. >> Yeah, so it's interesting, because when you talk about that sort of journey to cloud that you're on, sometimes people will ask the question, well, how long before everything is in the cloud? And often the answer is, if you look at what's called the vanishing point, where the two sides of the highway come together, off in the distance, it's like, that's, that's when it'll happen. But as you get closer to that point, it gets further away. So if you had to categorize it in terms of a percentage of where you are now, and then an aspiration over time, how would you categorize that? >> So I have the pleasure of telling you that we are probably at about, I'd say 90% in the cloud? >> Oh, wow, okay. >> We were very aggressive about it. And frankly, I think, you know, first of all, I have the privilege to lead an amazing team. And they did everything possible to make this real. We had a goal, and it was focusing on our customers, being customer obsessed, really. And for us, data centers just didn't make sense in that world. So all we did was work towards how do we deprecate these legacy technologies? How do we consolidate and then move them to the cloud as quickly as possible? So for us 90%, and we're going even even further. Is that last 10% worth it, to go for that? I mean, you know, what's the, you know, you get to that marginal return? >> I really think the next 5% will be worth it, the last five we're not going to pursue and here's why. So think about, you know, we talked about really low latency things that need to be physically in the building. So we have a bunch of, we have a whole lot of fulfillment and distribution centers, right? Those, in some cases, we have automation equipment that really requires low latency connectivity to physical equipment. Moving that to the cloud, is not really a high value proposition. If you think about, you know, large corporate presences, there are some pieces of technology that you could move to the cloud. But again, latency in the customer, the users experience might be compromised as a result. If there's no value, really, to moving that into the cloud, why would you do it? >> And wouldn't you have to freeze the application in order to move it into the cloud or not for these 10% or 5%, or not necessarily? >> Not necessarily. In many cases, we have applications that are built in a distributed fashion so that you can take, you know, some percentage of it, move it to the cloud, validate it over there, and then move the rest of it-- >> You could build some kind of abstraction layer, okay. So the million dollar question is, what does Veeam have to do with all this? >> Well, so Veeam has been for quite some time now, our data protection engine. You know, when I talk about moving people up the value stack, I don't take that lightly. For me, you know, having engineers do things like and please forgive me for a second here, but do things like backups, to me that's, it's a hard requirement, but it's not really high value for me. So if I can get a platform that can use policies, can use tags can operate natively in the cloud. And once you have it running, you can set it and forget it, other than your periodic, you know, business continuity to DR Tests. You know, that's the dream scenario. And we've achieved that largely. We still have some legacy systems that are not on vignette. But that's something that's going to change over the next, let's call it 18 or so months. >> So did you evolve as Veeam evolved? How long have you been in this role? I apologize-- >> I've been with HBC for three years now. >> Okay, so now, Veeam goes, well, I remember I first saw Veeam at a VMUG. I'm like VMware, I was just brilliant, right? Of course, we all say that. Now, but you saw Veeam's ascendancy through virtualization, and then it took a while, but then all of a sudden, bare metal, the first in SAS, great cloud strategy. Now the first in I don't know if I can say that. Scratch that. We will talk to you about that tomorrow. Someone will come here. >> Someone else will come here. At VeeamON. So, from what you know, about HBC, did you kind of follow that Veeam strategy, they were just sort of there as you migrate it to the cloud, SAS, you know, Microsoft 365, etc? >> Yeah, so we actually started using Veeam in a very limited capacity quite some time ago, mostly to protect on-prem virtualized workloads. And that was, you know, that was really the limit. And, you know, my team had been used Veeam, in my previous role when I worked for a large healthcare provider, health care company in the states. So I was pretty familiar with Veeam as a platform, I was very familiar with the journey. I think that you know, more than many other, most of their competition, they've made the transition into the cloud first world, far more successfully. If you think about the policy engine, the automatic tearing, by age, as well as some of the cloud tagging, and the full integration with the native capabilities in AWS and Azure, it's been a dream scenario for us. >> You and I have talked about this Danny, and a lot of your competitors, especially early on the cloud, they wrap their stack in, you know, to container, or Kubernetes, it's shoved it in the cloud, which is really hosted on prem app. You guys didn't do that. I mean, I pushed you on this a number of times. What did you do? >> Every time there's a modern infrastructure, we say, how can we actually apply data protection, modern data protection to that infrastructure, specifically. We don't try and take what already exists. And Veeam started at this. If you think back when we first started, everyone was doing agents. And if you took an agent, put it on a hypervisor, and you'd 100 of them running at the same time, you would kill your production system. So we said, we'll take a snapshot at the hypervisor level. And then when storage arrays came up with snapshots, let's take advantage of that. When we went to the cloud, we said let's take advantage of the API's rather than trying to put an agent in there. And so every time we encounter a new infrastructure, we say, how do we take advantage of what that infrastructure is bringing? >> We're going to dig into more of this tomorrow. But I don't want to steal from the HBC story. Let me ask you about, you talked about, we talk a lot about digital transformation and modernization. And, of course, COVID was like a force march to digital, we all sort of realize this. What do you see Ope, that's now permanent? Whether it's, you know, security, data protection, and how you're thinking about modernization? What are those practices that are now best practices that will become permanent? >> Well, the obvious one that kind of hits up hits us all in the face is remote work. For the past, let's call it two ish years, my team has been almost completely remote. And as a result, you know, we've been able to show that, for us, it worked just fine. There were some teething pains as we all did >> It was like Y2K. Wasn't it? Hey, the world didn't end. >> It became a non factor very quickly, why? Because for most technology organizations were too used to working outside of normal hours. So it wasn't a stretch really to extend a logic to just working, you know, working remotely permanently. That said, you know, one of the things that for us, and I'm going to deviate away from the technology side for a second, one of the things that is really critical for us is we're trying to make sure that we respect people's work-life balance. As we have colleagues who work from home, you know, today, it's very easy to roll out of bed in the morning, you know, put your zoom suit on, and you know, where you're wearing your shorts, and all that and just work the whole day and then around like five to 7 P.M. or whatever, you sign off and you just realized, I just spent way more time working than I probably would have if I were going to the office. That's you know, it's a great productivity-- >> With no breaks. >> With no breaks, right? And there's no button, no water cooler moments or whatever. But, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to come up with various ways to respect people's, you know, work-life balance. Interestingly enough, we actually have a law that is going to effect in early June, in Ontario, where there will be a right to disconnect. So outside of normal working hours, you will be required to disconnect from your employees unless it is an operational issue, or some other pertinent emergency that requires them to engage. So, I think that's going to become the new norm as we go forward. Coming back to technology, I think just looking at the last two years, I don't know if you've noticed the same thing, but the pace of innovation seems to have picked up a tick. And I think that is going to become the new normal. You're going to see a lot of people challenging status quo a lot of sacred, a lot of sacred cows are going to get, you know, get, you know put out to pasture. And I think that's a good thing for our industry, it's going to quicken the pace of innovation. And it's also going to make people more thoughtful about where they place their bets, I think. You know, the other thing, this is the last one, dollars and cents. If you think about the pandemic, when it first started, we all had to take a breath, because instantly, a whole lot of industries just paused, right? And when that happened, you know, you had no revenue coming in. You had, it was whoa, what are we doing here? And I think that also sharpened our focus, when it came to making some some decisions. You know, we all had to deal with, you know, in some cases, furloughs and some cases reductions. Thankfully, we're all back to back to normal now. But where you place your bets financially, it's going to drive a lot of technology decision in investing, right? So I think that's going to be a larger part of our kind of landscape going forward. >> So that last point about innovation, Danny, it's got to be music to your ears, because your, the premise, you're saying, behind Veeam, is you look at the next trend and then modernize, you put meaning behind modern data protection. It's not just a tagline. You gave a couple of good examples. But talk a little bit more about, you know, what Ope just said and what that means to you guys? >> Well, at a technology level, I always talk about three things being part of modern data protection. One is, around the security, everyone working from home, there's intellectual property going into the home on the endpoint in Microsoft Teams, in all the collaboration tools, that needs to be protected. And actually, we're seeing because of the rise in ransomware, cyber insurance is actually requiring data protection for that. So a big part of modern data protection is all about the security of the environment. The second is cloud acceleration. We want customers to move to the cloud. I love sitting here quietly listening to him tell the story of what they're doing, because it's perfect. That is the story that we want from our customers moving to the cloud. And we don't want to stop that in any way. In fact, all of our licensing models go to market, support set cloud acceleration. And then the last thing is, of course, data protection. If they're going to do that, you own that data, you need to protect it on any cloud and on every cloud. And so our focus around modern data protection is those three things. Ransomware protection, cloud acceleration and modern data protection >> In an environment that is not bespoke, I presume, we're going to talk about Supercloud tomorrow. But right, but this idea that instead of going to, I don't know, if you run on Google, AWS, Azure, whatever, but instead of going there and doing your thing, and going over here and doing your on-prem, but you want a consistent experience across all your estates, whether it's on-prem and the cloud, eventually out to the edge, we're going to talk about that tomorrow, too. Is that a fair premise? >> It is. I mean, operational consistency is absolutely crucial for my team to succeed. I mean, think about running multiple different tools for data protection, it just creates a whole lot of interaction, let's call it that has friction. And ultimately, with anything and technology, wherever there's friction, you're going to have problems eventually, and you're going to have varying levels of skill in the team. Suppose you have part of your data protection team, you lose one or two people to COVID for a week, right? And you have a DR test. And it's so happens that these are the experts at FUBAR software, that is your data protection platform. The people that you may have on-prem, available may not have the right skills. I mean, unifying that stuff and actually running them out of the same ethos, really. I think that creates operational consistency that is so valuable for us to be successful. There was one thing I wanted to bring up, just hearing what you said earlier. Zero trust, I think is going to become part of our industry baseline as well. Zero trust approaches to network connectivity to tooling so that you stop dealing with traditional VPN. >> Tho nication >> Tho nication It just, that's where we're going as well. So apologies but-- >> No, not at all, it was a buzzword before the pandemic. >> It was but it's actually-- >> Now, it's a mandate. >> It's kind of, it's come back and become actually useful. >> If people are trying to, okay, what does this really mean? What does this mean to our organization? Exciting times, you know, the thing is, there's a lot of unknowns, right? And we certainly saw that with COVID. So how do you as a technologist deal with, you know, it used to be we would automate the known. This industry is built on that, right? How are you approaching what you don't know, from a technology, infrastructure and process standpoint? >> So I'm going to, everyone watching, everyone turn their videos off, when it's, I'm going to give them a secret, it's the people. The people are the secret sauce. If you surround yourself with amazing people, curious people, you can solve any problem. I again, like I said, I have the privilege of leading this team. And we have some amazing thinkers and problem solvers. If you set them to task and give them the right support as a leader, they will accomplish anything. And so for me, having a robust and just really diversely skilled team allows us to attack any problem, I have zero, I have zero worries about the future of state of technology, I have absolute confidence, we'll be able to engage, master and exploit whatever technologies come our way or any other challenges that actually happened to you know, be in our path as well. >> We hear this a lot in The Cube people process technology. Technology, figure itself out and get the good people you can get the right process and win. >> Absolutely. >> Ope, Danny, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Danny, we'll see you tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon Danny's coming back and we're going to dig into a lot of this stuff and double click on it. Appreciate your time. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante, for David Nicholson. You're watching The Cube's coverage VeamON 2022. From the Aria, in Las Vegas. This is day one. Keep it right there. (enchanting music)

