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

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

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you Data Driven Insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the pre-cloud era hardware companies would run benchmarks, showing how database and or application performance ran better on their systems relative to competitors or previous generation boxes. And they would make a big deal out of it. And the independent software vendors, you know they'd do a little golf clap if you will, in the form of a joint press release it became a game of leaprog amongst hardware competitors. That was pretty commonplace over the years. The Dell Snowflake Deal underscores that the value proposition between hardware companies and ISVs is changing and has much more to do with distribution channels, volumes and the amount of data that lives On-Prem in various storage platforms. For cloud native ISVs like Snowflake they're realizing that despite their Cloud only dogma they have to grit their teeth and deal with On-premises data or risk getting shut out of evolving architectures. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we unpack what little is known about the Snowflake announcement from Dell Technologies World and discuss the implications of a changing Cloud landscape. We'll also share some new data for Cloud and Database platforms from ETR that shows Snowflake has actually entered the Earth's orbit when it comes to spending momentum on its platform. Now, before we get into the news I want you to listen to Frank's Slootman's answer to my question as to whether or not Snowflake would ever architect the platform to run On-Prem because it's doable technically, here's what he said, play the clip >> Forget it, this will only work in the Public Cloud. Because it's, this is how the utility model works, right. I think everybody is coming through this realization, right? I mean, excuses are running out at this point. You know, we think that it'll, people will come to the Public Cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the Private Cloud. It's not that we can't run a private Cloud. It's just diminishes the potential and the value that we bring. >> So you may be asking yourselves how do you square that circle? Because basically the Dell Snowflake announcement is about bringing Snowflake to the private cloud, right? Or is it let's get into the news and we'll find out. Here's what we know at Dell Technologies World. One of the more buzzy announcements was the, by the way this was a very well attended vet event. I should say about I would say 8,000 people by my estimates. But anyway, one of the more buzzy announcements was Snowflake can now run analytics on Non-native Snowflake data that lives On-prem in a Dell object store Dell's ECS to start with. And eventually it's software defined object store. Here's Snowflake's clark, Snowflake's Clark Patterson describing how it works this past week on theCUBE. Play the clip. The way it works is I can now access Non-native Snowflake data using what materialized views, external tables How does that work? >> Some combination of the, all the above. So we've had in Snowflake, a capability called External Tables, which you refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically there's a through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data, wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud, up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell On-Premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake. So that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> So as Clark explained, this capability of External tables has been around in the Cloud for a while, mainly to suck data out of Cloud data lakes. Snowflake External Tables use file level metadata, for instance, the name of the file and the versioning so that it can be queried in a stage. A stage is just an external location outside of Snowflake. It could be an S3 bucket or an Azure Blob and it's soon will be a Dell object store. And in using this feature, the Dell looks like it lives inside of Snowflake and Clark essentially, he's correct to say to an analyst that looks exactly like the data is in Snowflake, but uh, not exactly the data's read only which means you can't do what are called DML operations. DML stands for Data Manipulation Language and allows for things like inserting data into tables or deleting and modifying existing data. But the data can be queried. However, the performance of those queries to External Tables will almost certainly be slower. Now users can build things like materialized views which are going to speed things up a bit, but at the end of the day, it's going to run faster than the Cloud. And you can be almost certain that's where Snowflake wants it to run, but some organizations can't or won't move data into the Cloud for a variety of reasons, data sovereignty, compliance security policies, culture, you know, whatever. So data can remain in place On-prem, or it can be moved into the Public Cloud with this new announcement. Now, the compute today presumably is going to be done in the Public Cloud. I don't know where else it's going to be done. They really didn't talk about the compute side of things. Remember, one of Snowflake's early innovations was to separate compute from storage. And what that gave them is you could more efficiently scale with unlimited resources when you needed them. And you could shut off the compute when you don't need us. You didn't have to buy, and if you need more storage you didn't have to buy more compute and vice versa. So everybody in the industry has copied that including AWS with Redshift, although as we've reported not as elegantly as Snowflake did. RedShift's more of a storage tiering solution which minimizes the compute required but you can't really shut it off. And there are companies like Vertica with Eon Mode that have enabled this capability to be done On-prem, you know, but of course in that instance you don't have unlimited elastic compute scale on-Prem but with solutions like Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake, you can certainly, you can start to simulate that Cloud elasticity On-prem. I mean, it's not unlimited but it's sort of gets you there. According to a Dell Snowflake joint statement, the companies the quote, the companies will pursue product integrations and joint go to market efforts in the second half of 2022. So that's a little vague and kind of benign. It's not really clear when this is going to be available based on that statement from the two first, but, you know, we're left wondering will Dell develop an On-Prem compute capability and enable queries to run locally maybe as part of an extended apex offering? I mean, we don't know really not sure there's even a market for that but it's probably a good bet that again, Snowflake wants that data to land in the Snowflake data Cloud kind of makes you wonder how this deal came about. You heard Sloop on earlier Snowflake has always been pretty dogmatic about getting data into its native snowflake format to enable the best performance as we talked about but also data sharing and governance. But you could imagine that data architects they're building out their data mesh we've reported on this quite extensively and their data fabric and those visions around that. And they're probably telling Snowflake, Hey if you want to be a strategic partner of ours you're going to have to be more inclusive of our data. That for whatever reason we're not putting in your Cloud. So Snowflake had to kind of hold its nose and capitulate. Now the good news is it further opens up Snowflakes Tam the total available market. It's obviously good marketing posture. And ultimately it provides an on ramp to the Cloud. And we're going to come back to that shortly but let's look a little deeper into what's happening with data platforms and to do that we'll bring in some ETR data. Now, let me just say as companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Pure and others build out their hybrid Clouds. The cold hard fact is not only do they have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model. You will hear them talk about that a lot, but they got to do that. So it, and that's critical from a user experience but in order to gain that flywheel momentum they need to build a robust ecosystem that goes beyond their proprietary portfolios. And, you know, honestly they're really not even in the first inning most companies and for the likes of Snowflake to sort of flip this, they've had to recognize that not everything is moving into the Cloud. Now, let's bring up the next slide. One of the big areas of discussion at Dell Tech World was Apex. That's essentially Dell's nascent as a service offering. Apex is infrastructure as a Service Cloud On-prem and obviously has the vision of connecting to the Cloud and across Clouds and out to the Edge. And it's no secret that database is one of the most important ingredients of infrastructure as a service generally in Cloud Infrastructure specifically. So this chart here shows the ETR data for data platforms inside of Dell accounts. So the beauty of ETR platform is you can cut data a million different ways. So we cut it. We said, okay, give us the Cloud platforms inside Dell accounts, how are they performing? Now, this is a two dimensional graphic. You got net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and what ETR now calls Overlap formally called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. That's on the horizontal axis that red dotted line at 40% represents highly elevated spending on the Y. The table insert shows the raw data for how the dots are positioned. Now, the first call out here is Snowflake. According to ETR quote, after 13 straight surveys of astounding net scores, Snowflake has finally broken the trend with its net score dropping below the 70% mark among all respondents. Now, as you know, net score is measured by asking customers are you adding the platform new? That's the lime green in the bar that's pointing from Snowflake in the graph and or are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the forest green is spending flat that's the gray is you're spend decreasing by 6% or worse. That's the pinkish or are you decommissioning the platform bright red which is essentially zero for Snowflake subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now, what's somewhat interesting is that snowflakes net score overall in the survey is 68 which is still huge, just under 70%, but it's net score inside the Dell account base drops to the low sixties. Nonetheless, this chart tells you why Snowflake it's highly elevated spending momentum combined with an increasing presence in the market over the past two years makes it a perfect initial data platform partner for Dell. Now and in the Ford versus Ferrari dynamic. That's going on between the likes of Dell's apex and HPE GreenLake database deals are going to become increasingly important beyond what we're seeing with this recent Snowflake deal. Now noticed by the way HPE is positioned on this graph with its acquisition of map R which is now part of HPE Ezmeral. But if these companies want to be taken seriously as Cloud players, they need to further expand their database affinity to compete ideally spinning up databases as part of their super Clouds. We'll come back to that that span multiple Clouds and include Edge data platforms. We're a long ways off from that. But look, there's Mongo, there's Couchbase, MariaDB, Cloudera or Redis. All of those should be on the short list in my view and why not Microsoft? And what about Oracle? Look, that's to be continued on maybe as a future topic in a, in a Breaking Analysis but I'll leave you with this. There are a lot of people like John Furrier who believe that Dell is playing with fire in the Snowflake deal because he sees it as a one way ticket to the Cloud. He calls it a one way door sometimes listen to what he said this past week. >> I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah, but that we've talked about this don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers ultimately from VMware. >> Okay, so what does the data say about what John just said? How is VMware actually doing in Cloud after its early missteps and then its subsequent embracing of AWS and other Clouds. Here's that same XY graphic spending momentum on the Y and pervasiveness on the X and the same table insert that plots the dots and the, in the breakdown of Dell's net score granularity. You see that at the bottom of the chart in those colors. So as usual, you see Azure and AWS up and to the right with Google well behind in a distant third, but still in the mix. So very impressive for Microsoft and AWS to have both that market presence in such elevated spending momentum. But the story here in context is that the VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware's On-Prem Cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation VCF they're doing pretty well in the market. Look, at HPE, gaining some traction in Cloud. And remember, you may not think HPE and Dell and VCF are true Cloud but these are customers answering the survey. So their perspective matters more than the purest view. And the bad news is the Dell Cloud is not setting the world on fire from a momentum standpoint on the vertical axis but it's above the line of zero and compared to Dell's overall net score of 20 you could see it's got some work to do. Okay, so overall Dell's got a pretty solid net score to you know, positive 20, as I say their Cloud perception needs to improve. Look, Apex has to be the Dell Cloud brand not Dell reselling VMware. And that requires more maturity of Apex it's feature sets, its selling partners, its compensation models and it's ecosystem. And I think Dell clearly understands that. I think they're pretty open about that. Now this includes partners that go beyond being just sellers has to include more tech offerings in the marketplace. And actually they got to build out a marketplace like Cloud Platform. So they got a lot of work to do there. And look, you've got Oracle coming up. I mean they're actually kind of just below the magic 40% in the line which is pro it's pretty impressive. And we've been telling you for years, you can hate Oracle all you want. You can hate its price, it's closed system all of that it's red stack shore. You can say it's legacy. You can say it's old and outdated, blah, blah, blah. You can say Oracle is irrelevant in trouble. You are dead wrong. When it comes to mission critical workloads. Oracle is the king of the hill. They're a founder led company that knows exactly what it's doing and they're