(innovative music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. My name is Dave Vellante, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. Hybrid as in physical, not a lot of that going on this year. But we're here with the AWS ecosystem, AWS, and special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage of the event. We've got two live sets, two remote studios, more than a hundred guests on the program. We're going really deep, as we enter the next decade of Cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Danny Allan, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Veeam, and James Kirschner who's the Engineering Director for Amazon S3. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's kick things off. Veeam and AWS, you guys have been partnering for a long time. Danny, where's the focus at this point in time? What are customers telling you they want you to solve for? And then maybe James, you can weigh in on the problems that customers are facing, and the opportunities that they see ahead. But Danny, why don't you start us off? >> Sure. So we hear from our customers a lot that they certainly want the solutions that Veeam is bringing to market, in terms of data protection. But one of the things that we're hearing is they want to move to Cloud. And so there's a number of capabilities that they're asking us for help with. Things like S3, things like EC2, and RDS. And so over the last, I'll say four or five years, we've been doing more and more together with AWS in, I'll say, two big categories. One is, how do we help them send their data to the Cloud? And we've done that in a very significant way. We support obviously tiering data into S3, but not just S3. We support S3, and S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. And more importantly than ever, we do it with immutability because customers are asking for security. So a big category of what we're working on is making sure that we can store data and we can do it securely. Second big category that we get asked about is "Help us to protect the Cloud-Native Workloads." So they have workloads running in EC2 and RDS, and EFS, and EKS, and all these different services knowing Cloud-Native Data Protection. So we're very focused on solving those problems for our customers. >> You know, James, it's interesting. I was out at the 15th anniversary of S3 in Seattle, in September. I was talking to Mai-Lan. Remember we used to talk about gigabytes and terabytes, but things have changed quite dramatically, haven't they? What's your take on this topic? >> Well, they sure have. We've seen the exponential growth data worldwide and that's made managing backups more difficult than ever before. We're seeing traditional methods like tape libraries and secondary sites fall behind, and many organizations are moving more and more of their workloads to the Cloud. They're extending backup targets to the Cloud as well. AWS offers the most storage services, data transfer methods and networking options with unmatched durability, security and affordability. And customers who are moving their Veeam Backups to AWS, they get all those benefits with a cost-effective offsite storage platform. Providing physical separation from on-premises primary data with pay-as-you-go economics, no upfront fees or capital investments, and near zero overhead to manage. AWS and APM partners like Veeam are helping to build secure, efficient, cost-effective backup, and restore solutions using the products you know and trust with the scale and reliability of the AWS Cloud. >> So thank you for that. Danny, I remember I was way back in the old days, it was a VeeamON physical event. And I remember kicking around and seeing this company called Kasten. And I was really interested in like, "You protect the containers, aren't they ephemeral?" And we started to sort of chit-chat about how that's going to change and what their vision was. Well, back in 2020, you purchased Kasten, you formed the Veeam KBU- the Kubernetes Business Unit. What was the rationale behind that acquisition? And then James, I'm going to get you to talk a little bit about modern apps. But Danny, start with the rationale behind the Kasten acquisition. >> Well, one of the things that we certainly believe is that the next generation of infrastructure is going to be based on containers, and there's a whole number of reasons for that. Things like scalability and portability. And there's a number of significant value-adds. So back in October of last year in 2020, as you mentioned, we acquired Kasten. And since that time we've been working through Kasten and from Veeam to add more capabilities and services around AWS. For example, we supported the Bottlerocket launch they just did and actually EKS anywhere. And so we're very focused on making sure that our customers can protect their data no matter whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's on-premises in a data center, or if it's running up in the Cloud in EC2. We give this consistent data management experience and including, of course, the next generation of infrastructure that we believe will be based on containers. >> Yeah. You know, James, I've always noted to our audience that, "Hey AWS, they provide rich set of primitives and API's that ISV's like Veeam can take advantage of it." But I wonder if you could talk about your perspective, maybe what you're seeing in the ecosystem, maybe comment on what Veeam's doing. Specifically containers, app modernization in the Cloud, the evolution of S3 to support all these trends. >> Yeah. Well, it's been great to see Veeam expands for more and more AWS services to help joint customers protect their data. Especially since Veeam stores their data in Amazon S3 storage classes. And over the last 15 years, S3 has helped companies around the world optimize their work, so I'd be happy to share some insights into that with you today. When you think about S3 well, you can find virtually every use case across all industries running on S3. That ranges from backup, to (indistinct) data, to machine learning models, the list goes on and on. And one of the reasons is because S3 provides industry leading scalability, availability, durability, security, and performance. Those are characteristics customers want. To give you some examples, S3 stores exabytes the data across millions of hard drives, trillions of objects around the world and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second. S3 can process in a single region over 60 terabytes a second. So in summary, it's a very powerful storage offering. >> Yeah, indeed. So you guys always talking about, you know, working backwards, the customer centricity. I think frankly that AWS sort of change the culture of the entire industry. So, let's talk about customers. Danny do you have an example of a joint customer? Maybe how you're partnering with AWS to try to address some of the challenges in data protection. What are customers is seeing today? >> Well, we're certainly seeing that migration towards the Cloud as James alluded today. And actually, if we're talking about Kubernetes, actually there's a customer that I know of right now, Leidos. They're a fortune 500 Information Technology Company. They deal in the engineering and technology services space, and focus on highly regulated industry. Things like defense and intelligence in the civil space. And healthcare in these very regulated industries. Anyway, they decided to make a big investment in continuous integration, continuous development. There's a segment of the industry called portable DevSecOps, and they wanted to build infrastructure as code that they could deploy services, not in days or weeks or months, but they literally wanted to deploy their services in hours. And so they came to us, and with Kasten K10 actually around Kubernetes, they created a service that could enable them to do that. So they could be fully compliant, and they could deliver the services in, like I say, hours, not days or months. And they did that all while delivering the same security that they need in a cost-effective way. So it's been a great partnership, and that's just one example. We see these all the time, customers who want to combine the power of Kubernetes with the scale of the Cloud from AWS, with the data protection that comes from Veeam. >> Yes, so James, you know at AWS you don't get dinner if you don't have a customer example. So maybe you could share one with us. >> Yeah. We do love working backwards from customers and Danny, I loved hearing that story. One customer leveraging Veeam and AWS is Maritz. Maritz provides business performance solutions that connect people to results, ensuring brands deliver on their customer promises and drive growth. Recently Maritz moved over a thousand VM's and petabytes of data into AWS, using Veeam. Veeam Backup for AWS enables Maritz to protect their Amazon EC2 instances with the backup of the data in the Amazon S3 for highly available, cost-effective, long-term storage. >> You know, one of the hallmarks of Cloud is strong ecosystem. I see a lot of companies doing sort of their own version of Cloud. I always ask "What's the partner ecosystem look like?" Because that is a fundamental requirement, in my view anyway, and attribute. And so, a big part of that, Danny, is channel partners. And you have a 100 percent channel model. And I wonder if we could talk about your strategy in that regard. Why is it important to be all channel? How to consulting partners fit into the strategy? And then James, I'm going to ask you what's the fit with the AWS ecosystem. But Danny, let's start with you. >> Sure, so one of the things that we've learned, we're 15 years old as well, actually. I think we're about two months older, or younger I should say than AWS. I think their birthday was in August, ours was in October. But over that 15 years, we've learned that our customers enjoy the services, and support, and expertise that comes from the channel. And so we've always been a 100 percent channel company. And so one of the things that we've done with AWS is to make sure that our customers can purchase both how and when they want through the AWS marketplace. They have a program called Consulting Partners Private Agreements, or CPPO, I think is what it's known as. And that allows our customers to consume through the channel, but with the terms and bill that they associate with AWS. And so it's a new route-to-market for us, but we continue to partner with AWS in the channel programs as well. >> Yeah. The marketplace is really impressive. James, I wonder if you could maybe add in a little bit. >> Yeah. I think Danny said it well, AWS marketplace is a sales channel for ISV's and consulting partners. It lets them sell their solutions to AWS customers. And we focus on making it really easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage software solutions, including software as a service in just a matter of minutes. >> Danny, you mentioned you're 15 years old. The first time I mean, the name Veeam. The brilliance of tying it to virtualization and VMware. I was at a VMUG when I first met you guys and saw your ascendancy tied to virtualization. And now you're obviously leaning heavily into the Cloud. You and I have talked a lot about the difference between just wrapping your stack in a container and hosting it in the Cloud versus actually taking advantage of Cloud-Native Services to drive further innovation. So my question to you is, where does Veeam fit on that spectrum, and specifically what Cloud-Native Services are you leveraging on AWS? And maybe what have been some outcomes of those efforts, if in fact that's what you're doing? And then James, I have a follow-up for you. >> Sure. So the, the outcomes clearly are just more success, more scale, more security. All the things that James is alluding to, that's true for Veeam it's true for our customers. And so if you look at the Cloud-Native capabilities that we protect today, certainly it began with EC2. So we run things in the Cloud in EC2, and we wanted to protect that. But we've gone well beyond that today, we protect RDS, we protect EFS- Elastic File Services. We talked about EKS- Elastic Kubernetes Services, ECS. So there's a number of these different services that we protect, and we're going to continue to expand on that. But the interesting thing is in all of these, Dave, when we do data protection, we're sending it to S3, and we're doing all of that management, and tiering, and security that our customers know and love and expect from Veeam. And so you'll continue to see these types of capabilities coming from Veeam as we go forward. >> Thank you for that. So James, as we know S3- very first service offered in 2006 on the AWS' Cloud. As I said, theCUBE was out in Seattle, September. It was a great, you know, a little semi-hybrid event. But so over the decade and a half, you really expanded the offerings quite dramatically. Including a number of, you got on-premise services things, like Outposts. You got other services with "Wintery" names. How have you seen partners take advantage of those services? Is there anything you can highlight maybe that Veeam is doing that's notable? What can you share? >> Yeah, I think you're right to call out that growth. We have a very broad and rich set of features and services, and we keep growing that. Almost every day there's a new release coming out, so it can be hard to keep up with. And Veeam has really been listening and innovating to support our joint customers. Like Danny called out a number of the ways in which they've expanded their support. Within Amazon S3, I want to call out their support for our infrequent access, infrequent access One-Zone, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive Storage Classes. And they also support other AWS storage services like AWS Outposts, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball Edge, and the Cold-themed storage offerings. So absolutely a broad set of support there. >> Yeah. There's those, winter is coming. Okay, great guys, we're going to leave it there. Danny, James, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really good to see you guys. >> Good to see you as well, thank you. >> All right >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of 2021 AWS re:Invent, keep it right there for more action on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage, right back. (uplifting music)

(soft music) >> From around the globe, It's theCube with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. Hi buddy. Welcome to the cubes coverage of VeeamON 2020, (laughs) the virtual version of VeeamON. and I'm here with Justin Warren who's the chief analyst and managing director of Pivot Nine. Justin, Good to see you. How are things down under? >> Not too bad. It was a bit of a rough start to the year. But things are looking a little bit better here in the middle of the year. It's tough times. >> And of course Justin, you may, you guys may know, as a many times you post and of course our other almost daily CUBE host these days, Stu Minivan joining us to unpack the Veeam keynotes, the trends in the marketplace. How you doing Stu? >> I'm doing great, Dave. Yeah. As you said, rather than us flying all around the country, we're in doing remote interviews every day, Its different, 2020.(laughs) >> So this has been quite a year, obviously. Because of course it was from Veeam's perspective, started out with that blockbuster exit $5 billion exit to private equity slash VC, insight capital, insight partners which was just an awesome thing for the founders. And some of the employees and actually going forward now, I think the balance of the employees really they'll have an opportunity to grow the valuation of the company even further. I think that's what we've seen with insight. I mean they want exits, so it's like they used to talk about, Ratmir Used to talk about Act Two (laughs) well now we're going to see it play out guys. So just some high level stats, a billion dollars last year in bookings. They're really shifting to an ARR model in a big way, 375,000 customers, 160 countries, 4,200 employees. Justin, do you remember when you first ran into Veeam at like some VMUG somewhere, who are these guys? Wow. They've certainly made it. >> They really have. And it's honest surprising but also not . They've feeling when I first encountered Veeam was that it's like well, who is this people? Yeah. What are they doing? It was very much SMB. It was very much practitioner, a very technical focus and people who used it just loved the product because back then the informal tagline was, it just were. And in those days it really was amazing. That there was a product that was simple and easy to use and worked on it, all of the things that they needed it to do. And I had a very, very VM focused back in that time. Hence the name of the entire company was go Veeam. And to see it grow from that one even then was quite a broad base but a very much an SMB market and see it grow across the entire industry. It's pretty remarkable. There is no really any ... Not many other companies who've pulled off this kind of growth momentum. >> Yeah. I mean Justin I think you nailed it there. I think back it's a company that hasn't stayed at a steady state still though. In the virtualization community, there were ripple effects. When Veeam went beyond just doing VMware and started to do Microsoft. Then a few years ago, I remember after we were doing the Q bed at the show, there was such a real push forward to extend the relationship with Microsoft, to the cloud. One of the things that we think we see loud and clear at this show is that VMware relationship early strong and as VMware goes to various cloud environment, Veeam can go along with that so that the relationship stays strong, but they're also in a lot of the public clouds and expanding beyond what they're doing. Yep. They're moving into the enterprising and I think one of the things we'll dig into is how enterprising is Veeam today. But absolutely it could company that very different than they were two or three years ago. And Dave, as you correctly pointed out now there's not the, who is this weird privately held company? Who's the ownership? I think there's a little bit of a more of a understanding as to, they're a big player in the space. And a little bit more a understanding as to where things go going forward. >> Well, I want to get your take on sort of their, we're going to go through a lot today, but the vision, that Danny Allan laid out in his keynote. And I think it's quite interesting. I mean, given the energy and the VC money coming into the market behind Cohesity and Rubrik the noise that they're making, what he put up as their vision is the most trusted provider of backup solutions, that deliver cloud data management. So as you guys well know, Cohesity and Rubrik really pushing this notion of data management, which means a lot of things to a lot of people. It's interesting to note that Veeam, first of all, new management, new CEO, Danny Allan, and now CTO, and obviously in a strategy role. So he's putting forth this kind of back to basics a mentality but then leapfrogging and trying to leapfrogging the data management narrative into the cloud, bringing cloud into it, super-gluing and cloud and data management which I think is really smart because when you think about multicloud data management for data protection It's got to be about cloud native and it's got to be somebody who's got no agenda around hardware or even necessarily a public cloud agenda. And Veeam wants to the be that Company. What do you think of that messaging Justin? >> I think broadly speaking, I think Veeam can pull it off. I do have some concerns around the whole data management thought. On the first thing of just being able to pull this off across the industry, I think vein is well-placed because it's always been about software. And it's always been about partnership. Though Veeam has been channel , It has been a hundred percent channel back in the day, very, very little direction. If any, at all, they are very strong on partnerships. They will partner with anybody because basically they don't really mind who else you deal with. They just want your backup to be done through Veeam. And the backup is very strong. That is what they are great at. So the risks they may own the data management side is it we've seen this play before pretty much ever backup company at some point just to talk about, Hey, we have a couple of your data. It's kind of sitting there and not really doing anything. What if we would attend this into something else and start using it for other purposes? But it's never really paid off for anybody. No, One's really done anything with their backup data in it in a true sense because we haven't seen anyone else become very good at that and be known throughout the industry of OES. Once you've backed up your data to the scene, you can then do all of these others stuff with it. I can't name anyone who's actually been quite successful at that but I can name plenty of people who've grown. >> Well Commvault is certainly tried actually guys, once you bring up the good competitive slide I want to that's a good lead in Justin. So what this data from our data partner, ETR Enterprise Technology Research, those whose watch our breaking analysis every week you see that we use this data extensively. And basically what we're showing here is the fundamental methodology that ETR uses is this thing called net score, which is kind of like net promoter score. It basically asks customers, are you buying? Are you increasing spending or decreasing spending takes the less subtracted from the more, and then you get a net score. That's the vertical axis. And it's an indicator of spending velocity, the horizontal axis it's labeled market share. It's not like IDC counts market share. It's a measure of mark pervasiveness within the survey. Then it's calculated by the mentions of the vendor divided by the total number of mentions within that sector. Now what we're showing here is a comparison of pure play data protection vendors and you can see there's no Dell EMC there's no IBM because they're not pure plays. I can't cut the data by data protection. So I got put fourth the pure plays. But let's walk through this so you could see here is you've got the pervasive company in the upper left. You can see the net scores and they could see the so the shared ends. This is 1,269 survey respondents. And you can see the shared end is the presence of these companies within that 1269, then CIOs and IT practitioners. So you can see Commvault very high presence but then interestingly and I guess not surprisingly Veeam right there. And then it drops off Veritas, Rubrik and Cohesity, and you can see where the heat map is on the vertical axis Rubrik, One of the highest net score is in the data set, and you've got Cohesity also very high, not as great of a presence in the data set. You can see Veeam very respectable. This was a 15 year old company with a relatively high net score. Really, really respectable, as I say in the solidly in the mid thirties and then Commvault getting into the pink zone and then Veritas in the red zone, low net score. And not as great as you're great at presence, which some concerns there for Veritas. So that's guys, that's the horses on the track. Anything there surprise you? Was it Veritas's position, it doesn't really surprise me, but it is remarkable just how our wife and the rest of the players that they are. And certainly that matches in the conversations the way having here with customers and others in industry. The nine Veritas just does not come out in the way that it used to. It used to be, I would have say that it would be, it used to be neck and neck with Commvault. Now we really don't hear the name Vera Tasman at all. Which is as a long time participant in the industry, Veritas was very much part of my career very early on. They were a stand by name. They were very well respected. But say seeing that sort of thing happened to it a great company, like Veritas it's a bit sad. Really? >> Well, you mean look at you're right. The Veritas was always the gold standard of a company with no hardware agenda. Who's going to be the Veritas of X? You would always use that sort of line or phrase. But now Stu, when I think about the opportunities here, It seems like multicloud is going to within the data protection space, is going to be run by somebody who can do cloud native. So in other words, running cloud native on, Azure, AWS and Google, maybe Alibaba, but cloud native, being able to take advantage of those native services on the cloud. Somebody who's got an on-prem presence who can bring that cloud experience on-prem. Who actually can do it also across clouds, a very, very high performance, low latency, very efficient, low cost. So in thinking about that multi-cloud landscapes, do how do you assess the horses on the track? >> Yeah, well, you know, Dave, first of all, one of the things Justin said, Veeam is partner-driven. One of the conversations I'm having for VeeamON is with the partner Alliance team, they are a hundred percent partner driven. And also for so many years, we talk about one of the negatives about Veeam is, Oh, well, most of their customer base is SMB, well, if you look at the cloud, one of the knocks against cloud for a long time was, Oh, it's just the really small companies that are doing a lot of clouds. Well, my data managers whether I'm a small company or a big company, so a lot of these pieces come together, Veeam has really been able to move into that cloud environment. What they're doing, sans across them . Data protection seems to be one of those areas when you talk about, the mantras, the industry like Amazon and say, okay when are they going to eat your business? Well, you know, Amazon's got a strong storage team. But data protection. They've got some very basic functionality in there but there's a robust ecosystem and companies like Veeam, I can capitalize on. >> Well, you mentioned the there in the enterprise, of course we all know the story of there a couple of years ago, there was a big enterprise, of course, they brought in some executives from VMware, some really high quality folks. They struck relationships with companies like HPE and Cisco. I think HPE in particular is it's paid off quite well but everybody wants to do business with Cisco cause they're very partner friendly and it's interesting. They kind of pull back from that not kind of. They pull back on that major initiative, the high price, direct sales people. And I remember doing a breaking analysis when Veeam got acquired or maybe it was even previous to that and making the comment to that yeah. They had to pull back on that, but I dug into the ETR data. Veeam actually has quite a presence in large companies. Maybe it's division of a large company, or maybe it's shadow IT, I don't know. People who just you don't want the simple backup but they're VMware customers. And it seems to me they really have an opportunity to go up market. Maybe kind of to reset that enterprise strategy. What do you guys think? >> Yeah, I think that's was what they were trying to do a couple of years ago. So I think hotly, they just didn't succeed quickly as they had hoped. There was also a little bit of an issue, which is something I remember speaking to the Retina Mayor about some years ago. About the challenge of being able to serve these different markets, because what SMB wants is quite different to what an enterprise want. And being able to fulfill both of those needs simultaneously from one company it's really challenging because things that you do for enterprise annoy SMB, the things that around ran complexity to be able to deal with the inherently complex environments that are enterprise. SMB just doesn't have that issue. Whereas if you can only do things in SMB type ways that annoys the enterprise, being able to satisfy both of those markets in a way that they both happy with. And so that no one else feels neglected that's pretty much what they wish that were struggling with nothing. So the hot pivot to enterprise they existing customer base, which then was rolling mostly SMB. They started to feel a little bit neglected. No, it was just a bit of a stumble. I think it feels like they've reset now and understood how to do these in a slightly more gentle fashion. But we can call it that. So rather than going for that really aggressive push into enterprise, they are just following the natural momentum, which is people who've come from SMB. And some of those medium companies grow into very large companies and bring them with them and others just that people as they move through their career will grow from a small company to maybe a medium company. And then they'll end up in a division of an enterprise scale and they used to Veeam and they want to bring what they they know in like they want to bring that experience to the company that they now work at. That is a sort of natural flow there I think for them that is only now showing the fruit of what was actually laid down a few years ago. >> Well, and I think there was something else going on there too, which is, we now know the company was positioning for an exit that was up for sale. So enterprise is very expensive, it's time consuming. The ROI is often times very long. That's why you see enterprise startups raising gobs of money and they just ,i think weren't getting the ROI. And when you think about insight, this is one of the more forward thinking, great PE or VC firms they'll live with rule of 40, right, where a rule of 35 or 80 rule of 50, where it's not just about growth, it's about growth plus EBIT. And if you add those up and it adds the 40 or 45 or 35 or whatever their target is, I don't know exactly what Insights looking forward but that's the combination that drives value. So my guess is they wanted to dial up EBIT and give it or the sale. And they might've had specific targets, who knows. That were being negotiated but i think that probably had something to do with it. And as well as you're pointing out, Justin, it takes time but us to If we look into some of the things that we're hearing from the messaging, some of the announcements and we'll get into that. Big, big discussion around digital transformation. One of the first, if not the first to do a backup for office 365, another a new version of Veeam backup for AWS. Oh. So there were some enterprisey types of things that they were there were talking about, a little glimpse at version 11.Any thoughts there, Stu. >> Yeah. Well, David, it's interesting, Justin put up a really good point there when you opt digital transformation Dave. Well, one of the things we've been saying for years, the difference between a company before and after that is you're leveraging the data. So, If I look at Veeam and say, do I protect the data absolutely? Do I secure your data? I'm involved with that. Actually one of the leadership changes, they just hired their first CSO. So bigger push for security, that'll help them a lot in what they do with it, public sector, that's where the CSO actually came from the public by that will help them. But what I didn't, haven't heard as much yet, is okay. I'm a piece of that data. And if you're going to the cloud, I can manage, I can protected and secure it. But how do I help connect people to get more value out of the data and leverage that data? So I think Justin nailed it with that. So many pieces that are important about data that Veeam does do. But that the discussion we always have in AI is be able to take that raw data and converting it into insights and out facts. >> Well, to Justin's point earlier about data management. And I want to to pick up on what you were saying about security, obviously everybody's talking about ransomware, but to me, you're talking about the CSO. The role of the CSO is obviously of course evolving it's Al board level topic. CSO, oftentimes was off as a peer, I say off, but as a peer to the CIO on purpose, they didn't want the CSO to report to the CIO cause it would have been like the Fox watching the hen house. But i think cause it was this sort of failure equals fire mentality and they wanted the truth. But I think now people have transparent discussions at the board about security. Hey, we know we're going to get penetrated. It's all about our response. Obviously we have to deal with the layers, but we're exposed, everybody's exposed. So I think increasingly organizations are realizing that it's a team sport, you've got to get everybody involved, the lines of business, the users being responsible. And of course IT, my point is that security and data protection are now becoming two sides of the same point. Almost like privacy. We've shared that before. So when you think about digital transformation, you think about data protection as part of your security portfolio? Not just something that you bolt on as an afterthought. And I think in many respects, Justin, that's maybe a bigger market opportunity for a lot of these data protection companies and backup companies, than the so-called opaque data management that you're referring to before. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that because what I'm saying from the security side of the market, particularly within large enterprise is a change in mindset from a prevention to a resilient, that kind of mindset around it and how to deal with it. Though previously there was a lot of either we'll just ignore it cause there's not really a problem and it's not going to happen to us. Then it became a kind of a fear response of just, we want to prevent it ever happening to us. Now it's kind of we've gone to an acceptance. And when going through the Kubler Ross. A framework for dealing with grief. People aren't understanding that sooner or later bad things are going to happen to us. What we need to figure out is how we deal with it when it does. And that's the mindset that you need to have when you're talking about data protection. So it's the same kind of mindset that you need for security. And now people are starting to look at, okay, how do we firstly detect if we've actually got a problem, if there's a breach or if there's a risk, how do we notice that we know that that's happening? And then once we noticed that, what do we do about it? So that's things like catching it early so that when you you'll recovery is small, which is the same general idea around software development of fail fast. You want to just pick the failures early so that you can correct them all. Basically if you find yourself in a hole stop digging and then once you've figured that out, okay now how do we recover from this in a way that is minimally disruptive to the business. And that could be like recovering from ransomware, having grilly solid backup. So you can restore weekly, that's the best protection against ransomware that you can have. Then you can start trying to figure out, okay, we know we can recover if it happens to us now let's just try to reduce the number of times that this does actually happen. That's the general idea that I'm seeing come through. More often with CSOs, with CIOs and with board level conversation. >> I want to come back to Justin and then Stu with your final thoughts. Justin, what do you take on this Veeam universal license? Was this a case of, hey we had so much complexity across our portfolio like that you're going to the Italian restaurant, you're just here you want everything in the menu or there's too much to figure out just the order for me. And they're trying to clean that up or do you see this as sort of a more innovative licensing approach? That's more cloud friendly. What do you make of that? >> I think it's a bit of both. think it's part of VeeamON thoughts as well again, from back in the very early parts of the company, the idea was that it just works. It should be simple and easy to use. So it's completely on brand for Veeam to have a simple and easy to use licensing model. There's a lot of criticism from enterprise and particularly from medium and small business, well overly complicated licensing models. We see people wrestling daily with the billing system within AWS. We see people frustrated with the licensing approach of Oracle. We see them seemingly frustrated when you not figuring out exactly what have I lost since then, what happened and what am I not licensed for in, Microsoft ecosystem. So for them to have a simple and easy to use licensing approach, it just fits right in with the rest of what the company is doing. It does also simplify the way that they organize and operate their company, as they have to deal with lots and lots of different partners, having a complicated licensing system on top of all of those other complicated licensing systems would just make their own job much, much harder. So this way it actually works for them as well as for their customers. >> Yeah. Simplicity is the watch word there Stu and I get, I mean, I get the sense in speaking to the customers, partners, that Veeam well has basically has the philosophy make it easy to and we'll sell more. We're not going to try to micromanage, to maximize revenue. You heard this certainly from some of their big partners who said that Veeam made it transparent. Our sales people for commissions and their salespeople and really make it easy to do business with. So Stu I'll give you the last word here. >> Yeah. So I think, as you mentioned, Veeam also listening and seeing what their partners are doing. So we've watched companies like AWS, trying to make a little bit simpler as to if I'm choosing compute, I don't have to be locked into one model a aisle, pay those across the environment or pure storage and other partner of Veeams. If I stay a customer, I make it easy to be able to move from one generation the next though, that cloud like model absolutely is what we expect. And when you talk to customers today, we know the only constant is change. I actually loved in the keynote. There was a I believe it was Satya Nadella that they quoted and said that, we've seen more change in the last two months that we normally would see in a decade. So Veeam being agile, moving, listening to their customers, learning with their partners and making sure that they've got things in the modern consumption model. >> Well, guys, thanks for helping us break down the VeeamON 2020, some of the trends in the market place.Some of the commentary and the keynote. Justin Warren Stu Minivan. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks Dave. >> I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Stu and Justin and the entire cube team, people right there. We'll be back with our coverage of VeeamON 2020, right after this short break. (soft music)

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is special On the Ground of theCUBE here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. We've had the pleasure of knowing the VTUG team for quite awhile back actually, when it was the New England VMUG was when I started attending. When it switched to the VTUG at Gillette Stadium's when we started doing theCUBE there. And happy to bring back to the program first, Chris Harney, who is the one who created this as a true user event. And joining him is his wife Dawn Harney, who we know is behind the scenes organizing all of this event. So, Dawn and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing this community and educational process with all of us. >> Thanks Stu, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, so, Chris, we really want this, it's a celebration. Sixteen years; back in 2003 the number one movie of the year was actually Finding Nemo. Of course we waited a long time for there. It goes without saying that all of us were a little bit younger. And boy, in those days, I started working with VMR in 2002, so that journey of virtualization was real early. There was no cloud talking we had kind of the XSP's and some of the earlier things. But so much has changed, and what I have loved is this journey that the users that are attending here. We're actually here in the Expo hall, and if you look, why are there no people in here right now? Because they are all in the break out sessions understanding what are the skill sets that they need today and tomorrow to help them in their journey; virtualization, cloud, DevOps, all of these changes there. Chris, you started this as a user to help share with your peers, so, we've had you on the program many times, bring us back. >> Yeah, so think back to 2003. There was no way to share information. There's no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups, Meetups, no Game of Thrones. >> We had to go to books and stuff like that. >> Exactly. >> Read the paper. >> So white papers, those were the big deal. You had the Microsoft books that were two inches thick and glossy. >> Yeah, I wonder how many of our younger audience would know the acronym RTFM? Read The Fine Manual please, is what we're doing. Dawn, this event, as I said, we've been at the winter event at Gillette Stadium, you brought in some of the Patriot players we've had the pleasure of interviewing. This Summer event is epic. I know people that come from very long distances to swim in the community, get the information. There's a little bit of lobster at the end of the day. >> There's a lot of lobster at the end of the day. >> So give us the community that you look to help build and foster, and what this event has meant to you over the years. >> For me it's really a place for everybody in the community to come together and share their knowledge with their peers. Something may work for me maybe it will work for you. Let's get together and talk about it. The best way to learn something is from somebody that may have done it, or done it, messed it up, learned something, like to share it with you. So, it really is about working with your peers, learning something from your sponsors and all these companies that you work with everyday. What's new, what's going on. So this is the place to go to get all that. >> Wait, Dawn, I thought you weren't a tech person. >> I'm not a tech person. >> That answer was spot on because one of the things I loved about the virtualization community, is we were all learning in the early days. And it required a little bit of work. There's this theory known as the IKEA effect. Sometimes if you actually help build it a little bit, you actually like it a little bit more. And this community really epitomizes that in the virtualization community and cloud. We've been talking about cloud now for a decade but it's still relatively early days on how this multi-hybrid cloud fits together, how operations are changing, so, Chris, bring us through a little bit of that arc. >> Well, I'll think about it, back in 2003, there was only VMwire. There was only one virtualization platform, if you didn't use VMwire, you were doing bare metal Windows install or Unix install on physical servers. Well, back when we changed, there was Hyper-V, that was coming out, AWS was just coming out, so that's when we kind of made the jump from just being a VMwire user to a virtual technology. So we could talk about the cloud, we could share those experiences and have that same journey together, and hopefully learn and lead, get smarter together as a group, you can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself. >> Yeah, and as we know, Chris, and we've talked about this, the IT industry is never "Hey, give me a clean "sheet of paper and we'll start everything." We know it is additive and all of these things go together, so cloud did not obviate the need for virtualization, so all of these things go together, and how do I make sure as my job doesn't get completely eliminated or, I was talking to somebody who said "If I've been doing the same thing for 10 years, "will I be out of a job?" They said, "Well hopefully you really really like "what you're doing cause if you think "you can keep doing what you're doing, "that is all you will ever be able to do." And I thought that was a very poignant comment. >> Yeah, Matt Broberg's talk this morning about what's your next job going to be, what skillsets do you need to be relevant in 10 years, and it's the same thing, I mean we said the same thing 10, 15 years ago. You can't be a Windows admin anymore, you can't be a VMwire admin anymore, you can't be a cloud admin anymore in five years. >> Yeah, so Dawn, give our audience a little bit of the scope of this event, as I said, I know people that have flown in from the Carolinas, from Colorado, from all over, from California and the like, 16 years of this event, this community is not just New England, it really has had a broad impact. >> Right, and it's huge, people plan their vacations around this, I've had people come from Europe, they fly over here, stay in the state of Maine, they go to L.L. Bean, they do all those things because they plan their vacation, they know they need to be here for the VTUG event, so it's meant a lot, because you do get so many different variety of people, you have the sponsors, you have the end users, you have media, you have bloggers, you have pretty much just everybody comes together to really be that community, so it's meant a lot to me, it's been a long 16 years but it's meant a lot. >> All right, so the question people are asking, this is the final VTUG, so no more winter event at Gillette, this is the final event tonight at Gritty's, so explain to us how that happened. >> It is the final event, 16 years, we're all getting older, it's bittersweet, but we've just realized that it takes a lot of time to put these together, it takes a lot of sponsors, it takes a lot of users, the users continue to come, but unfortunately the sponsors pay for it, and really don't have that following with the sponsors that we used to have, unfortunately. >> There are a lot more events, there are a lot more ways to find customers, so they're going to the meetups and they're doing their own events. >> Yeah, to your opening point Chris, 16 years ago it was much tougher to find sources. Now the challenge we have is there's too many options out there, there are too many events, trust me, I go to too many events, but this one has always been one that we've always looked forward, so please from the community, want to say thank you so much, it has always been one of our favorite things to kick off the year with when we do the winter one, and the summer one, I've made this trip a couple of times, it is a little warm in here, I think brings back to the roots of this event, remember it was four or five years ago it was 110 degrees out, and then you switched to this facility, so of course the air conditioning decides to go out, because we know in IT, sometimes things break. >> Start in the heat, end in the heat. >> So Chris, want to give you the final word for the final VTUG. >> You know, I'm just very proud and happy with this community, it truly is a community, it wasn't us, it wasn't theCUBE, it wasn't the vendors, it was everyone working together to make a community that helped each other out, so thanks to everyone. >> Chris and Dawn, thank you so much, we're happy to be a small piece of this community, and look forward to staying in touch with you in your future endeavors. Thanks so much, I'm Stu Miniman, we have a full day of coverage here, keynote speaker, some of the users that have traveled around, really focusing on the community here at the VTUG Summer Slam, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome inside the VM Village at VMworld 2018 where we have a nice, big set. Double set of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host John Troyer and wait, Keith Townsend? >> Did you mess up the intro? >> Oh my gosh. (Keith chuckling) Luckily, the great thing about VMworld is it's got a great community. Remember a couple of years ago, had a couple of my staff that weren't going to be here and I'm like oh my gosh, what do we do? So I reached out to community members. John Troyer, Keith Townsend. I said hey, guys, how'd you like to do some CUBE stuff? Keith did a whole bunch of CUBE with us for a couple of years and something happened. You decided to go and take a real job? >> Evidently, you can't live off borrowed time for too long. It catches up with you. But VMware, obviously, world-class organization. I've been on the other side interview folks on here so I've gotten a good window in to the org over the past couple of years, thanks to theCUBE. >> Yeah, well, Keith, look, first of all, thank you for all the time you did. We call you the once and future guest host of theCUBE. (both laughing) So we have not seen the end of Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. You're now a solutions architect, though, at VMware. If people want, go read Keith's blog. Great resource to the community as to looking at jobs. Keith didn't apply to VMware once or twice, it was one of those you keep trying and eventually you found a pretty sweet job. >> Yeah. >> Maybe give us a little insight as to what brought you, what excited you to come join VMware? You've know the community, been a vExpert. Been a watcher and a partner and a customer of VMware. What's it like being inside, wearing that logo? >> I've said on theCUBE, a couple of times, VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. You can take that one of two different ways. You can say VMware is really slow organization, or they go right where the CIO needs them to go. The thing the intrigued me about VMware all the time is that no company is better positioned to walk through digital transformation than VMware. As seen by the announcements this morning. VMware is struggling through, we're struggling through to find our way through what it is that the right combination of partnerships, technologies, people, process to help companies transition to this new digital age and that is an exciting thing to be a part of. >> Definitely interesting times. I'm sure there's a number of companies that would say hi, Microsoft, Amazon, and the like, that we think we're pretty well positioned to lead companies to where you need to go. But definitely interesting stuff in the keynote. That maturation of cloud and networking. Put your CTO Advisor hat on there. How're they doing? >> This is where I got, I tweeted it out earlier that man, I got to be careful, because some of the stuff that I want to tweet I'm like, oh, I can't say that as a VMware employee. But I can say definitely, I was surprised at the RDS announcement and people love the VMware ESXi on ARM. Two amazing announcements, but what really excited me was the RDS announcement. On theCUBE, I've pushed Chris Wolf, I've pushed Lee Caswell, all of these GMs, these BU GMs, about when is the innovation going to come out of VMware again? Let's not just get V1 updates. Why should somebody upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.7? Give us a compelling reason. I think this morning we heard some really compelling stuff. RDS on vSphere is, I can't overstate how disruptive of an innovation that is. >> That could be really interesting. I like what you said in the beginning about the digital transformation. I think we also heard this morning the word digital foundation a lot, which is, again, one of my goals here for this show, Stu and Keith, is to pin down what does VMware do? What does it do? And it's not quite fair, because it has quite a wide portfolio but it seems to me, Keith, that it feels like the early days when I was there. You had to work with a whole set of OEMs in the hypervisor and some of the same things are happening with a whole bunch of clouds and working as a neutral Switzerland or partners with all them. But I was actually wanting to pivot over a little bit over to you as a communicator and as a