showing Cloud momentum. Okay, the last point is that while Microsoft AWS and Google have major presence as shown on the X axis. VMware and Oracle now have more than a hundred citations in the survey. You can see that on the insert in the right hand, right most column. And IBM had better keep the momentum from last quarter going, or it won't be long before they get passed by Dell and HP in Cloud. So look, John might be right. And I would think Snowflake quietly agrees that this Dell deal is all about access to Dell's customers and their data. So they can Hoover it into the Snowflake Data Cloud but the data right now, anyway doesn't suggest that's happening with VMware. Oh, by the way, we're keeping an eye close eye on NetApp who last September ink, a similar deal to VMware Cloud on AWS to see how that fares. Okay, let's wrap with some closing thoughts on what this deal means. We learned a lot from the Cloud generally in AWS, specifically in two pizza teams, working backwards, customer obsession. We talk about flywheel all the time and we've been talking today about marketplaces. These have all become common parlance and often fundamental narratives within strategic plans investor decks and customer presentations. Cloud ecosystems are different. They take both competition and partnerships to new heights. You know, when I look at Azure service offerings like Apex, GreenLake and similar services and I see the vendor noise or hear the vendor noise that's being made around them. I kind of shake my head and ask, you know which movie were these companies watching last decade? I really wish we would've seen these initiatives start to roll out in 2015, three years before AWS announced Outposts not three years after but Hey, the good news is that not only was Outposts a wake up call for the On-Prem crowd but it's showing how difficult it is to build a platform like Outposts and bring it to On-Premises. I mean, Outpost isn't currently even a rounding era in the marketplace. It really doesn't do much in terms of database support and support of other services. And, you know, it's unclear where that that is going. And I don't think it has much momentum. And so the Hybrid Cloud Vendors they've had time to figure it out. But now it's game on, companies like Dell they're promising a consistent experience between On-Prem into the Cloud, across Clouds and out to the Edge. They call it MultCloud which by the way my view has really been multi-vendor Chuck, Chuck Whitten. Who's the new co-COO of Dell called it Multi-Cloud by default. (laughing) That's really, I think an accurate description of that. I call this new world Super Cloud. To me, it's different than MultiCloud. It's a layer that runs on top of hyperscale infrastructure kind of hides the underlying complexity of the Cloud. It's APIs, it's primitives. And it stretches not only across Clouds but out to the Edge. That's a big vision and that's going to require some seriously intense engineering to build out. It's also going to require partnerships that go beyond the portfolios of companies like Dell like their own proprietary stacks if you will. It's going to have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model and to do that, you're going to need more and more deals like Snowflake and even deeper than Snowflake, not just in database. Sure, you'll need to have a catalog of databases that run in your On-Prem and Hybrid and Super Cloud but also other services that customers can tap. I mean, can you imagine a day when Dell offers and embraces a directly competitive service inside of apex. I have trouble envisioning that, you know not with their historical posture, you think about companies like, you know, Nutanix, you know, or Cisco where they really, you know those relationships cooled quite quickly but you know, look, think about it. That's what AWS does. It offers for instance, Redshift and Snowflake side by side happily and the Redshift guys they probably hate Snowflake. I wouldn't blame them, but the EC Two Folks, they love them. And Adam SloopesKy understands that ISVs like Snowflake are a key part of the Cloud ecosystem. Again, I have a hard time envisioning that occurring with Dell or even HPE, you know maybe less so with HPE, but what does this imply that the Edge will allow companies like Dell to a reach around on the Cloud and somehow create a new type of model that begrudgingly accommodates the Public Cloud but drafts of the new momentum of the Edge, which right now to these companies is kind of mostly telco and retail. It's hard to see that happening. I think it's got to evolve in a more comprehensive and inclusive fashion. What's much more likely is companies like Dell are going to substantially replicate that Cloud Operating Model for the pieces that they own pieces that they control which admittedly are big pieces of the market. But unless they're able to really tap that ecosystem magic they're not going to be able to grow much beyond their existing install bases. You take that lime green we showed you earlier that new adoption metric from ETR as an example, by my estimates, AWS and Azure are capturing new accounts at a rate between three to five times faster than Dell and HPE. And in the more mature US and mere markets it's probably more like 10 X and a major reason is because of the Cloud's robust ecosystem and the optionality and simplicity of transaction that that is bringing to customers. Now, Dell for its part is a hundred billion dollar revenue company. And it has the capability to drive that kind of dynamic. If it can pivot its partner ecosystem mindset from kind of resellers to Cloud services and technology optionality. Okay, that's it for now? Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson is on the production team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and Rob Hof, on editorial they helped get the word out and thanks to Jordan Anderson for the new Breaking Analysis branding and graphics package. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. You could check out ETR website @etr.ai. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You want to get in touch. @dave.vellente @siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante. You can make a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the evolving capabilities of VCF on VxRail. VCF being VMware Cloud Foundation. as VxRail from Dell Technologies. Samuel Niemi is their Product Manager of VCF on VxRail. He's got the keys to the kingdom. He is going to give us the update on what's going on, obviously with all the major IT operational conversations going on with cloud native, how to get the best excellence out of the organization as we come through the pandemic, big stuff happening. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> In June, you guys announced some major updates that's coming on to VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail that would allow customers to extend their capabilities and their ability to innovate in the landscape and with external storage. Can you take us through what's new what's the situation and tell us what's happening? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off if you're, for those who might be watching who are not familiar with VCF on VxRail, VxRail is our hyperconverged infrastructure system that allows for massive data centers scaling at, from node to node to node. VCF on VxRail specifically is the VMware SDDC software suite that allows us to create a private cloud with VxRail deployments. So instead of saying, I want to manage this cluster and this cluster, and this cluster VCF allows us to manage VxRail clusters and deployments at a big scale. So VCF on VxRail, we've gone from in the last two and a half years or so that we have been available as a product we've gone from nothing to tens of thousands of nodes deployed across the world. And it has been a rollercoaster of a ride. And we're just thrilled with the success that we've had so far. >> And what's been new since the release in June but what's new? >> Absolutely. So, one thing that we've realized from a VxRail perspective is that, as we grow and as our data center and enterprise scale customers continue to grow their VCF on the VxRail environments VCF on VxRail has to evolve as well. And in June we announced an ability for VCF on VxRail to consume external storage. Now, hyper-converged means no storage, networking, network virtualization I should say and your server all in one box. External storage gives us the ability to utilize your existing Dell EMC storage arrays and use that data centric kind of storage deployment with your existing or net new VCF on VxRail deployments. It's really exciting stuff. And we're really looking forward to be able to even better provide solutions for our customers at that big enterprise scale. >> So a lot of change happening scale is a big word here, right? We're seeing scale, modern applications looking for environment. You talk about hybrid private cloud. I mean, essentially cloud operations is private cloud if you will. I got to ask you on this big product that you have VCF on VxRail, what are the drivers behind making this option viable for customers, what are they looking for? Why are they consuming it this way? What are the key aspects of drive in this force? >> Absolutely. So, what we found is that with vSAN which has been wildly successful on the VxRail, it's fantastic for general purpose workloads. And we don't see that changing. What we see is an ability for our customers to leverage the extreme speed of our PowerStore T, our PowerMax and our Unity XT storage arrays so that you can get that sub millisecond latency that you're used to out of those storage arrays and have the same benefits in say another workload domain of your existing vSAN deployment. Now, my favorite example of a use case for that is when you have sub millisecond latency, that's something like a PowerMax can provide. Let's say you're standing at the gas pump. It's cold, I'm here in Minnesota it was three degrees here yesterday. When I'm standing at the gas pump, swipe my card. I don't want to wait and wait and wait for that database kit. Put my card to go through I want it now. PowerMax and our PowerStore T, unity XT with those crazy low latencies, they allow our VCF on VxRail customers to not have to wait at the pump. So when our enterprise customers have those things deployed with that crazy low latency for database hits, you're not standing at the pump. You're not waiting awkwardly at the grocery store for your card to go through. You really get that extreme speed that those big storage arrays can provide. >> Yeah, so the weather in Minnesota, and so my brother lives in that area too. He was complaining about it on the family text, but this is an edge case, whether you're swiping your credit card on the pump, this latency discussion, the edge is really a key conversation because that's what you're, you're going to get cold waiting, but still you could be, key data store for say some equipment in a manufacturing operation, or on a farm or somewhere. So again, this brings up the whole edge. >> True. >> That an area is that the driver, one of the drivers, or is it also just in general the performance? >> You know I would say it depends on what you need out of your storage array. If you need that performance at the edge, VCF can deploy remote clusters in a metro distance within 50 milliseconds. So you can have your center and you can have your edges, you can put storage arrays behind those edges. You can have that kind of, speed from place to place, to place to place, or you can use traditional vSAN storage. So it really comes down to what your storage use case is. Maybe you have a need of the data replication that PowerMax can provide from one site to the other, and that's your backup for your edges. Those kinds of things can all be utilized with VCF on VxRail and remote clusters at the edge. >> What a similar customer use case? Can you just walk me through some examples of customers that you have and what they're interested in, what kind of advantages they're seeing with the capability? >> Certainly. So we have a number of customers who have high level of data resiliency requirements that we have that 99 point lots of nines resiliency that the PowerMax, and it's forebears, VMX have provided for 20 something years now, those customers say at our financial institutions where they have to have massive levels of resiliency. We have customers who frankly have separate buying cycles, where they buy their compute one year, and then maybe two years later, that's when their storage comes up for renewal. So those customers are able to leverage both VCF on VxRail and their external storage. I'm not going to drop customer names. I've got a couple that come to mind, but I'll say in the financial institution and in healthcare especially is where we see. >> What problem are they solving? You don't have to name names because I know it's probably the company, everything, but you know what all the reference stuff, but what's the anecdotal, what's the main problem, let's say kind of the use cases that jump out and people, if people are watching might think that they should be using this. What signals and signs should they be looking for? >> Absolutely. I would say first off data resiliency, and I'm just in love with PowerMax. So that's the first thing that jumps to mind. I'm extreme performance, whether it's databases or having a need to get data out to their customers as quickly as possible. Replication comes to mind. Those are the big three. And then of course, where you maybe need a little bit of compute and a lot of storage are dynamic nodes and VCF on VxRail means that we can sell our nodes without any storage. And that really gives us an ability to just say, I need a lot of compute, I need a little compute, whatever it might be, I'm going to scale my nodes and my storage independently of one another. >> Where can people get more information to find out? >> Sure, absolutely. So for more information, you can always go to dell.com. You can reach out to your sales team and talk to your VMware sales team as well, who are well-versed in VCF on VxRail deployments, but we're always here dell.com and we're always just an email away. >> So while I've got your here, say, I want to ask you about this notion of simplifying the IT operational experience. >> Sure. >> In your view, as you look out on the horizon from your perspective, being the product leader on this area, what's on the mind of the customer. What's the psychology out there? What's some of the environmental conditions that they're facing (indistinct) their landscape. Is it do more with less, the classic cliche? Is it actually a replatformin, is