member of the community. You were a customer. You worked for a large pharmaceutical company and ran a lot of billion dollars worth of stuff. You chose to become a communicator and an explainer and to be part of the learning process and buying process as an independent. Now back on the vendor side. Is there anything in that journey you've learned about 2018 about how people learn and how IT people figure this stuff. How do I even know where to go or what to buy or even what to consider? Any insights into that? >> So John, that's a really great question. I went on a run this morning, the vFit Run. We do it every year at VMworld and I was with VMUG CEO, Brad Tompkins. And we actually talked about this. vSphere admins want all the vSphere content that they can consume. In reality, they need to transition from just being focused on vSphere, vSphere, vSphere, and VXLAN and NSX to this broader picture. Pat on stage this morning talked through PKS, which is Kubernetes, he talked a little bit of serverless. I mean, from a CEO of a software company, that was a lot to consume just on the stage this morning. So you can be a deer in the headlights and think, what should I focus on? I think the thing to focus on, one of my peers gave a talk, well two of my peers, Craig Fletcher, who brought me into VMware, and Joseph Griffith, gave a talk today on culture. And this is about culture. The culture to learn and grow. You don't necessarily have to learn a specific technology, but you should most definitely have the attitude that if the CXO comes to me and asks me about X business process, I need to know a high level answer to that and how do I get there? Simple, simple steps is learn your business processes. I'll throw just one out there. Order to cash. Every organization has some process from when they either request money, they place an order, and how they eventually get paid. If you learn that process, the technology bits I think fall in place. >> Yeah it's an interesting point. I've talked to some of the users here, and they were a little bit overwhelmed this morning. I don't think there's anybody at this show, that if you put them in front of the CEO of their company, and said, okay tell me everything VMware's doing. (Keith laughing) Nobody can explain that. Nobody inside VMware nobody out. There's too much. Part of the answer I get all the time, is how do I keep up? Look, you're not going to keep up on everything. You need to have, I think the role you're in now Keith, is part of helping customers understand what are the things they need to understand, what are the steps they can be taking in the areas they need to learn and the things they can lean on you and your partners to get there. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah I did a podcast with Brian Gracely maybe about a year, a year and half ago and we talked about this very topic. At the highest level, you just need, from a CIO perspective, CIO, CTO, and if you don't have a CTO, that's probably step one. But from a CIO perspective, you need someone who can just think about big picture, how the moving parts work. And then you need people to go deep and different areas. I talked to a financial services senior VP and he was talking through how he needed today a Pivotal guy But tomorrow that Pivotal guy would not need to be a Pivotal guy but a Kubernetes guy specifically. And how that guy would morph into something else so he's structured in his organization. So that he can, hey today, this guy or gal knows this technology stack but more important, they know systems and they can adjust and learn the technology that they need to learn to be effective. Because even as an analyst, near the end of the CTO Advisor as a full time opportunity, I thought about focusing all on VMware, because the company's that big now. Pat on stage said one of the things they learned from AWS, is how to add features every quarter. Stu, if I told you five years ago VMware would add a feature every quarter, the culture just isn't there, until now. >> Yeah, so, Keith, that's a really interesting point. That pace of change, because most people when you talk about vSphere upgrades, it was oh wow. It came out every year, every year and a half or so like that >> That's too fast >> I'm usually a couple generations behind. Every quarter there's no way I'm going to do that. We still have a bit of an impedance mismatch. When I go use the cloud, some of the base things happen under line. But other things I still need to choose or there's automation that will help me. How do we help CIOs, IT businesses to get to this more fluid, dynamic, upgradeable environment compared to the oh wait I need to consciously think about when do I upgrade, when do I move, how do I make those changes? >> So we have to get out of this mindset that IT is in this constant ops mode. Whether it's vSphere and the announcements that were made today or any other platform. We add no value by engineering upgrades. Putting time into designing and testing the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 update 1 really doesn't add value at the end of the day. VMware made critical announcements about the path to having VMware manage that. VMware cloud on AWS is a great example but the technologies are out there where we're no longer consuming our OSes. There's Linux distributions, there's Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows desktop ever and we'll get those updates directly from Microsoft. So we need to get out of the mindset that we add value as executives to managing upgrades and move our organizations where we're consuming these things as the black boxes they should be. >> Alright, so Keith, last question. What's surprised you so much, so far inside of VMware? >> You know what? I'm going to give an honest, raw answer to that, Stu. I'm not used to competing against my friends. (Stu laughing) It's one of those things, you know what, you got to make money, you got to win deals but both me and you have made a lot of friends, and John, we've made a lot of friends in this community. And you run into situations where you're pitting your technology against someone you just had dinner with last night or the week before at the last conference. And you've known for years and they're actually your friend. And keeping that competitive nature but at the same time maintaining your friendship, that's been surprisingly interesting. >> Alright, well hey, Keith, pleasure to catch up with you, as always, you're always welcome on our program in one of these seats. And yeah, absolutely, what I love about this community is that I see lots of people that are friends that are fierce competitors but they're grabbing out, hanging out at parties, taking selfies together, doing stuff like that. So, community, definitely key themes. Keith, thank you for being our community guest for today. Day one of three days live wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas, VMworld 2018. For John Troyer, the CTO Advisor Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by Silicon Angle. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program a regular here at the VTUG, but no longer a local, so Chris Colotti who's currently the Field CTO at Tintri, great to see you Chris. >> You too Stu, it's been a while. >> And love the attire. >> I know, I think every time I come and do a presentation, I have a Patriots jersey on of some kind. >> Absolutely, I mean there's a few things we know you for, so you love your virtualization, you love your Patriots, and there's usually some workout thing, so are we going to get some fitness tips (mumbles)? >> Not today, actually you don't want to know what I did the other day with a buddy of mine, so you'll see me hobbling around because it was not a good leg day (laughs). >> Okay, so we'll be getting, I always like to hear, I just had a user on of what they weren't like in the industry, so you'll give us the what not to do to make sure that you can keep your fitness goals. >> Yeah, don't hook up with a buddy who has a lot of sandbags in his truck that likes to work out with them. >> So Chris, for those of our audience that haven't been to the event, and give us just a little bit about your background, what you're doing these days. >> Yeah, so I mean VTUG's, man this has been around forever, I think. >> 12 years now. >> 12 years the Harneys have been doing this, and I've been, I think I've been a part of it for a better part of the last decade or so. One being a Patriot's fan, two being a virtualization person, and where I kind of grew my career from sort of being a Sys Admin to where I am now, I just think this is one of the better events because it's all technology, right? I mean we run into people that it's not just virtualization, you got AWS now, you got people of all walks of life that comes to this and honestly, I think you can't beat the venue, right? I mean especially, how many times have we been here where they cover the windows? If the windows are covered, it's a good year. That's what we say. >> As a matter fact, this is the fifth year we've had theCube, and every year the Patriots are still in the playoffs, working towards the Super Bowl, and they're one step away again. >> I think the worst year for me, was I actually had the center stage keynote one year, and they told me while I was presenting they were actually on the field practicing, and it was all I could to not just stop talking and say I'll be right back (laughs). >> As you said, better part of a decade you've been here, you were working for VMWare, when this was a VMUG, but you've been involved, tell us just what you're doing these days for work. >> Yeah, so I left VMWare and moved over to Tintri, which is I'll flash the word partner, I came over there, actually I came over as a cloud evangelist kind of person, and that shifted a little bit, and while that was around how to use our APIs and things like that for automation and private cloud, now there's actually three Field CTOs, I'm one of 'em, and I spend most of my time really talking to customers, doing events, doing roadmap presentations, where were going, what we're doing, I still spend my fair share on the road doing the shows and stuff, VMworld. >> You just threw in a bunch of things there, talk cloud, API, storage, what are you hearing from customers these days? What are they getting right? What are they struggling with, and what are they looking for? >> Yeah it's funny, so for a long time I was a cloud guy, right? I mean I did VCloud Air, I launched VCloud Air DR, and I think what I heard coming over to Tintri is good, folks are still struggling with that whole, "What do I put in the cloud? "What don't I put in the cloud? "Do I bring everything back?" We've got a lot of customers that have brought stuff back on premises, I think a lot of customers are just still struggling with that concept, I mean one of the first presentations I did, probably I think, here it was back in 2010, right around that timeframe, when VCloud Air, or VCloud Director was launched, Chris had me, Harney had me come down and do VCloud Director, and it was deer in the headlights, you know? It was so bleeding edge for VMWare at that point to have this cloud product and this automation stuff, and then fast forward to today, you know eight years later, I still think people are struggling with that. They're just not sure how to deal with it, right? And operationally, I think people come and really figure out it's not about cloud so much as automation, we've got to simplify the way we do things, we got to automate more. We've got to take day to day operations and do something different with 'em. >> Yeah, I mean a line we've used often is cloud is not a destination, it's an operations model. >> Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of people that still think it's a destination, the old To the Cloud ads, remember those? >> Microsoft, absolutely, there's lots of jokes on that. Yeah, you gave an interesting keynote this morning, I actually had one of the users that came on our program earlier, and she was like, "I really enjoyed that." So Luigi Danakos, a friend of ours and you, tell me a little more about IT in careers, because we know the only thing that is consistent is that things are going to change, so give our audience a little bit of taste of what you talked about. >> So yeah, it was actually interesting, so we came up with the idea because I've come to these and done technical presentations all the time, but inevitably I always get somebody, or a couple people come up to you and say, "How did you get where you are? "How did you evolve?" And people who know my story, what's interesting about mine is I went to school for architectural engineering, I actually have a degree in architectural engineering, drawing blueprints and designing houses, and they always look at me and say, "How did you "get to here? "You were a System Admin, and I'm a Sys Admin, "and how do I grow my career?" So Luigi and figured why don't we sort of take a little bit of that history 'cause now we're kind of, I hate to say we're the old guys on the porch these days, but back in the day, we were younger, we were faster, as you go forward, how do you stay relevant? And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about, so we talk a concept from an author by the name of John C Maxwell and we kind of took one of his books and we kind of cobbled it down to five different aspects and we just talked about what to think about, how to move, not just always knowing the technology, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? And how to get there, not just to sit and say, "Well it's never going to happen for me." You have to make something out of it yourself, and I think the response was pretty good, it was different, it was the first one in the morning, but it wasn't getting hit at 9:00 a.m. with technicals, it was really just us telling our stories around how we got to where we were going, and one of the big parts about Luigi was having just been let go from HP and now he's done some interviews and I thought it was really great 'cause he came right out and said, "Y'know what? "I'm going to just do my own thing. "I've just decided there's never a good time "to start your own company, so why not do it now?" And that was after he went through four or five interviews, so hopefully it resonated with some people. For me, it's always gotten harder to learn. I think as we get older, I made the joke in the session, I lost my phone first thing this morning. Literally, couldn't remember where I put it, dropped it, I called my best friend, Chris Boyd, who's one of the other CTOs and I said have you seen it? Because I'm going to send the, I was going to have him run around the west side with the buzzer going off, the Find my iPhone to go find this, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so learning gets harder. >> Yeah, well learning's harder, the bar's not that high to kind of get into new stuff. When I walk around the show, two things struck me. Number one is the vendors, every single one of them are hiring SEs, and they can't find enough good quality people, and it's more about the people, then it is, you can train them up. And secondly, some of these new spaces, talk about like the cloud space, if you get your Associate's on like AWS? Like people will call you immediately, and there's so much opportunity out there, we both had lots of friends. There's changes in consolidations in the industry, and therefore there's people that hey, it's time for a change, so-- >> Well I never thought I would work for a storage company. Well I worked for VMWare which was acquired EMC years ago, but we still never, as VMWare employees, we didn't work for a storage company. >> VMWare's a software company. >> We were a software company, and I still actually look at Tintri as a software company, yes we sell an appliance, but the crux of what Tintri does really is the software of the OS itself and that's what makes it different. So yeah, and I mean I've had to learn more about storage then I knew before, and I was telling a guy at the show, one of the things that Luigi and I talk to people, always said just learn something new every day, just as small and as silly as it was, and we've told different stories, and a guy asked me, "So what's the last thing "you learned, technology-wise, outside of storage?" I said I actually learned containers because of my home media server environment. I had to go out and learn Docker because I wanted to run some stuff and I didn't want to stand it up, I just wanted to figure out how containers work, so now Tim Gabett and I, we're on the phone back and forth, alright how'd you get that container run? And what'd you do for the storage, and how'd you deal with this? But that to me is what keeps your brain a little bit sharp, I mean I don't do puzzles and things like that, but those stupid side projects we all do because we're technologists I think help. >> Yeah, and you never know when those side projects and passions could turn into an opportunity from careers standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Alright Chris, you've been coming to this event quite a long time, as we said, give us the what's changed and what's stayed the same from your standpoint? >> Aw man, that's a tough one because I think a lot of stuff has essentially stayed the same in the realm of networking and storage, I think there's always a new player, but I look back at the last, I'll probably get myself in trouble here, but what was the last big innovative thing in the IT space when I was a System Admin, and I go back to those easy things, like I remember when I did my first VMotion, and it was like how does that work? And I used to have conversations, and I do that today with engineers, and I say what are we innovating? What are we doing to change the game? And to me, and again this is all my personal opinion, I suppose I'll preface it with that because for most people that know me know I have a pretty strong opinion on stuff, but I think that's the tough part is how do we move forward? How do we evolve to the next, really big, innovative thing that just blows people's minds? And I think AWS definitely did that a little bit when it really started to go mainstream and people realized it was a real thing, it wasn't a book store anymore, they had this other stuff, and we go through these cycles, right? But I think in the standard IT space, I'm still trying to figure out outside of those, what's the next really cool thing that we're going to see from the different vendors? And who's innovating and who's just sort of maintaining? >> Yeah, absolutely, well I can tell you that people here are excited, there's a lot to learn about keynotes this morning, I mean everything from what's happening in the automation space, developers, not a ton of developers at a show like this, but definitely lots of opportunity there, you talked the AWS presentation, he's like, "I'm live-coding and showing you Lambda stuff." Most of the people here aren't quite ready for some serverless world-- >> That was like me doing VCloud Director presentations (laughs). >> And things like that, I remember three years ago, it was like the AWS 101, everybody was like, "Oh my gosh, "this cloud thing sounds really amazing." So it takes some time, we've heard about it. I remember back when I heard about VMotion when it was in development, and still one of those things where you look back at your career and like wow, that was an amazing, it was that magic technology. >> It was almost those conversation, where were you when you did your first VMotion, right (laughs)? >> As a matter of fact, Duncan actually did a blog post about that, "Where you heard about it?" And I pulled in (mumbles) into the thread because I was lucky enough to go to a conference and moderate a session where he explained down to Kernel Zero how it worked, and it was interesting-- >> How he actually did what he did. >> You know what they say, "Any technology that is significantly difficult "to explain might as well be magic." So you're right, interesting stuff to see where innovation's going in the industry, I think most people I know are pretty excited, there's so much going on there, there's no shortage of new things to learn, we just need to reach out and take those opportunities, and I love your advice to keep learning something every day. >> As small as it is, I told these guys this morning that one of my biggest learning experiences was when we moved, I had to learn how to drive a motor home, a house, and deal with stuff that I've never done, right? But it's all learning. I challenged them today to just whether you're going to the sessions or you're just walking around where the vendors are, just understand what those people do and take that away and internalize it and see how you can use it. >> Well Chris, I'm glad to see you're still a true blue Patriots fan there-- >> The tattoo is still real (laughs). >> You haven't picked up the Southern drawl just yet. >> No it's funny, my wife said I pick it up a little bit when I'm around our neighbors, and then when I come back up here, I can really turn on the Boston accent if I tried but (laughs). >> Well, you all come back for lots more coverage here from VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCube. (exciting electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconeANGLE. (energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group, fifth year we've had theCube here. I happen to have on the program a first-time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer with VMware, knows a thing or two about virtualization. >> Maybe a couple of things. >> Stu: Thanks for joining us, Kyle. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, "What I'd like to do is come up in the 20s. "It kind of feels like single digits." Why did you leave the warmth of the south to come up here to the frigid New England? >> (chuckles) Yeah, well, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about which is API usage. Once I got the invite, no-brainer, made the trip. >> Awesome! So definitely, Jonathan Frappier who we asked to be on the program but he said Kyle's going to be way better. (Kyle chuckles) Speak better, you got the better beard. (Kyle laughs) I think we're just going to give Frappier a bunch of grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you been VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? >> Yeah, absolutely! So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long-time customer. I did that for about 10 to 12 years of the IT span doing everything from help desk working my way up to being on the engineer side. I really fell in love with automation during that time period and then made the jump to the vendor side. I've been at VMware for about two years now where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. >> Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented at VMUGs? >> Yes, yes, so I've been a vExpert. I think I'm going on seven years now. I've helped run the Indianapolis VMUG for five to six years. I've presented VMUGs all over the country. >> Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate, it can do great things for your career. >> Yes, absolutely! I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. >> Indy VMUG's a great one, a real large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but a good rivalry going on there. I want to talk about the keynote you talked about, automation and APIs. It's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. >> Yeah, absolutely! We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 6.5 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new, to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were SOAP-based so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible which that was just something that Jon knew quite well. I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with Jon. It went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit. We even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something you can use with anything. >> For somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skillsets are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? >> Sure. A lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware {code} blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful APIs that we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman, we give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a Getting Started with vSphere, they've got a Getting Started with different operating systems as well. Those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. Obviously, we're building on automation here. We're building on... At least when I was in admin, I got involved in automation because there was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off, and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. >> Yeah, great point there 'cause, yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, "Oh, wait, are these tools going to take away my job?" And to repeat what you were just saying, "No, no." There's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, "Wait, no, once I start automating it, "then I kind of need to care, and feed, and maintain that, "versus just buying something off the shelf "or using some service that I can do." Any feedback on that? >> Well, it's more of a... It's a passion thing. If it's something that you're really get ingrained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course, you can buy something. You could get somebody from... There are professional services organizations involved, so you don't have to do the menial tasks of updating that. Say if you go from one version to a next version, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that, and that's where I was. >> The other thing I picked up on is you said some of these things are new only in 6.5. One of the challenges we've always had out there is, "Oh, wait, I need to upgrade. "When can I do it? "What challenges I'm going to have?" What's the upgrade experience like now and anything else that you'd want to point out that said, "Hey, it's time to plan for that upgrade "and here are some of the things that are going to help you"? >> We actually have an End of Availability and End of Support coming up for vSphere 5.5. That's going to be coming up in here later this year in September-October timeframe. So you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. This is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5. And the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. Moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter Server Appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the VCSA Migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the Appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to remove that pain out of that process. >> Yeah, it's good, you've got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you got to get off! (Kyle chuckles) I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there as well as there's the carrot out there. All the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything, and two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? >> As far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. Even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python. I'm like, "Wow!" This is something that keeps coming up more and more often. I'm using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested because I'm like, "Hey, if you're that interested, "and you're that passionate about it, "I should be too." So that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with all of the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, how to make use of their product, and some of their automation frameworks, and with what programming languages. That kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. >> Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question probably without even thinking about it. The passion, the excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. All right, Kyle Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCube. (energetic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend, and this is one of the interviews we've been really excited. Of course, we've got about 60 interviews. We love all of them. Lots of good excitement. Lots going on at this ecosystem. Over 43 thousand in attendance here in Las Vegas, but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf, who's the Vice President and CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware. Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. Great to see you guys. >> So for the year, the whole VMware on AWS has been a hot buzz discussion. We've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE about you know, partnering and how does that work and who gets the most benefit out of it, but let's start, Chris I'd love to hear your viewpoint, you know. You talk to a lot of customers. I've talked to some customers that are really excited about it, especially at VMWorld, that were there testing it and doing it. Give us the customer viewpoint. What's really exciting them? What's interesting them? And I know there's a lot of new news we're wanna gonna get into. >> Yeah, you know, there's so much that I think is exciting to customers because you know, they're struggling with being more agile, being more software defined, being able to have more flexibility in their environments. And to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS allows them to go through data center consolidation easier. It allows them to get applications to the Cloud to take advantage of Cloud services. One of the things people, I think kind of falls between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS is the fact that if I want to modernize an application or a traditional application, refactoring an application is enormously expensive. It's very hard to do. It's very time consuming. If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud on AWS and then start to integrate that with other native AWS services, I get the benefit of modernizing that application without having to touch any of the application code, which is a huge benefit to customers. >> Yeah, we've spent the last couple of years at this show, which well, do I lift and shift? Do I just re-platform it? Do I refactor it? Do I totally rewrite it? You know, the number of customers that I've talked to at this show, their advice that they give to their peers is like well, go faster. And how do we go faster? Do I just take my VMware stuff that I was doing in my own data center, stick it in VMware on AWS, start using all the cool stuff. Is that kind of the path that you see? >> That's part of it. You know, I think there's a couple threads here. There's the notion that you know, I wanna go faster, but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT. Where I have to change my mindset. You know, I can't say I want to be more software defined and more agile and then have specific hardware requirements in my architecture. Of course, that's not for all applications, but that's part of that shift in mindset is how can I go faster? And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers, if I can get into that operational model by getting on Amazon quicker, then that's good for my business. >> Yeah, let me just poke on one more thing on that and I know Keith wants to jump in here, but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago. It was like, you know my Windows operating system going end to life. I'm gonna stick it in VM and keep it there forever. But, boy that application was all the technical data. My users hated it and everything like that. How does VMware go from I managed what you had to enabling your future? >> The thing that we're really focused on here in terms of enabling the future, when you think about programmatic compute and networking and storage and security, all applications need them. I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function or whatever, but at the end of the day, somebody has to do it and that part of the fabric becomes really important for things like having a security auto-trell. The other thread there is where VMware's strategic to customers is that they say, "You know I might wanna start this in the Cloud, "but I wanna maintain full control "of all of the intellectual property, "so I wanna use Kubernetes, I wanna use containers, "I wanna use a variety of open source projects. "I wanna use their native API's for my software engineers, "but I wanna have flexibility to build these applications "without pre-destining their future." Maybe it runs in a Cloud today, maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow, maybe it runs out at the edge. Maybe I do an acquisition and it has to run in that facility. The bottom line is, I don't always know what the future holds for my apps. And for the aspect of the apps that are core to your business, there's a lot value in running them on VMware because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility and independence, just like we've done way back in the past with your traditional enterprise applications. >> So Chris, that's a great setup for the next set of questions, which is, VMware has been known to move at the speed of the CIO. We're at AWS re:Invent. These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO. The question is around, what's VMware's focus? You know, there's VMware Cloud on