it refactoring? Is it application developers? what's some of the big drivers there in terms of the customers that you're seeing? >> So as a customer today, I have so many options for where to put my data and where to put my VMs and my development. I want to look at what is the best route for my business? Is it a hybrid cloud offering? And if yes, what's the easiest way to manage that because at the end of the day, if I'm spending money on maintenance spending money on staff who are not accelerating the business, but just keeping the thing going, what's the best way to do that? And VCF on VxRail today really allows our customers to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud rather, and maintain the entire thing through one interface. That interface being SDDC Manager. When we look at the benefits of it, VCF for on VxRail today provides Tanzu. So for customers who need to have a development platform in their hybrid cloud Tanzu is that the easy option or the easy answer for that. So, it is a big answer. What's driving this, lots of things, but really it's data center modernization. It's moving from a traditional servers with virtual machines on them into the hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, you were missing resilience here on the data. I think that's awesome because I mean, at the end of the day it's data driven. Everyone wants more data. Database has been around for a while. So making that go faster is really critical. Awesome, awesome conversation. And now on the VCF on VxRail, what's the bottom line, if you had to summarize the evolution capabilities that are coming on, they're evolving, you're the Product Manager, you got the keys to the kingdom, what's next, what's happening? >> If I'm looking at VCF and what's next and what's on the way, really lifecycle management. So, when our customers talk about what it looks like to lifecycle their systems without VCF on VxRail and the complexity of doing that without VCF it's lifecycle management is the reason for being. We look at the, from everything we lifecycle from the hardware of the VxRail nodes, including disc firmware, HPAs, NIC drivers, etc to the VCF SDDC software suite, all of those components they're in vSphere, VCenter ESXi. I'm going through the checklist in my head here. The V realized components, getting all of that lifecycle to a good continuous revalidated state is really, really tough. And then your add storage, that's one more thing. So I want to be able to just have a single click that will go through LCM my entire hybrid cloud environment from hardware to software stack, so that I can manage that external storage that I just added to my system without adding more pain. So really with VCF on VxRail, it's the only jointly engineered solution from an HCI vendor like VxRail and VMware to deliver that single click soup to nuts hardware to software suite LCM. LCM is the name of the game. And we're going to continue to make that innovate on that and new ways that I can't even say yet. >> I can't wait to hear the innovation is a great model. Putting that out there, getting the environmental all scaled up. Sam Niemi, Product Manager, VCF VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail with Dell Technologies. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Absolutely thanks, John. >> Okay, it's theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John for your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to welcome back to the program the cto of vmware kit kohlberg welcome back to the program and congrats on your new role thank you yeah i'm really excited to be here so you've been at vmware for a long time you started as an intern i read yeah yeah it's been uh 18 years as a full-timer but i guess 19 if you count my internship so quite a while it's many lifetimes in silicon valley right many lifetimes in silicon valley well we've seen a lot of innovation from vmware in its 23 years you've been there the vast majority of that we've seen a lot of successful big tech waves ridden by vmware in april vmware pulled tanzu and vmware cloud foundation together vmware cloud you've got some exciting news with respect to that what are you announcing today well we got a lot of exciting announcements happening at vmworld this week but one of the ones i'm really excited about is vmware cloud with tons of services so let me talk about what these things are so we have vmware cloud which is really us taking our vmware cloud foundation technology and delivering that as a service in partnership with our public cloud providers but in particular this one with aws vmware cloud on aws we're combining that with our tanzu portfolio of technologies and these are really technologies focused at developers at folks driving devops building and operating modern applications and what we're doing is really bringing them together to simplify customers moving from their data centers into the cloud and then modernizing their applications it's a pattern that we see very very often this notion of migrate and then modernize right once you're on a modern cloud infrastructure makes it much easier to modernize your applications talk to me about some of the catalysts for this change and this offering of services was it you know catalyzed by some of the events we've seen in the world in the last 18 months and this acceleration of digital adoption yeah absolutely and we saw this across our customer base across many many different industries although as you can imagine those industries that that were really considered essential uh were the ones where we saw the biggest sorts of accelerations we saw a tremendous amount of people needing to support remote workers overnight right and cloud is a perfect use case for that but the challenge a lot of customers had was that they couldn't take the time to retool that they had to use what they already had and so something like vmware cloud was perfect for that because it allowed them to take what they were doing on-prem and seamlessly extend it into the cloud without any changes able to do that you know almost overnight right but at the same time what we also saw was the acceleration of their digital transformation people are now online they're needing to interact with an app over their phone to get something you know remotely delivered or to schedule maybe um an appointment for their pet because you know a lot of people got pets during the pandemic and so you just saw this rush toward digitization and these new applications need to be created and so as customers move their application estate into the cloud with vmware cloud and aws they then had this need to modernize those applications to be able to deliver them faster to respond fast to the very dynamic nature of what was happening during the pandemic so let's talk about uh some of the opportunities and the advantages that vmware cloud with tanzania service is going to deliver to those it admins who have to deliver things even faster yep so let me talk a bit about the tech and then talk about how that fits into uh what the users will experience so vmware cloud with tons of services is really two key components uh the first of which is the tanzu kubernetes grid service the tkg service as we call it so what this is is actually a deep integration of tonsil kubernetes grid with vmware cloud and and the kubernetes we've actually integrated into vmware cloud foundation folks who are familiar with vmware may remember that a couple of years ago we announced project pacific which was a deep integration of kubernetes into vsphere essentially enabling vsphere to have a kubernetes interface to be natively kubernetes and what that did was it enabled the i.t admins to have direct insight inside of kubernetes clusters to understand what was happening in terms of the containers and pods that that their developers were running it also allowed them to leverage uh their existing vsphere and vmware cloud foundation tooling on those workloads so fast forward today we we have this built in now and what we're doing is actually offering that as a service so that the customer doesn't need to deal with managing it installing it updating any of that stuff instead they can just leverage it they can start creating kubernetes clusters and upstream conformant kubernetes clusters to allow their developers to take advantage of those capabilities but also be able to use their native tooling on it so i think that's really really important is that the it admin really can enable their developers to seamlessly start to build and operate modern applications on top of vmware cloud got it and talk to me about how this is going to empower those it admins to become kubernetes operators yeah well i think that's exactly it you know we talk to a lot of these admins and and they're seeing the desire for kubernetes uh from their lines of business from you know from the app teams and the idea is that when you look start looking at the kubernetes ecosystem there's a whole bunch of new tooling and technology out there we find that people have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the right thing to use is and for a lot of these folks they say hey i've already figured out how to operate applications in production i've got the tooling i've got the standardization i got things like security figured out right super important and so the real benefit of this approach and this deep integration is it allows them to take those those tools those operational best practices that they already have and now apply them to these new workloads fairly seamlessly and so this is really about the power of leveraging all the investments they've made to take those forward with modern applications and the total adjustable market here is pretty big i heard your cto referring to that in an interview in september and i was looking at some recent vmware survey numbers where 80 of customers say they're deploying applications in highly distributed environments that include their own data center multiple clouds uh edge and also customers said hey 90 of our application initiatives are focused on modernization so vmware clearly sees the big tam here yeah it's absolutely massive um you know we see uh many customers the vast majority something like 75 percent are using multiple clouds or on-prem in the cloud we have some customers using even more than that and you see this very large application estate that's spread out across this and so you know i think what we're really looking at is how do we enable uh the right sorts of consistency both from an infrastructure perspective enabling things like security but also management across all these environments and by the way it's another exciting thing neglected to mention about this announcement vmware cloud with tonsil services not only includes the tonsil kubernetes grid service giving you that sort of kubernetes uh cluster as a service if you will but it also includes tons of mission control essentials and this is really the next generation of management when you start looking at modern applications and what tons of mission control focuses on is enabling managing kubernetes consistently across clouds and so this is the other really important point is that yes we want to make vmware cloud vmware cloud infrastructure the best place to build and operate applications especially modern ones but we also realize that you know customers are doing all sorts of things right they're in the native cloud whether that's aws or azure or google and they want ways of managing more consistently across all these environments in addition to their vmware environments both in the cloud and on-prem and so tons of mission control really enables that as well and that's another really powerful aspect of this is that it's built in to enable that next level of administration and management that consistency is critical right i mean that's probably one of the biggest benefits that customers are getting is that familiarity with the console the consistency of being able to manage so that they can deploy apps faster um that as businesses are still pivoting and changing direction in light of the pandemics i imagine that that is a huge uh from a business outcomes perspective the workforce productivity there is probably pretty pretty big yeah and i think it's also about managing risk as well you know one of the the biggest worries that we hear from many of the cios uh ctos executives that we talk to at our customers is this uh software supply chain risk like what is it exactly like what are the exact bits that they're running out there right in their applications because the reality is that um those apps are composed of many open source technologies and you know as we saw with solarwinds it's very possible for someone to get in and you know plant malicious code into their source repository such that as it gets built and flows out it'll you know just go out and customers will start using it and it's a huge huge security vulnerability and one thing on that note that customers are particularly worried about is the lack of consistency across their cloud environments that because things are done different ways and the different teams have different processes across different clouds it's easy for small mistakes to creep in there for little openings right that a hacker might be able to go and exploit and so i think this gets back to that notion of consistency and that you're right it's great for productivity but the one i think that's almost in some ways you might say uh for many of these folks more important for is from a security standpoint that they can validate and ensure they're in compliance with their security standards and by the way you know this is uh for most companies a board level discussion right the board is saying hey like do we have the right controls in place because it is um such an important thing and such a critical risk factor it is a critical risk factor we saw you mentioned solar winds but just in the last 18 months the the massive changes to the threat landscape the huge rise in ransomware and ddos attacks you know we had this scatterer everybody went home and you've got you know the edge is booming and you've got folks using uh you know not using their vpns and things when they should be so that the fact that that's a board level discussion and that this is going to help from a risk mitigation perspective that consistency that you talked about is huge i think for a customer in any industry yep yeah and it's pretty interesting as well like you mentioned ransomware so we're doing some work on that one as well actually not specifically with this announcement but it's another vmware cloud service that plugs into this uh seamlessly vmware cloud disaster recovery and one of the really cool features that we're announcing at vmworld this week is the ability to actually support and and maybe uh handle ransomware attacks and so the idea there is that if you do get compromised and what typically happens is that the hackers come in and they encrypt you know some of your data and they say hey if you want to get access to it you got to pay us and we'll decrypt it for you but if you have the right dr solution um that's backing up on a fairly continuous basis it means that whatever data might be encrypted you know would only be a small delta like the last let's say hour or two of data right and so what we're looking at is leveraging that dr solution to be able to very rapidly restore specific individual files uh that may have been compromised and so this is like one way that we're helping customers deal with that like obviously we want to put a whole bunch of other security protections in place and we do when we enable them to do that but one thing when you think about security is that it's very much defense in depth that you have multiple layers of the fail-safes there and so this one being kind of like the end result that hackers do get in they do manage to compromise it they do manage to get a hold of it and encrypt it well you still got unencrypted backups that you control and that you have um a very clean delineation and separation from just like kind of an architectural standpoint that the hackers won't be able to get at right so that you can control that and restore it so again you know this is something very top of mind for us and it's funny because we don't always lead with the security angle maybe we should as i'm saying it here but uh but it's something that's very very top of mind for a lot of our customers it's something that's also top of mind for us and that we're focused on it is because it's no longer if we get attacked it's one and they've got to be able to have the right recovery strategy so that they don't have to pay those ransoms and of course we only hear about the big ones like the solar winds and the colonial pipelines and there's many more going on when i get back to vmware cloud with tanzania services talk to me about how this fits into vmware's bigger picture yeah yeah yeah great question thanks for bringing me back i'd love to geek out on some of these things so um but when you take a step back so what we're really doing uh with vmware cloud is trying to provide this really powerful infrastructure layer uh that is available anywhere customers want to run applications and that could be in the public cloud it could be in the data center it could be at the edge it could be at all those locations and you know you mentioned edge earlier and i think we're seeing explosive growth there as well and so what we're really doing is driving uh broad optionality in terms of how customers want to adopt these technologies and then as i said we're sort of you know we're kind of going broad many locations we're also building up in each of those locations this notion of ponzu services being seamlessly integrated in doing that uh you know starting now with vmware cloud aws but expanding that to every every location that we have in addition you know we're also really excited another thing we're announcing this week called project arctic now the idea with arctic is really to start driving more choice and flexibility into how customers consume vmware cloud do they consume it as software or as a service and where do they do that so traditionally the only way to get it delivered as a service would be in the public cloud right vmware cloud aws you can click a few buttons and you get a software defined data center set up for you automatically now traditionally on-prem we haven't had that we we did do something pretty powerful uh a year or two back with the release of vmware cloud on dell emc we can deliver a service there but that often required new hardware you know new setup for customers and customers are coming back to us and saying hey like we've got these really large vsphere deployments how do we enable them to take advantage of all this great vmware cloud functionality from where they are today right they say hey we can't rebuild all these overnight but we want to take advantage of vmware cloud today so that's what really what project arctic is focused on it's focused on connecting into these brownfield existing vsphere environments and delivering some of the vmware cloud benefits there things like being able to easily well first of all be able to manage those environments through the vmware cloud console so now you have one place where you can see your on-prem deployments your cloud deployments everything being able to really easily move uh applications between on-prem and the cloud leveraging some of the vmware cloud disaster recovery capabilities i just mentioned like the ransomware example you can now do that even on prem as well because keep in mind it's people aren't attacking you know the hackers aren't attacking just the public cloud they're attacking data centers or anywhere else where these applications might be running and so arctic's a great example of where we're saying hey there's a bunch of cool stuff happening here but let's really meet customers where they're at and many of our customers still have a very large data center footprint still want to maintain that that's really strategic for them or as i said may even want to be extending to the edge so it's really about giving them more of that flexibility so in terms of meeting customers where they are i know vmware has been focused on that for probably its entire history we talk about that on the cube in every vmworld where can customers go like what's the right starting point is this targeted for vmware cloud on aws current customers what's kind of the next steps for customers to learn more about this yeah absolutely so there's a bunch of different ways so first of all there's a tremendous amount of activity happening here at vmworld um just all sorts of breakout sessions like you know detailed demos like all sorts of really cool stuff just a ton of content i'm actually kind of i'm in this new role i'm super excited about it but one thing i'm kind of bummed out about is i don't have as much time to go look at all these cool sessions so i highly recommend going and checking those out um you know we have hands-on labs as well which is another great way to test out and try vmware products so hold.vmware.com uh you can go and spin those things up and just kind of take them for a test drive see what they're all about and then if you go to vmc.vmware.com that is vmware cloud right we want to make it very easy to get started whether you're in just a vsphere on-prem customer or whether you already have vmware cloud and aws what you can see is that it's really easy to get started in that there's a ton of value-add services on top of our core infrastructure so it's all about making it accessible making it easy and simple to consume and get started with so there's a ton of options out there and i highly recommend folks go and check out all the things i just mentioned excellent kit thank you for joining me today talking about vmware cloud with tons of services what's new what's exciting the opportunities in it for customers from the i.t admin folks to be empowered to be kubernetes operators to those businesses being able to do essential services in a changing environment and again congratulations on your promotion that's very exciting awesome thank you lisa thank you for having me our pleasure for kit colbert i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 [Music] you

>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The next 10 years of cloud, they're going to differ dramatically from the past decade. The early days of cloud, deployed virtualization of standard off-the-shelf components, X86 microprocessors, disk drives et cetera, to then scale out and build a large distributed system. The coming decade is going to see a much more data-centric, real-time, intelligent, call it even hyper-decentralized cloud that will comprise on-prem, hybrid, cross-cloud and edge workloads with a services layer that will obstruct the underlying complexity of the infrastructure which will also comprise much more custom and varied components. This was a key takeaway of the guests from theCUBE on Cloud, an event hosted by SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this episode, we'll summarize the findings of our recent event and extract the signal from our great guests with a couple of series and comments and clips from the show. CUBE on Cloud is our very first virtual editorial event. It was designed to bring together our community in an open forum. We ran the day on our 365 software platform and had a great lineup of CEOs, CIOs, data practitioners technologists. We had cloud experts, analysts and many opinion leaders all brought together in a day long series of sessions that we developed in order to unpack the future of cloud computing in the coming decade. Let me briefly frame up the conversation and then turn it over to some of our guests. First, we put forth our view of how modern cloud has evolved and where it's headed. This graphic that we're showing here, talks about the progression of cloud innovation over time. A cloud like many innovations, it started as a novelty. When AWS announced S3 in March of 2006, nobody in the vendor or user communities really even in the trade press really paid too much attention to it. Then later that year, Amazon announced EC2 and people started to think about a new model of computing. But it was largely tire kickers, bleeding-edge developers that took notice and really leaned in. Now the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, really created what we call a cloud awakening and it put cloud on the radar of many CFOs. Shadow IT emerged within departments that wanted to take IT in bite-sized chunks and along with the CFO wanted to take it as OPEX versus CAPEX. And then I teach transformation that really took hold. We came out of the financial crisis and we've been on an 11-year cloud boom. And it doesn't look like it's going to stop anytime soon, cloud has really disrupted the on-prem model as we've reported and completely transformed IT. Ironically, the pandemic hit at the beginning of this decade, and created a mandate to go digital. And so it accelerated the industry transformation that we're highlighting here, which probably would have taken several more years to mature but overnight the forced March to digital happened. And it looks like it's here to stay. Now the next wave, we think we'll be much more about business or industry transformation. We're seeing the first glimpses of that. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research summed it up at our event very well I thought, he basically said the cloud is the big winner of COVID. Of course we know that now normally we talk about seven-year economic cycles. He said he was talking about for planning and investment cycles. Now we operate in seven-day cycles. The examples he gave where do we open or close the store? How do we pivot to support remote workers without the burden of CAPEX? And we think that the things listed on this chart are going to be front and center in the coming years, data AI, a fully digitized and intelligence stack that will support next gen disruptions in autos, manufacturing, finance, farming and virtually every industry where the system will expand to the edge. And the underlying infrastructure across physical locations will be hidden. Many issues remain, not the least of which is latency which we talked about at the event in quite some detail. So let's talk about how the Big 3 cloud players are going to participate in this next era. Well, in short, the consensus from the event was that the rich get richer. Let's take a look at some data. This chart shows our most recent estimates of IaaS and PaaS spending for the Big 3. And we're going to update this after earning season but there's a couple of points stand out. First, we want to make the point that combined the Big 3 now account for almost $80 billion of infrastructure spend last year. That $80 billion, was not all incremental (laughs) No it's caused consolidation and disruption in the on-prem data center business and within IT shops companies like Dell, HPE, IBM, Oracle many others have felt the heat and have had to respond with hybrid and cross cloud strategies. Second while it's true that Azure and GCP they appear to be growing faster than AWS. We don't know really the exact numbers, of course because only AWS provides a clean view of IaaS and passwords, Microsoft and Google. They kind of hide them all ball on their numbers which by the way, I don't blame them but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues on growth rates. And we have other means of estimating through surveys and the like, but it's undeniable Azure is closing the revenue gap on AWS. The third is that I like the fact that Azure and Google are growing faster than AWS. AWS is the only company by our estimates to grow its business sequentially last quarter. And in and of itself, that's not really enough important. What is significant is that because AWS is so large now at 45 billion, even at their slower growth rates it grows much more in absolute terms than its competitors. So we think AWS is going to keep its lead for some time. We think Microsoft and AWS will continue to lead the pack. You know, they might converge maybe it will be a 200 just race in terms of who's first who's second in terms of cloud revenue and how it's counted depending on what they count in their numbers. And Google look with its balance sheet and global network. It's going to play the long game and virtually everyone else with the exception of perhaps Alibaba is going to be secondary players on these platforms. Now this next graphic underscores that reality and kind of lays out the competitive landscape. What we're showing here is survey data from ETR of more than 1400 CIOs and IT buyers and on the vertical axis is Net Score which measures spending momentum on the horizontal axis is so-called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. The key points are AWS and Microsoft look at it. They stand alone so far ahead of the pack. I mean, they really literally, it would have to fall down to lose their lead high spending velocity and large share of the market or the hallmarks of these two companies. And we don't think that's going to change anytime soon. Now, Google, even though it's far behind they have the financial strength to continue to position themselves as an alternative to AWS. And of course, an analytics specialist. So