AWS, there's PKS, there's VIG. You guys came out with Openstack, VMware integrated Openstack 4.0, and then even VMware Cloud on AWS, the promised innovation three and a half months after the release. Iteration on that. That's much faster than what the CIO used to have. How are those conversations balanced between the CIO and the new business user here at AWS? >> Yeah, way to sugarcoat Keith. That's a good question. Look at CIOs today. There's very innovative CIOs. We had the NFL CIO up on stage in the morning Keynote, right? And I thought that was highly dynamic, really talking about how you have to transform business. What we're really focused on in terms of helping customers is making sure that that fabric that runs their business applications is just as fluid and dynamic as their businesses. The security has to be as fluid and dynamic or more dynamic than the threats that you face. So, these are areas that we're focused on, but your point is: how can VMware continue to deliver quick innovation? I think VMware integrated Openstack actually is an example of VMware integration or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up. We don't talk about Openstack that much now, but VMware was the very first Openstack distro-vendor to make upgrades of Openstack versions they feature as software. Where our competitors in that space were making it a professional services engagement. You look at us, what we've done in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere. We announced PKS and we were very quick to embrace Kubernetes. We announced Greengrass preview that we're bringing to market as well on vSphere. So, you're absolutely right to give us the feedback that in the past, you could say Vmware was a bit conservative of a company. We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations. They were important and we were deliberate because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality. That's what our customers expect, but at the same time, it's very good feedback to say that we have to work quicker, and that's the model that we're in. I think that the AWS partnership for Vmware is one example of how we've had a couple of companies learning from each other in terms of AWS and interacting with the enterprise and VMware in terms of innovating a Cloud space, and you're staring to see the benefits and the fruits of that labor now. >> So, ironically I ran into the VMUG president, Ben Clayton doing a show floor. It's amazing to see the crossover between the VMware community and the AWS community. I think VMware Cloud on AWS has been a boom, a realizing that Cloud is coming into the enterprise in a great way. Let's talk about the community and the users. How do you help move that traditional community of, I think VMUG is 200,000 users. How do you help move that membership forward to this new speed of IT? >> It's a terrific question. There's definitely some challenges with getting folks. Part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart. We love building everything. We love the pieces and parts. We can understand how they matter, but even if they matter like this much, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should build a snowflake for my business because some of the problems that VMware solves, you could say that every business in the world has to solve the same problems. So why focus on some of those smaller nuisances? What we've been really after is providing much more content into the VMUG communities around transformation, around how more modular IT architectures are important. Even beyond the VMUG community, if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners, where their core focus was on some very tightly integrated hardware-based solutions. Those partners, the more innovative ones, are now building hybrid applications across VMware and AWS components and modernizing enterprises that way. We're trying to encourage our VMUG community to do the same thing. I've had talks with VMUG events this year talking to them about Edge Compute and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like. Part of this is, I think all of us in IT, we have to have that point in time where we say "I have to let go, "I know the market's shifting, "I know I have to do something different." If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known for being a Certified Novell Engineer, right? Times change and we have to change too, so it's really important to be prescriptive and give our community all the tools they need to evolve with us. >> Chris, you mention the Greengrass thing that you have in preview for a bit. I want you talk about that a little bit and when I heard Andy Jassy this morning, he talked about the continuum. Instances, which underneath, that's virtualization from VMware. There's containers and there's serverless. Andy says if he was to build IWBS today, he'd build it all serverless. We know it's not a zero sum game and nothing changes overnight, but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight and containers doesn't go away now that serverless comes out. I want you to talk about the Greengrass and how that spectrum fits into the customers you're talked to in the VMware journey. >> I think it's really, really exciting and certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless. My 14 year old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom and he likes to program it to do really fun things. My favorite example is he had it talking about who the ugliest person in the world is and wanted Alexa to name his sister. There's a part of me that's like "No don't do that, son" but then the other part's like "I'm so proud of you." >> That's awesome. But if we step back, there's this huge press to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics and the intelligence to either where the data's being created or where the data's being consumed. We've had a lot of customers come to us jointly, saying "Look, I can't move the data to the Cloud "to do deep analytics or machine learning. "It defies the laws of physics "or the networking costs are just too much. "Or there's latency considerations. "I need a faster transaction execution time." We have a customer, a joint customer, where they're monitoring the heat of the brake pad on a train and they're trying to understand in real time, how that impacts the train's maintenance schedule and when they should take it out of service. They need to get the intelligence of the Cloud closer to where these things are occurring. Let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere. You heard an announcement of machine learning on Greengrass today. To do machine learning, I need some considerable compute horsepower to really make it effective. Most of our customers already have a lot of that horsepower already out at the edge. One of our customers has six to 10 servers. This is very common of a lot of retail organizations, six to 10 servers per stores times 10,000 stores. They're trying to do more with IOT and more analytics. They want to leverage the investments that they already have an infrastructure. The other part that's strategically important to VMware is this: we want to have Cloud services be able to execute where the data's being created and that's a natural use case for virtualization. Then second, we want to have a platform that can allow the most popular opensource technologies to also run there to give customers all of that choice. So for us, it's all about promoting heterogeneity at the edge. We see those Cloud services as really that new generation of application platforms that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint of a Cloud data center to say "this is where it has to run." I want it to run wherever the business requirements say it needs to run and that's what's important and that's what we're doing with this announcement. >> Chris, we talk to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs and even looking at VMware, trust that part of it has been very stable in the environment for years, the product selection can be overwhelming. CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment and their strategies in a certain area. Conversations, where are you telling CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment? >> It's a really good question. You definitely have to have a focus area and for us, it's about a platform for rapid agility and innovation. That's really key. We don't know what the future's gonna be. We can guess and you are both two very visionary guys and you have a general idea of what's gonna happen over the next 12, 18 months, but there's things that are just unexpected, especially in the business context. We can understand technology, but business dynamics change very quickly. Helping CTOs and CIOs understand how to build a fabric that can make them more agile and flexible is really key. That's one. So, greater automation, greater efficiencies, rapid innovation, but even more importantly for a lot that's really top of mind is security. Giving them a way to do rapid recovery, being able to start to segment some of their resources, being able to dynamically offer and adjust security and understand threats in real time and combat them in real time is key. The traditional model of security is: I have a dynamic threat so I'm gonna have increased layers of static security to combat it and I'll just add more layers. Doesn't work. We've had customers have massive outages that we've worked with because they've had ransomware attacks and things like that, so they want to be more agile and more dynamic. Their VMware environments, they've been able to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching organizations that they have to think differently. So really, that security and agility I see is really top of line for a lot of folks. >> Chris, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth, talked to a lot of customers that are interested. The elephant in the room when I talk to all of them is cost. We've looked at Big Bear Metal, Amazon released that instance. That's a big hunking instance, a lot of memory, a lot of networking. I've talked to a couple customers that said, "I did the analysis on VMware over AWS "versus heck, just buying a rack "and stick it in my environment." You get a significant difference in there. One customer is like "Hey, it was 3x the cost "for me to just buy it and do it myself, "and I didn't feel I was gonna get any "operational efficiencies even doing it "'cause I know VMware and I know how to run it." What do you say to those customers? What are they missing? I'd love any misconceptions that you're hearing out there. >> I'll give ya an example. Let's use the cost analogy. My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas. I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo, but that's actually 3x the cost of me buying the circuit board kit, say on Amazon, and soldering in the components myself. When you think about that in a practical, real world example, we used to buy motherboards and build PCs and servers back in the day. We don't even think about doing it anymore and even if I could save 25 dollars doing it, I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business. Look, we are-- >> I wanna poke at that. Because you're partners at Delium Sig and I buy one of the VX whatever family from their team. It's pretty easy to ploy, I do that. I understand how to do VMware. It's not gonna take me months to deploy. I know how to a VMware environment and it's that type of configuration. They're saying it's not building versus buying and I understand there's a spectrum there, but just the raw VMware and AWS. They said "I'm gonna get two bills. "I'm gonna get one from VMware and one from Amazon" and the price of it does seem pretty massive compared to what they were doing. So, are they wrong about that? >> I'm really surprised at that. We're not hearing that from our customers We're seeing them have very solid in terms of cost saving, in terms of running on AWS because unlike a traditional Cloud environment, I can oversubscribe physical hosts, I can run more workloads because it is native VMware. You're also getting additional benefits. I'm getting V-SAN storage, I'm getting NSX for networking and security. To say I'm just gonna take vSphere and compare, I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison. There's other aspects that we're providing that operate in a Cloud environment. And, listen, we had this before. Five years ago, people were saying, "Well, Cloud's too expensive so I'm gonna stay on premises." We don't even think that way anymore. There's other benefits that you're getting in the Cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration and we've seen VMware Cloud on AWS is as price competitive as a lot of the native public Cloud services are without all the added benefits of networking and security and management and other things that we throw in. >> Chris, wanna give you the final word. What's exciting you these days? You used to sit on kind of this side of the table, look at the environment. You're deep in some of the emerging pieces. What's getting you excited? I'd love to hear any final insights on partnering between VMware and Amazon, which a lot of us on the outside are like cats and dogs living together. >> Okay, let's hit a couple of them. First, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring at the edge, I think is extremely exciting. Driving new use cases around augmented reality, more machine learning. How we're looking in terms of moving services to where data's being generated instead of moving the data, which is always problematic. That's a new wave of innovation that I think is really exciting. So that's the certainly the area I'd say that's most exciting for me, is how we can innovate there. It's also around hybrid applications. It's the integration of things like Lambda functions in a traditional file system. I was with a major global financial services organization yesterday and we were not talking about traditional Lambda function use cases. We were talking about integrating Lambda with database and file system events and VM's running on vSphere. So, there's this whole new way to modernize applications that we're just at the cusp of. That pace of innovation's happening faster and faster. I'll say this about Amazon: we are really committed to working together and I think what you're seeing in the industry in general, it's not just VMware with AWS, but it's with our partners in the container spaces. An example is containers as a service and platform as a service, is we're being very pragmatic about focusing on what we're really, really good at. And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at it, in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge and there's natural synergies where we can work together with Amazon web services. In my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner. All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team and the IOT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience. We share lessons learned, we share engineering, work together. It's extremely collaborative because just like all of our technology partners, there's always areas where we're going to compete a little bit and there can be some overlap, but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together and that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS. >> Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate your perspectives, the VMware community engagement, know you're always open to having some good, real discussions here, so really appreciate you coming sharing all our viewpoints. Congratulations on all the progress here. We're certainly excited to see where it goes. >> I appreciate the opportunity. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Justin Warren. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld2017. Believe it or not it's our eighth year covering this show. About 23,000 here in attendance and pulls from around the world even though there is a European show. But happen to welcome to the program, a first time guest, to theCUBE, someone I've known for a number of years. So, great to pull you in front of the camera. Dan Frith who is a consultant with Penguin Punk. We had one of my guests this morning said, you know this is the punk rock set so it only makes sense that, you know, you've got the shoes and the hair, and even hit a punk show >> Dan: Yep. >> here in Vegas >> Dan: I did, I did. >> when you first got here. >> Dan: Yep. >> So, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> So, Dan, just for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You're heavily involved in the VMware community. You're a VIMA leader. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Tell us your background and what you're doing these days. >> Dan: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Stu. I've been working with Virtualization for about 15 year now. Started with Workstation, went to ESX 2. And sort of it all went from there. I thought that was pretty cool stuff. Kept me really busy for a long time. Branched out into further data center technologies. I'm really interested in things that go in racks, and how they can help people do stuff better, faster and smarter. >> Dan: Yeah. >> I tell you, I've been working with VMware for about the same time, 15 years. Had a little bit more hair and less gray, you know, when that started, I loved some of the IBM to TV commericals where it was like, "Where did all the servers go?" Racked it all up and things like that. To watch the evolution and the ebbs and flows in this community >> Dan: Yep. >> has been pretty cool. So, how important is VMware today in your ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's critical to what we do every day. A lot of our customers are very VMware focused. Not just for the high proviso. It's all management automation that we wrap around that stuff. NSX is becoming more and more critical to what we're doing. Got a lot of complicated cloud plays happening locally. NSX is really helping us to get where we need to be where traditionally maybe it was bit of a slower, harder process. We've certainly found stuff like that is really helping us get some good winds on the board. >> Could you unpack that a little bit for us? Definitely coming into the show, I hear a lot about NSX. Lots of customers doing what I taught. Some of the ecosystem at large is like when you really get in there's some complicated pieces. Networking, security, >> Dan: That's right. >> never going to be simple? >> Dan: Right. >> So what are some of the challenges? How do we get over some of them? And what does this really deliver? >> Yeah, I think some of the biggest challenges with networking and security in the enterprise isn't the actual tech anymore it's the way that we apply the processes to that tech, the policies, the frameworks and governments, the risk, compliance assessments, all that sort of stuff. People don't necessarily understand that world inside their business. Having something like NSX come in it gives them the opportunity to reassess what they're actually trying to achieve, what's critical from an application perspective down rather than just thinking about the infrastructure and the tools they're using. It's not just about switches, routers, firewalls anymore. It's about what I'm actually trying to achieve, what really needs to talk to what, and now I can make this happen with this tool that's actually really flexible and agile, and very easy to get up and running. >> But the thing around the security aspect of it in particular, is that it's not the same sort of audience that you would normally be talking to if you're a VMware sort of person. >> Dan: That's right. It's usually handled by someone completely different. Similarly, the networking can be a little bit funny as well because the networking people are all about the hardware, and the switches, and things that plug into it. And this virtual switching idea, when I first heard NSX you're going to teach BGP to virtualization? >> I know, >> and I think that's been very interesting as well. I think we saw the last 10 years the storage and virtualization guys seem to come together reasonably well and start to cooperate on stuff. And we're finally understanding what storage is to VMware guys and vice versa. Whereas the networking stuff is still that dark art where you have to have >> Yeah. >> a certain number of letters after your name to make it work. And the security guys, again, they're a whole different beast, right? They're kind of like the DBA's of the infrastructure world. >> So, how far along in using storage as sort of an analogy. How far down that journey of getting people together and to understand each other on both sides. >> Yeah, so I think its still pretty early days. I know VMware's been very bullish about what NSX can do to transform your infrastructure. But I think there's a lot of conversations that still need to be had at a reasonably high level in organizations to get people understanding exactly what they can do with this stuff, and I think realize the potential of what they can do. Sometimes it's not actually what they need to do now, it's what they need to do three years from now. And I think a lot of businesses just aren't planning ahead that far, right? >> Dan, I'm curious your take on the keynote this morning. Pat got on stage. I thought good energy. I thought it was one of his best keynotes that he's given. >> Dan: Absolutely. >> But for your audience, kind of in your geo, digital transformation, kind of the journey to cloud. How much of that kind of hit home for you? Any critiques that you'd give. >> So, cloud's obviously a hot topic where I'm based. The VMware AWS story is getting more and more interesting. But, again, for Australia still not so much. You've got it in one geo right now. Australia is not going to be enabled for awhile. It took AWS a long time to get a presence down there. >> I think if I heard right, they said within a year by the time we come back to VMWorld next year, which I think is going to be in Vegas unfortunately again, but they said we should be across all the Amazon availability zones. >> Yeah, in which case that could be tremendously interesting. But I've got to crunch a few numbers to make sure this really works because I like the idea. It's a neat idea. It's very good for those legacy enterprises that don't really want to get away from vSphere to Shared who've got the kind of crusty applications that don't really run very well on public cloud. But they're in the middle of their transformation piece, perhaps. They're trying to get cloud-native. This is a nice stepping stone. If VMware can execute on it, makes sense financially. >> So, what are some of the financial price points that you're seeing out there? You know, we've heard over the years, VMware sometimes is everybody's yelling about it, sometimes not as much, cloud is going to be the savior Or wow, it's really expensive- >> Dan: That's right, it sort of varies. I think one of the points this morning they said, "You can have a variable cost model." And a lot of the businesses I deal with they hate that stuff. They need to know every month how much they're going to spend. >> Stu: Yeah, CFO doesn't like uncertainty, right? >> Absolutely not. Yeah, and this kind of stuff can get out of control really quickly. I'm not yet convinced unless you put the right controls, governance, framework, all that stuff on top of it. That's going to be the key thing, I think, for the success of this. >> There's a lot of talk about innovation which involves change and risk. And so, if we're trying to keep things into constrained boxes where we may not understand exactly what it's going to be, then by definition we're reducing as much risk as we can which is kind of- >> What's been fascinating with the customers I work with who are all traditional enterprises, services, those types. They've got CIOs coming in and saying, "Let's go to cloud. Everyone's in the cloud." They've sent it all up there and they go, "Oh my three-tier application actually doesn't work in this cloud. I need to bring it back. We've got those people going through those cycles already locally. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation going on at a high level. But I think some of the homework hasn't been done, to make that successful. And I think that's what people need to focus more on is an application centric, or even a business outcome centric... You know we use 2,000 applications in the enterprise but what do they all do. >> Justin: What are they for? >> What are they for? Are they just there because they've always been there? Or can we carve some of this stuff out? >> Yeah, how do softwares and service and public cloud fit into that discussion. >> Yeah. So, I think they're going to be more and more critical. I think the maturity around some of the softwares and service offerings has been really good. People are loving the offloader risk and the offload our responsibility for SAS. I think some of the problem is around, again, it's compliance, risk, people aren't necessarily backing up their Office365 stuff. They're sort of relying on Microsoft to have things in place. They're potentially not realizing some of the risk they're exposing themselves to. Not that this stuff is dodgy but it's tricky to navigate how you actually protect- >> I was talking to a security person yesterday, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, no if I just use SAS I don't need to worry about the security, right?" And I was like, "No, you need to worry about it even more." >> Dan: Yeah, yeah. >> We've seen plenty of examples of people who have put data into AWS for example, and then their S3 bucket is just open for the world to see. >> Dan: That's right. The simplicity adds a bit more mystery where it probably shouldn't. >> Yeah, doing your homework and understanding the tools that you're about to go and use is important. >> Dan: Yeah, understanding the risks and understanding some of the consequences of your actions. It's not just about reducing the floor tiles on your own premises stuff. It's about understanding what the data is actually doing, where it's going, and what it's going to mean to someone if they get ahold of that data. >> Yeah, but it's not a new situation really. Cloud's been around for over ten years now. A lot of these ideas of IT working with the business because that's what IT is about. It's not exactly a radical concept. >> It's not a massive change in what we're doing. I think some of the problem is we haven't done that very well to begin with. Now, we've just put another infrastructure construct in place and gone, "Oh, well now well work with the business on this." Unfortunately, we still aren't working with the business. You still got pockets of the business doing their own thing. It's poorly understood. IT is a cost center, a pain, a drain on the business, if you will. And it's hard for them to, I think, bridge that gap. We need to focus a bit more on making the gap between what the business is trying to achieve and what IT can do to help them. I don't think the cloud necessarily takes that conversation away. >> Yeah, unfortunately the technologies never going to be a silver bullet but I heard you say that IT still is looked at as a cost center for a lot of your environments. And I hear people maybe they're too optimistic. Not only is IT a cost center, they're working with the business. Maybe IT is driving the business. Sounds like maybe you're not there quite yet. >> So, I don't think that's happening in the big enterprises just yet. The more conservative ones are still struggling, I think, with bridging that gap between IT and business. The ones who can't see the value of what they're doing from an IT perspective, they're always going to struggle with that kind of stuff. >> How about just a general concept of digital transformation. In your area is that something, are people embracing it? I've read a great article actually by one of the networking vendors, and he said, "Look, people might not agree with digital transformation but digital disruption is definitely real." >> Absolutely. >> Stu: What are you seeing? >> If there's a way we can shoehorn a way of doing things differently into traditional business, into traditional IT companies as well, and making them understand that they're not just there to take all their money and not necessarily deliver on all of their promises. And if the business can start understanding that their is some value in IT, then I'm all for digital disruption if that's a mechanism to make that happen. Realistically though, I'm still faced with the same challenges of legacy software being out of support, and hardware that's sweating the asset, taking it a little too far. Those kind of problems are realistically what I'm still seeing every day. >> Kind of like the concept that Pat talked about in the keynote today of cyber hygiene. Just doing the basics >> Dan: That's right. >> Dan: Doing the basics. And I think some people are struggling with those basics because they've never done it or they've sort of forgotten how to do it, or they expect, magically, that their new shiny cloud will do that for them. Or their service provider and that's definitely not the case. >> Justin: Yeah. >> We're still pretty early in the show. But any of the announcements so far, anything jump out at you? Or anything that you've seen yet that you want to highlight? >> I'm excited about the VM in AWS thing. I think it's good to finally see that. The annoucement last year at VMworld US, now it's generally available. Limited but generally available. >> Yeah, it was actually announced like a month after the show last year. One of the things we were a little frustrated that there was a three letter name big company that they made an announcement with which was up on stage talking about security today but not so much their cloud offerings. >> Not so much about that stuff. Yeah, so it's been a weird, I'm not going to say it's a pivot but it's certainly a bit of a twist. >> So, you're also a VMUG leader. What are the pain points that you're hearing from people in the community? What do they look for out of the ecosystem that would make their jobs a whole lot easier? >> I think people are sometimes struggling with the complexity of the ecosystem. It's still fairly broad and diverse. And sometimes people struggle to actually navigate their way through what they need to get done. I think that's what a lot of our VMUG members are struggling with day to day. >> I guess I don't see the vendors in the ecosystem solving that problem. It tends to be the distribution, consultants and the like that will help explain that. Because the problem we have, even if I just take storage or networking, these are really complicated things. And there's not going to be one solution that fits 90% of it. So, that's why I need to understand, you said a customer with 2,000 applications, how do I manage that stack of applications? How do I deal with that? You're a consultant. How do you help people through some of these challenges? >> So, I generally try to start with what's important to people. Like what's really making the business tick? What hurt them the most when it goes down? What costs them money? And some people have a really hard time understanding how much money their burning every time an application falls over. And then we just try to make some links between the infrastructure, the application that keeps that outcome running for them. >> Yeah, one of the things I've been poking at is there's too many things that IT is doing that they suck at. And I'm not trying to poke at them. It's what we call the undifferentiated heavy lifting. Come on, I think we talk to anybody, you're no good at building a data center. Please don't do another one. >> Dan: That's right. >> Somebody else can do it. Now, I'm not saying it all goes to public cloud. Lots of options how you do that. But from the ground up and as we work our way, what drives the business? What creates value for the business? And finding those areas. Roles of the CIO is changing greatly, role of IT. >> Yeah. >> Things are going to look very different in five years than it does today. >> Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And I think people don't necessarily appreciate the value of consultants who can help them on their journey. Because it's hard. IT is hard. Enterprise is hard. And putting IT and Enterprise in the same sentence that really makes it very hard. >> Justin: Yeah, very hard. >> You got to be careful. I saw there was one of those sarcastic memes years ago. It was like, "Consultants, if you can't solve the problem at least there's lots of money to be made moving it along." >> Yeah, yeah. And redefining the problem is another fun one. >> Justin: That's always fun. >> Yeah. >> So, Dan people want to learn more about what you're doing. How do they find you? >> So, they can find me at penguinpunk.net. I've got a blog there. It's been running there for about 10 years now. You can find me on the Twitters @penguinpunk. And various other things. Come to a VMUG meeting in Brisbane if you're ever in the area. We'll buy you a beer and treat you nice. >> Stu: Excellent. Love to do that. We have yet to do theCUBE in Australia but it's definitely what we want to do. So, Dan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. For Justin and Stu, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)