it will continue to grow, but it will be challenged. We think to catch up to the leaders. Now take a look at the hybrid zone where the field is playing. These are companies that have a large on-prem presence and have been forced to initiate a coherent cloud strategy. And of course, including multicloud. And we include Google in this so pack because they're behind and they have to take a differentiated approach relative to AWS, and maybe cozy up to some of these traditional enterprise vendors to help Google get to the enterprise. And you can see from the on-prem crowd, VMware Cloud on AWS is stands out as having some, some momentum as does Red Hat OpenShift, which is it's cloudy, but it's really sort of an ingredient it's not really broad IaaS specifically but it's a component of cloud VMware cloud which includes VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation. And even Dell's cloud. We would expect HPE with its GreenLake strategy. Its financials is shoring up, should be picking up momentum in the future in terms of what the customers of this survey consider cloud. And then of course you could see IBM and Oracle you're in the game, but they don't have the spending momentum and they don't have the CAPEX chops to compete with the hyperscalers IBM's cloud revenue actually dropped 7% last quarter. So that highlights the challenges that that company facing Oracle's cloud business is growing in the single digits. It's kind of up and down, but again underscores these two companies are really about migrating their software install basis to their captive clouds and as well for IBM, for example it's launched a financial cloud as a way to differentiate and not take AWS head-on an infrastructure as a service. The bottom line is that other than the Big 3 in Alibaba the rest of the pack will be plugging into hybridizing and cross-clouding those platforms. And there are definitely opportunities there specifically related to creating that abstraction layer that we talked about earlier and hiding that underlying complexity and importantly creating incremental value good examples, snowfallLike what snowflake is doing with its data cloud, what the data protection guys are doing. A company like Loomio is headed in that direction as are others. So, you keep an eye on that and think about where the white space is and where the value can be across-clouds. That's where the opportunity is. So let's see, what is this all going to look like? How does the cube community think it's going to unfold? Let's hear from theCUBE Guests and theCUBE on Cloud speakers and some of those highlights. Now, unfortunately we don't have time to show you clips from every speaker. We are like 10-plus hours of video content but we've tried to pull together some comments that summarize the sentiment from the community. So I'm going to have John Furrier briefly explain what theCUBE on Cloud is all about and then let the guests speak for themselves. After John, Pradeep Sindhu is going to give a nice technical overview of how the cloud was built out and what's changing in the future. I'll give you a hint it has to do with data. And then speaking of data, Mai-Lan Bukovec, who heads up AWS is storage portfolio. She'll explain how she views the coming changes in cloud and how they look at storage. Again, no surprise, it's all about data. Now, one of the themes that you'll hear from guests is the notion of a distributed cloud model. And Zhamak Deghani, he was a data architect. She'll explain her view of the future of data architectures. We also have thoughts from analysts like Zeus Karavalla and Maribel Lopez, and some comments from both Microsoft and Google to compliment AWS's view of the world. In fact, we asked JG Chirapurath from Microsoft to comment on the common narrative that Microsoft products are not best-to-breed. They put out a one dot O and then they get better, or sometimes people say, well, they're just good enough. So we'll see what his response is to that. And Paul Gillin asks, Amit Zavery of Google his thoughts on the cloud leaderboard and how Google thinks about their third-place position. Dheeraj Pandey gives his perspective on how technology has progressed and been miniaturized over time. And what's coming in the future. And then Simon Crosby gives us a framework to think about the edge as the most logical opportunity to process data not necessarily a physical place. And this was echoed by John Roese, and Chris Wolf to experience CTOs who went into some great depth on this topic. Unfortunately, I don't have the clips of those two but their comments can be found on the CTO power panel the technical edge it's called that's the segment at theCUBE on Cloud events site which we'll share the URL later. Now, the highlight reel ends with CEO Joni Klippert she talks about the changes in securing the cloud from a developer angle. And finally, we wrap up with a CIO perspective, Dan Sheehan. He provides some practical advice on building on his experience as a CIO, COO and CTO specifically how do you as a business technology leader deal with the rapid pace of change and still be able to drive business results? Okay, so let's now hear from the community please run the highlights. >> Well, I think one of the things we talked about COVID is the personal impact to me but other people as well one of the things that people are craving right now is information, factual information, truth, textures that we call it. But here this event for us Dave is our first inaugural editorial event. Rob, both Kristen Nicole the entire cube team, SiliconANGLE on theCUBE we're really trying to put together more of a cadence. We're going to do more of these events where we can put out and feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires of people making things happen, but it's often the people under them that are the real Newsmakers. >> If you look at the architecture of cloud data centers the single most important invention was scale-out. Scale-out of identical or near identical servers all connected to a standard IP ethernet network. That's the architecture. Now the building blocks of this architecture is ethernet switches which make up the network, IP ethernet switches. And then the server is all built using general purpose x86 CPU's with DRAM, with SSD, with hard drives all connected to inside the CPU. Now, the fact that you scale these server nodes as they're called out was very, very important in addressing the problem of how do you build very large scale infrastructure using general purpose compute but this architecture, Dave is a compute centric architecture. And the reason it's a compute centric architecture is if you open this, is server node. What you see is a connection to the network typically with a simple network interface card. And then you have CPU's which are in the middle of the action. Not only are the CPU's processing the application workload but they're processing all of the IO workload what we call data centric workload. And so when you connect SSDs and hard drives and GPU is everything to the CPU, as well as to the network you can now imagine that the CPU is doing two functions. It's running the applications but it's also playing traffic cop for the IO. So every IO has to go to the CPU and you're executing instructions typically in the operating system. And you're interrupting the CPU many many millions of times a second. Now general purpose CPU and the architecture of the CPU's was never designed to play traffic cop because the traffic cop function is a function that requires you to be interrupted very, very frequently. So it's critical that in this new architecture where does a lot of data, a lot of these stress traffic the percentage of workload, which is data centric has gone from maybe one to 2% to 30 to 40%. >> The path to innovation is paved by data. If you don't have data, you don't have machine learning you don't have the next generation of analytics applications that helps you chart a path forward into a world that seems to be changing every week. And so in order to have that insight in order to have that predictive forecasting that every company needs, regardless of what industry that you're in today, it all starts from data. And I think the key shift that I've seen is how customers are thinking about that data, about being instantly usable. Whereas in the past, it might've been a backup. Now it's part of a data Lake. And if you can bring that data into a data lake you can have not just analytics or machine learning or auditing applications it's really what does your application do for your business and how can it take advantage of that vast amount of shared data set in your business? >> We are actually moving towards decentralization if we think today, like if it let's move data aside if we said is the only way web would work the only way we get access to various applications on the web or pages to centralize it We would laugh at that idea. But for some reason we don't question that when it comes to data, right? So I think it's time to embrace the complexity that comes with the growth of number of sources, the proliferation of sources and consumptions models, embrace the distribution of sources of data that they're not just within one part of organization. They're not just within even bounds of organizations that are beyond the bounds of organization. And then look back and say, okay, if that's the trend of our industry in general, given the fabric of compensation and data that we put in, you know, globally in place then how the architecture and technology and organizational structure incentives need to move to embrace that complexity. And to me that requires a paradigm shift a full stack from how we organize our organizations how we organize our teams, how we put a technology in place to look at it from a decentralized angle. >> I actually think we're in the midst of the transition to what's called a distributed cloud, where if you look at modernized cloud apps today they're actually made up of services from different clouds. And also distributed edge locations. And that's going to have a pretty profound impact on the way we go vast. >> We wake up every day, worrying about our customer and worrying about the customer condition and to absolutely make sure we dealt with the best in the first attempt that we do. So when you take the plethora of products we've dealt with in Azure, be it Azure SQL be it Azure cosmos DB, Synapse, Azure Databricks, which we did in partnership with Databricks Azure machine learning. And recently when we sort of offered the world's first comprehensive data governance solution and Azure overview, I would, I would humbly submit to you that we are leading the way. >> How important are rankings within the Google cloud team or are you focused mainly more on growth and just consistency? >> No, I don't think again, I'm not worried about we are not focused on ranking or any of that stuff. Typically I think we are worried about making sure customers are satisfied and the adding more and more customers. So if you look at the volume of customers we are signing up a lot of the large deals we did doing. If you look at the announcement we've made over the last year has been tremendous momentum around that. >> The thing that is really interesting about where we have been versus where we're going is we spend a lot of time talking about virtualizing hardware and moving that around. And what does that look like? And creating that as more of a software paradigm. And the thing we're talking about now is what does cloud as an operating model look like? What is the manageability of that? What is the security of that? What, you know, we've talked a lot about containers and moving into different, DevSecOps and all those different trends that we've been talking about. Like now we're doing them. So we've only gotten to the first crank of that. And I think every technology vendor we talked to now has to address how are they are going to do a highly distributed management insecurity landscape? Like, what are they going to layer on top of that? Because it's not just about, oh, I've taken a rack of something, server storage, compute, and virtualized it. I know have to create a new operating model around it in a way we're almost redoing what the OSI stack looks like and what the software and solutions are for that. >> And the whole idea of we in every recession we make things smaller. You know, in 91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year, 2000 windows the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards we moved from Unix servers to Wintel windows and Intel x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again, we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lib servers. And that's what we did in 2008, 2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There's nothing in the physical world that actually even lives but we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade. They're going to make it even smaller not just in space, which is size, with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. >> So I think the right way to think about edges where can you reasonably process the data? And it obviously makes sense to process data at the first opportunity you have but much data is encrypted between the original device say and the application. And so edge as a place doesn't make as much sense as edge as an opportunity to decrypt and analyze it in the care. >> When I think of Shift-left, I think of that Mobius that we all look at all of the time and how we deliver and like plan, write code, deliver software, and then manage it, monitor it, right like that entire DevOps workflow. And today, when we think about where security lives, it either is a blocker to deploying production or most commonly it lives long after code has been deployed to production. And there's a security team constantly playing catch up trying to ensure that the development team whose job is to deliver value to their customers quickly, right? Deploy as fast as we can as many great customer facing features. They're then looking at it months after software has been deployed and then hurrying and trying to assess where the bugs are and trying to get that information back to software developers so that they can fix those issues. Shifting left to me means software engineers are finding those bugs as they're writing code or in the CIC CD pipeline long before code has been deployed to production. >> During this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as they have the right requirements. So that goes back to people making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people and then the change management aspects right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how this change is going to be how it's going to affect, and then the adoption and an engagement, because adoption is critical because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective. But if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, what is a digital transformation or innovation? It still comes down to understand the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow our reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Okay, so look, there's so much other content on theCUBE on Cloud events site we'll put the link in the description below. We have other CEOs like Kathy Southwick and Ellen Nance. We have the CIO of UI path. Daniel Dienes talks about automation in the cloud and Appenzell from Anaplan. And a plan is not her company. By the way, Dave Humphrey from Bain also talks about his $750 million investment in Nutanix. Interesting, Rachel Stevens from red monk talks about the future of software development in the cloud and CTO, Hillary Hunter talks about the cloud going vertical into financial services. And of course, John Furrier and I along with special guests like Sergeant Joe Hall share our take on key trends, data and perspectives. So right here, you see the coupon cloud. There's a URL, check it out again. We'll, we'll pop this URL in the description of the video. So there's some great content there. I want to thank everybody who participated and thank you for watching this special episode of theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante and I'd appreciate any feedback you might have on how we can deliver better event content for you in the future. We'll be doing a number of these and we look forward to your participation and feedback. Thank you, all right, take care, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. This is theCUBE virtual with VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering VMware. We're not in-person, we're virtual but all the content is flowing. Of course, we're here with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who's been on theCUBE, all 11 years. This year virtual of theCUBE as we've been covering VMware from his early days in 2010 when theCUBE started, 11 years later, Pat, it's still changing and still exciting. Great to see you, thanks for taking the time. >> Hey, you guys are great. I love the interactions that we have, the energy, the fun, the intellectual sparring and of course the audiences have loved it now for 11 years, and I look forward to the next 11 that we'll be doing together. >> It's always exciting 'cause we have great conversations, Dave, and I like to drill in and really kind of probe and unpack the content that you're delivering at the keynotes, but also throughout the entire program. It is virtual this year which highlights a lot of the cloud native changes. Just want to get your thoughts on the virtual aspect, VMworld's not in-person, which is one of the best events of the year, everyone loves it, the great community. It's virtual this year but there's a slew of content, what should people take away from this virtual VMworld? >> Well, one aspect of it is that I'm actually excited about is that we're going to be well over 100,000 people which allows us to be bigger, right? You don't have the physical constraints, you also are able to reach places like I've gone to customers and maybe they had 20 people attend in prior years. This year they're having 100. They're able to have much larger teams also like some of the more regulated industries where they can't necessarily send people to events like this, The International Audience. So just being able to spread the audience much more. A digital foundation for an unpredictable world, and man, what an unpredictable world it has been this past year. And then key messages, lots of key products announcements, technology announcements, partnership announcements, and of course in all of the VMworld is that hands-on labs, the interactions that will be delivering a virtual. You come to VMware because the content is so robust and it's being delivered by the world's smartest people. >> Yeah, we've had great conversations over the years and we've talked about hybrid cloud, I think, 2012. A lot of the stuff I look back at a lot of the videos was early on we're picking out all these waves, but there was that moment four years ago or so, maybe even four three, I can't even remember it seems like yesterday. You gave the seminal keynote and you said, this is the way the world's going to happen. And since that keynote, I'll never forget, was in Moscone and since then, you guys have been performing extremely well both on the business front as well as making technology bets and it's paying off. So what's next, you got the cloud, cloud scale, is it Space, is it Cyber? All these things are going on what is next wave that you're watching and what's coming out and what can people extract out of VMworld this year about this next wave? >> Yeah, one of the things I really am excited about and I went to my buddy Jensen, I said, boy, we're doing this work in smart mix we really like to work with you and maybe some things to better generalize the GPU. And Jensen challenged me. Now usually, I'm the one challenging other people with bigger visions. This time Jensen said, "hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. Let's do the entire AI landscape together, and let's make AI a enterprise class works load from the data center to the cloud and to the Edge. And so I'm going to bring all of my AI resources and make VMware and Tanzu the preferred infrastructure to deliver AI at scale. I need you guys to make the GPUs work like first-class citizens in the vSphere environment because I need them to be truly democratized for the enterprise, so that it's not some specialized AI Development Team, it's everybody being able to do that. And then we're going to connect the whole network together in a new and profound way with our Monterey program as well being able to use the Smart NIC, the DPU, as Jensen likes to call it. So now with CPU, GPU and DPU, all being managed through a distributed architecture of VMware. This is exciting, so this is one in particular that I think we are now re-architecting the data center, the cloud and the Edge. And this partnership is really a central point of that. >> Yeah, the NVIDIA thing's huge and I know Dave probably has some questions on that but I asked you a question because a lot of people ask me, is that just a hardware deal? Talking about SmartNICs, you talk about data processing units. It sounds like a motherboard in the cloud, if you will, but it's not just hardware. Can you talk about the aspect of the software piece? Because again, NVIDIA is known for GPUs, we all know that but we're talking about AI here so it's not just hardware. Can you just expand and share what the software aspect of all this is? >> Yeah well, NVIDIA has been investing in their AI stack and it's one of those where I say, this is Edison at work, right? The harder I work, the luckier I get. And NVIDIA was lucky that their architecture worked much better for the AI workload. But it was built on two decades of hard work in building a parallel data center architecture. And they have built a complete software stack for all the major AI workloads running on their platform. All of that is now coming to vSphere and Tanzu, that is a rich software layer across many vertical industries. And we'll talk about a variety of use cases, one of those that we highlight at VMworld is the University, California, San Francisco partnership, UCSF, one of the world's leading research hospitals. Some of the current vaccine use cases as well, the financial use cases for threat detection and trading benefits. It really is about how we bring that rich software stack. This is a decade and a half of work to the VMware platform, so that now every developer and every enterprise can take advantage of this at scale. That's a lot of software. So in many respects, yeah, there's a piece of hardware in here but the software stack is even more important. >> It's so well we're on the sort of NVIDIA, the arm piece. There's really interesting these alternative processing models, and I wonder if you could comment on the implications for AI inferencing at the Edge. It's not just as well processor implications, it's storage, it's networking, it's really a whole new fundamental paradigm, but how are you thinking about that, Pat? >> Yeah, and we've thought about there's three aspects, what we said, three problems that we're solving. One is the developer problem where we said now you develop once, right? And the developer can now say, "hey I want to have this new AI-centric app and I can develop and it can run in the data center on the cloud or at the Edge." Secondly, my Operations Team can be able to operate this just like I do all of my infrastructure, and now it's VMs containers and AI applications. And third, and this is where your question really comes to bear most significantly, is data gravity. Right, these data sets are big. Some of them need to be very low latency as well, they also have regulatory issues. And if I have to move these large regulated data sets to the cloud, boy, maybe I can't do that generally for my Apps or if I have low latency heavy apps at the Edge, huh, I can't pull it back to the cloud or to my data center. And that's where the uniform architecture and aspects of the Monterey Program where I'm able to take advantage of the network and the SmartNICs that are being built, but also being able to fully represent the data gravity issues of AI applications at scale. 'Cause in many cases, I'll need to do the processing, both the learning and the inference at the Edge as well. So that's a key part of our strategy here with NVIDIA and I do think is going to unlock a new class of apps because when you think about AI and containers, what am I using it for? Well, it's the next generation of applications. A lot of those are going to be Edge, 5G-based, so very critical. >> We've got to talk about security now too. I'm going to pivot a little bit here, John, if it's okay. Years ago, you said security is a do-over, you said that on theCUBE, it stuck with us. But there's been a lot of complacency. It's kind of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but but COVID kind of broke it. And so you see three mega trends, you've got cloud security, you'll see in Z-scaler rocket, you've got Identity Access Management and Octo which I hope there's I think a customer of yours and then you got Endpoint, you're seeing Crowdstrike explode you guys paid 2.7 billion, I think, for Carbon Black, yet Crowdstrike has this huge valuation. That's a mega opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing there? How are you bringing that all together? You've got NSX components, EUC components, you've got sort of security throughout your entire stack. How should we be thinking about that? >> Well, one of the announcements that I am most excited about at VMworld is the release of Carbon Black workload. 'Cause we said we're going to take those carbon black assets and we're going to combine it with workspace one, we're going to build it in NSX, we're going to make it part of Tanzu, and we're going to make it part of vSphere. And Carbon Black workload is literally the vSphere embodiment of Carbon Black in an agent-less way. So now you don't need to insert new agents or anything, it becomes part of the hypervisor itself. Meaning that there's no attack surface available for the bad guys to pursue. But not only is this an exciting new product capability, but we're going to make it free, right? And what I'm announcing at VMworld and everybody who uses vSphere gets Carbon Black workload for free for an unlimited number of VMs for the next six months. And as I said in the keynote, today is a bad day for cyber criminals. This is what intrinsic security is about, making it part of the platform. Don't add anything on, just click the button and start using what's built into vSphere. And we're doing that same thing with what we're doing at the networking layer, this is the last line acquisition. We're going to bring that same workload kind of characteristic into the container, that's why we did the Octarine acquisition, and we're releasing the integration of workspace one with Carbon Black client and that's going to be the differentiator, and by the way, Crowdstrike is doing well, but guess what? So are we, and right both of us are eliminating the rotting dead carcasses of the traditional AV approach. So there's a huge market for both of us to go pursue here. So a lot of great things in security, and as you said, we're just starting to see that shift of the industry occur that I promised last year in theCUBE. >> So it'd be safe to say that you're a cloud native and a security company these days? >> Yeah well, absolutely. And the bigger picture of us is that we're this critical infrastructure layer for the Edge, for the cloud, for the Telco environment and for the data center from every endpoint, every application, every cloud. >> So, Pat, I want to ask you a virtual question we got from the community. I'm going to throw it out to you because a lot of people look at Amazon and the cloud and they say, okay we didn't see it coming, we saw it coming, we saw it scale all the benefits that are coming out of cloud well documented. The question for you is, what's next after cloud? As people start to rethink especially with COVID highlighting and all the scabs out there as people look at their exposed infrastructure and their software, they want to be modern, they want the modern apps. What's next after cloud, what's your vision? >> Well, with respect to cloud, we are taking customers on the multicloud vision, right, where you truly get to say, oh, this workload I want to be able to run it with Azure, with amazon, I need to bring this one on-premise, I want to run that one hosted. I'm not sure where I'm going to run that application, so develop it and then run it at the best place. And that's what we mean by our hybrid multicloud strategy, is being able for customers to really have cloud flexibility and choice. And even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is going super well, we're seeing a real uptick, we're also happy that the Microsoft Azure VMware service is now GA. So there in Marketplace, are Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba partnerships, and the much broader set of VMware Cloud partner programs. So the future is multicloud. Furthermore, it's then how do we do that in the Telco network for the 5G build out? The Telco cloud, and how do we do that for the Edge? And I think that might be sort of the granddaddy of all of these because increasingly in a 5G world, we'll be enabling Edge use cases, we'll be pushing AI to the Edge like we talked about earlier in this conversation, we'll be enabling these high bandwidth low latency use cases at the Edge, and we'll see more and more of the smart embodiment smart city, smart street, smart factory, the autonomous driving, all of those need these type of capabilities. >> Okay. >> So there's hybrid and there's multi, you just talked about multi. So hybrid are data, are data partner ETR they do quarterly surveys. We're seeing big uptick in VMware Cloud on AWS, you guys mentioned that in your call. We're also seeing the VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation and the other elements, clearly a big uptick. So how should we think about hybrid? It looks like that's an extension of on-prem maybe not incremental, maybe a share shift, whereas multi looks like it's incremental but today multi is really running on multiple clouds, but a vision toward incremental value. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah, so clearly, the idea of multi is truly multiple clouds. Am I taking advantage of multiple clouds being my private clouds, my hosted clouds and of course my public cloud partners? We believe everybody will be running a great private cloud, picking a primary public cloud and then a secondary public cloud. Hybrid then is saying, which of those infrastructures are identical, so that I can run them without modifying any aspect of my infrastructure operations or applications? And in today's world where people are wanting to accelerate their move to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is spot-on with their needs. Because if I have to refactor my applications, it's a couple million dollars per app and I'll see you in a couple of years. If I can simply migrate my existing application to the hybrid cloud, what we're consistently seeing is the time is 1/4 and the cost is 1/8 or less. Those are powerful numbers. And if I need to exit a data center, I want to be able to move to a cloud environment to be able to access more of those native cloud services, wow, that's powerful. And that's why for seven years now, we've been preaching that hybrid is the future, it is not a way station to the future. And I believe that more fervently today than when I declared it seven years ago. So we are firmly on that path that we're enabling a multi and hybrid cloud future for all of our customers. >> Yeah, you addressed that like Cube 2013, I remember that interview vividly was not a weigh station I got hammered answered. Thank you, Pat, for clarifying that going back seven years. I love the vision, you always got the right wave, it's always great to talk to you but I got to ask you about these initiatives that you're seeing clearly. Last year, a year and a half ago, Project Pacific came out, almost like a guiding directional vision. It then put some meat on the bone Tanzu and now you guys have that whole cloud native initiative, it's starting to flower up, thousands of flowers are blooming. This year, Project Monterey has announced. Same kind of situation, you're showing out the vision. What are the plans to take that to the next level? And take a minute to explain how Project Monterey, what it means and how you see that filling out. I'm assuming it's going to take the same trajectory as Pacific. >> Yeah, Monterey is a big deal. This is re-architecting the core of vSphere and it really is ripping apart the IO stack from the intrinsic operation of vSphere and the SX itself because in many ways, the IO, we've been always leveraging the NIC and essentially virtual NICs, but we never leverage the resources of the network adapters themselves in any fundamental way. And as you think about SmartNICs, these are powerful resources now where they may have four, eight, 16 even 32 cores running in the SmartNIC itself. So how do I utilize that resource, but it also sits in the right place? In the sense that it is the network traffic cop, it is the place to do security acceleration, it is the place that enables IO bandwidth optimization across increasingly rich applications where the workloads, the data, the latency get more important both in the data center and across data centers, to the cloud and to the Edge. So this re-architecting is a big deal, we announced the three partners, Intel, NVIDIA Mellanox and Pensando that we're working with, and we'll begin the deliveries of this as part of the core vSphere offerings beginning next year. So it's a big re-architecting, these are our key partners, we're excited about the work that we're doing with them and then of course our system partners like Dell and Lenovo who've already come forward and says, "Yeah we're going to to be bringing these to market together with VMware." >> Pat, personal question for you. I want to get your personal take, your career going back to Intel, you've seen it all but the shift is consumer to enterprise and you look at just recently Snowflake IPO, the biggest ever in the history of Wall Street. It's an enterprise data company, and the enterprise is now relevant. The consumer enterprise feels consumery, we talked about consumerization of IT years and years ago. But now more than ever the hottest financial IPO enterprise, you guys are enterprise. You did enterprise at Intel (laughing), you know the enterprise, you're doing it here at VMware. The enterprise is the consumer now with cloud and all this new landscape. What is your view on this because you've seen the waves, have you seen the historical perspective? It was consumer, was the big thing now it's enterprise, what's your take on all this? How do you make sense of it because it's now mainstream, what's your view on this? >> Well, first I do want to say congratulations to my friend, Frank and the extraordinary Snowflake IPO. And by the way they use VMware, so I not only do I feel a sense of ownership 'cause Frank used to work for me for a period of time, but they're also a customer of ours so go Frank, go Snowflake. We're excited about that. But there is this episodic to the industry where for a period of time, it is consumer-driven and CES used to be the hottest ticket in the industry for technology trends. But as you say, it has now shifted to be more business-centric, and I've said this very firmly, for instance, in the case of 5G where I do not see consumer. A faster video or a better Facebook isn't going to be why I buy 5G. It's going to be driven by more business use cases where the latency, the security and the bandwidth will have radically differentiated views of the new applications that will be the case. So we do think that we're in a period of time and I expect that it's probably at least the next five years where business will be the technology drivers in the industry. And then probably, hey there'll be a wave of consumer innovation, and I'll have to get my black turtlenecks out again and start trying to be cool but I've always been more of an enterprise guy so I like the next five to 10 years better. I'm not cool enough to be a consumer guy and maybe my age is now starting to conspire against me as well. >> Hey, Pat I know you got to go but a quick question. So you guys, you gave guidance, pretty good guidance actually. I wonder, have you and Zane come up with a new algorithm to deal with all this uncertainty or is it kind of back to old school gut feel? >> (laughing) Well, I think as we thought about the year, as we came into the year, and obviously, COVID smacked everybody, we laid out a model, we looked at various industry analysts, what we call the Swoosh Model, right? Q2, Q3 and Q4 recovery, Q1 more so, Q2 more so. And basically, we built our own theories behind that, we tested against many analyst perspectives and we had Vs and we had Ws and we had Ls and so on. We picked what we thought was really sort of grounded in the best data that we could, put our own analysis which we have substantial data of our own customers' usage, et cetera and picked the model. And like any model, you put a touch of conservatism against it, and we've been pretty accurate. And I think there's a lot of things we've been able to sort of with good data, good thoughtfulness, take a view and then just consistently manage against it and everything that we said when we did that back in March has sort of proven out incrementally to be more accurate. And some are saying, "Hey things are coming back more quickly" and then, "Oh, we're starting to see the fall numbers climb up a little bit." Hey, we don't think this goes away quickly, there's still a lot of secondary things to get flushed through, the various economies as stimulus starts tailoring off, small businesses are more impacted, and we still don't have a widely deployed vaccine and I don't expect we will have one until second half of next year. Now there's the silver lining to that, as we said, which means that these changes, these faster to the future shifts in how we learn, how we work, how we educate, how we care for, how we worship, how we live, they will get more and more sedimented into the new normal, relying more and more on the digital foundation. And we think ultimately, that has extremely good upsides for us long-term, even as it's very difficult to navigate in the near term. And that's why we are just raving optimists for the long-term benefits of a more and more digital foundation for the future of every industry, every human, every workforce, every hospital, every educator, they are going to become more digital and that's why I think, going back to the last question this is a business-driven cycle, we're well positioned and we're thrilled for all of those who are participating with Vmworld 2020. This is a seminal moment for us and our industry. >> Pat, thank you so much for taking the time. It's an enabling model, it's what platforms are all about, you get that. My final parting question for you is whether you're a VC investing in startups or a large enterprise who's trying to get through COVID with a growth plan for that future. What does a modern app look like, and what does a modern company look like in your view? >> Well, a modern company would be that instead of having a lot of people looking down at infrastructure, the bulk of my IT resources are looking up at building apps, those apps are using modern CICD data pipeline approaches built for a multicloud embodiment, right, and of course VMware is the best partner that you possibly could have. So if you want to be modern cool on the front end, come and talk to us. >> All right, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware here on theCUBE for VMworld 2020 virtual, here with theCUBE virtual great to see you virtually, Pat, thanks for coming on, thanks for your time. >> Hey, thank you so much, love to see you in person soon enough but this is pretty good. >> Yeah. >> Thank you Dave. Thank you so much. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE virtual here for VMworld 2020, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante with Pat Gelsinger, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage VMworld 2020. Brought to you by the VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome to "theCUBE's" virtual coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm John furrier with my cohosts, Stuart Miniman and Dave Vellante. 10 years covering VM it's our 11th Vmworld, 2010 was our first. Guys, this is an unusual event. It's not in person. Analyzing the keynotes and essentially the main announcements in the general sessions. Let's analyze VMworld 2020. I know it's hard, we're not in person. A lot of the hallway conversations we're grabbing on Twitter. Obviously we've got our Cube interviews on "theCube".net. There's a link on the front page of the VMworld site. Check it out and go check out all the dozens of interviews we're doing here with our community. But, the event is "Digital Foundation "For An Unpredictable World," that's the theme. Most of the announcements are around future architecture, but the blocking and tackling is around AI With NVIDIA. You got security and you got some really key announcements around networking Stuart. So guys, what's your take on all this? Because, VMware has to set the table. They've made good moves under Gelsinger, last few years, you're seeing another Q2 successful quarter, Dave, you're starting to see VMware's investments pay off Raghu and the brain child who are behind VMware making these calls Stuart. Guys, this is the VMware's moment to go to the next level. What's your thoughts, Dave, we'll start with you. >> Well, I mean, as always you saw VMware have on stage some really high profile guests. So John Donahoe from Nike, who knows a little bit about the enterprise, right? He left ServiceNow after a couple of years, stint. Ironically ServiceNow is pushing a hundred billion dollar valuation. Nike's at 150. But he's more comfortable in the consumer world. CEO of Nvidia. I think that's a key move, Nvidia the arm acquisition. That's going to be critical at the edge. You're seeing VMware just throw its blanket around telco Edge cloud with VMware cloud and AWS, which is doing very well. We're going to talk about that in our cube segment. You're, seeing them really go after hybrid. And so they're really about expanding their marketplace and they've done a great job of that. For translating engineering into customer value and getting paid for it. >> I want to come back to you Dave, on this edge because some of the key trends that I think we've been on now that the whole world is kind of realizing that they're kind of going mainstream. One's been the edge and you mentioned ARM, and we got analysis on that. Stuart, cloud native, we've been banging on the cloud native drone. We've been riding that wave, now with the Snowflake IPO just happened earlier, you starting to see cloud native, everything is coming true. It's kind of evolving in front of us right now and the whole world is now on board with this new mega trend enterprise computing companies, the largest IPO, since we enrolled, actually if you look at Snowflake, so you start to see cloud native and Enterprise Technology as the next wave, this is huge. And VMware is a big part of it. Your thoughts from how they did the show. >> Yeah, so John, one of the questions we always ask is, how fast are customers moving? Are the vendors moving along with them? Our friend and often co-hosts in "theCube" Keith Townsend said, and it was kind of faint praise. "VMware has moved at the speed of the CIO." Dave, I've heard you so many times this year say that the impact of the pandemic, that the financial ramifications has been an accelerator for many of the transformational journeys that we've been talking about. Move to cloud much faster adopting cloud native faster. Companies that have gone through their digital transformation, are able to react much faster. And to be honest, I'm not sure that VMware's moving fast enough. We've seen them do a number of big acquisitions over the last few years. Some of them are doing great. Carbon Black, great to see them go deeper into the security space. We've talked a lot about that before. Some of the others, Pivotal came out of VMware and got pulled back in. Datrium was a recent acquisition. What we hear inside is, some of those groups and product lines have been trimmed back. So as companies are looking to move faster, they're looking to AWS is that bar. And while AWS is a big partner for VMware and very important, how many people will get to VMware on AWS and say, well, maybe I can scale back what my VMware state is, or maybe those some environments. So, we've said for the longest time, cloud is a double edged sword for many players you need to partner as closely as you can to keep that momentum going forward. But VMware is also getting cut by some of those deals. Boy, John, there was a big news a couple of weeks before the show here about how the VMware cloud on AWS, it's doing great. And if it's a big deal, the channel often gets cut out of it and Amazon's taking it. So there definitely are some things that put up a little bit warning lights for me as to who is winning, when it comes to the partnership. >> That's a great point, the ecosystem in VMware, out of 10 years we've been covering here, this is our 11th year with ""theCube"," we've always had that ecosystems evolving. And I think cloud native to me really sees how that's driving them with cloud. We saw that, serverless, you starting to see cloud native. And what cloud proved Dave was that developers really shouldn't care about the infrastructure being abstracted away. But now you look at multiple clouds, with VMware's now moving into having a multicloud kind of backbone, connected to these environments as a key strategy. But then you look at the edge. The edge is about purpose built devices, run with software and data. So whether it's at an office on a person or in space, you have these devices that is really not about the hardware, it's about the software running on them. They have to run into multiple environments. They are purpose built. They do have to run like cloud native. The edge is the next opportunity for VMware with multicloud. What's your thoughts and reaction to that? >> Well, I think there's no question. And again, the relevance of Nvidia on stage, we think that ARM and Nvidia are going to dominate AI inferencing at the edge real time, and you're going to need much more efficient processing at the edge than you're going to get with traditional x86 architectures. So today what we're seeing is a lot of companies, Dell, HPE included a throwing over x86 boxes to the edge. I think they clearly realized that ARM is going to be a player there and now with the Nvidia move. And I think, multicloud is really something that is starting to become real. I've often said multi-cloud has been more of a symptom of multi-vendor than an actual strategy. Well, that's changing. I think people don't want lock-in. I think they realize that they've got the right horse for the right course, and you're seeing Red Hat and VMware emerge as real leaders there. You're seeing it in the data, you're seeing VMware cloud on AWS. Okay, that's in AWS, but you're also seeing VMware Cloud Foundation and it's other VMware cloud capabilities emerging as in demand, a lot of spending velocity, a lot of interest gaining share. And so these are becoming real and they're becoming fundamental strategies as to your points Stuart, CIO's are catching up. And it's, actually becoming not just slideware, but real aware. >> Well, I'll debate that whole idea that CIO's are catching up, but I'd say CSOs already caught up. CIO's are catching up to the CSO, but this brings up the question Stuart, of what a modern app is. And this is one of the highlights of the show, modern applications, and feels a lot like kind of window dressing to the cloud native conversation because Tanzu is built into it but cloud native really is. This is where the modern apps are being built. And it's about security, it's about multiple clouds. So the question for you is, are we going to have a cloudless architecture? Because we've got serverless. Because if you think about modern apps, should you really care about which cloud it runs on? I'm sure Andy Jassy would be saying he does care. And you see Google almost shying away from having that conversation. But, Tanzu kind of speaks to a cloudless strategy. Is that something you see? >> John you're absolutely right. The goal we want is... Developers don't even want to think about the infrastructure at all. So cloudless serverless, storageless, it would all be wonderful if they didn't have to do that. Now, of course, data is the lifeblood of my business. We need to make sure that things are secure all the time. Serverless is wonderful and there's even some early connections that VMware and others in the traditional infrastructure space are tying to serverless environment. But if I look at VMware, John, this still isn't, where the app dev team people come, this is an infrastructure show and it needs to be an enabler for what they're doing. If you look at how Kubernetes integrates into VMware, it's, take your virtual estate and let's put containers in it and it can be managed in that environment. Or we've got some new tools we're developing and do some of that multicloud world, as opposed to the companies that are born in the cloud, or have a heavy leaning towards the cloud. This might not be attractive for them, but in many ways, it's extending what VMware has done for a long time. They've, got strong position here. And that's why John, as you've said, all the other clouds want to partner with VMware ' 'cause they've got just so many customers there that they will be... it's hybrid today it will be hybrid in the future. The public cloud is a pool, but the edge is also a pool. So that those new architectures like are starting to be put forward with project Monterey, give people a roadmap as to where they can go. And VMware absolutely is a key player in that discussion. >> Yeah, well, I want to bring this up real quick on project Monterey and then I want to get Dave's reaction too what the buyers are thinking about. 'Cause you know, we can debate the speed of the CIO and I'd love to have that debate in a separate segment. I think,COVID and the security threats are forcing the businesses to really be focused because if you not thinking about having an environment where people are working remotely and that's with COVID, and I'll see with the security vectors, if you don't have an architecture Stuart, then you're going to be screwed. So I think project Monterey feels to me as that VMware answer like, look, and you can have an end to end architecture. I think there's marketechure there's architecture, that's one thought. So let's react to that Stuart. How much of that do you see as, look at, if you want to move faster CIO, because they have to now move fast. COVID showed that and the ones that aren't are failing and it doesn't change the buyer behavior, Dave. Stuart we'll start with you Monterey. >> John I don't think we know yet. It is more marketecture I'd say you got to get into the whisper suites, have those discussions. There was not as much, pre-briefing on this. We talked for awhile, VMware on AWS, those solutions, they take two or three years to bake out. So I think Monterey is a good vision. They have some of the architectural underpinnings, but I'm not ready to say, "hey, you want to deploy that gear in 2020? "That's the blueprint that you want to use going forward," but it gets VMware a seat at the table. >> I'm a big fan of the project I think it's about time someone put a stake in the ground. So this is what a modern architecture looks like and love to debate that further, we'll do that another time, Dave buyers. Were they buying the VMware? What's your data tell you in terms of where the customers are right now in 2020, you've been doing a ton of breaking analysis on COVID fire behavior, spending patterns. How does VMware potentially its ecosystem stack up with all these focused cloud native, multicloud modern app and security and networking? >> Well, let's start with some data and I'll bring up this slide, which is this kind of wheel slide. And it's ETR data that talks to what we call net score. And essentially what it's doing is it's taking the green in this wheel, which is spending more and it's subtracting the red, which is spending less or leaving. And then you see that in the middle is 53% are flat. So they've got a net score at 29. What does that mean? That means this is a mature company, which is amazing to me that VMware continues to really outperform from a financial standpoint. Yeah, so you could see that, we subtract the red from the green. This is again a sign of a mature company, but the key is they've got to continue to invest. Now they make a lot of inorganic acquisitions and some organic acquisitions, but Dell, as we know, is using VMware's cashflow to restructure its balance sheet to go public, et cetera. So if you could bring up the next slide, if you would guys. This is a slide I like to share. And it shows in the vertical axis, spending momentum, which is net score and the horizontal axis, which is presence in the survey. It's a 1200 person survey or a respondent survey, IT buyers. Look where VMware cloud on AWS is. So while VMware has a 29%, net score, look at VMware cloud on AWS, look at VMware cloud, which is cloud foundation. And you can see Red Hat is in there with OpenShift, even OpenStack, believe it or not and telcos. And then just see the hyperscalers in the upper right. Everybody wants to be AWS or Azure, and you sort of see Google there. But the point of this is the momentum in hybrid cloud and multicloud, and VMware really is clearly in a very, very strong position there. So, back to your point about project Monterey, they're basically using this hybrid cloud notion to go everywhere. It's that TAM expansion that I love to talk about. And it's the innovation. The big question is if Dell's going to be squeezing VMware R&D, will it be able to continue to execute on that translation of engineering into product and customer value? That's going to be a challenge. We saw it decades ago, where IBM got squeezed doing stock buybacks and dividends R&D is the lifeblood of innovation. And so that's something that we have to watch very closely, I think. >> Just to one quick followup, Dave, we're talking about the financial pieces here we are in 2020, there's been the discussions and I know you've dug into it a bunch. By the time we get to VMworld 2021 will the ownership of VMware and the role that Michael Dell has, change? And will that impact that investment capability that you talked about? The cashflow just, I know you've done a lot of research on this and could it help educate our audience? >> Well, it's going to change the income statement of Dell because they won't have VMware in there anymore. It won't change VMware's cashflow. It will affect VMware and Dell's balance sheet. And so two companies, one chairman and the chairman is going to say, okay, let's rebalance the balance sheets and create an equilibrium. So Dell has less debt, VMware has more debt and we'll try to thread the needle so they're both investment grade, which will lower the interest costs on that debt. But fundamentally, I don't think it's going to change anything in terms of strategy, go to market, the close relationship was between Dell and VMware. the thing to watch is VMware's, Dell's piggyback. And so I would rather see a lot of that go... once this equilibrium is reached, I want to see that go more in R&D. You know, again, remember IBM has spent $6 billion in R&D for the past two decades IBM was right there. They could have invested in cloud the same way Amazon did. And in the same way that Microsoft did, they were kind of equal 20 years ago. And look what happened. You don't want that to happen to VMware. They must continue to spend on R&D and innovate. >> Oh, well let's get to the innovation strategy in a second, but I want to ask the ecosystem question, because if you go back in history guys, and remember when Pat Gelsinger had that year, where he was basically given the presentation of his life, and he was in the hot seat and there's a lot of rumors spinning around. Since then it's just been nothing but exceptional performance on as a company executing, all new bets have been played it's almost like he'd cleaned house, put the ship in the right direction they've been smooth sailing since strategically making all the right moves. Okay now that VMware is back on their footings and Dave they have a solid foundation, what happens to the ecosystem because now that their houses in order, what do they do with the ecosystem? How do you see it evolving? >> Well look, I mean the ecosystem is looking for alternatives. I mean they have to participate in VMware. It's part of their go to market. You remember Todd Neilson used to say, "For every dollar spend on a VMware license, "15 or 20 or $18 is spent in the ecosystem," you don't hear that type of ratio anymore. Maybe it still exists I'm sure it does because it's a very vibrant and robust ecosystem but look, let's face it. Jeff Clark and Michael Dell are very clear. We are going to do a much closer integration than EMC ever did. And look at HPE we're looking for alternatives, driving to the edge. That's a huge opportunity for people. VMware becomes the ecosystems cash cow, but they need new growth and new strategic opportunities. And so they got to play nice, but there's more green fields out there. >> Stuart multicloud and cloud native with Tansu I think this is a really big opportunity to reset the ecosystem with services, because it used to be vendors, you bolt on some data backup and recovery, and you have a bunch of people doing storage around VMware, and these big white spaces, they're kind of huge white spaces. But now, when you start getting into cloud native, is a whole new landscape developing. Your thoughts because we're seeing some activity, certainly companies that are building on top of clouds that are building on top of clouds. So you've got Snowflake builds on Amazon now, other clouds and you have companies building on Snowflake. So you're starting to see this kind of new interconnected cloud native landscape, your thoughts. >> Yeah, well John there's definitely a huge tug of war in the ecosystem. One of the things that's been really nice if you were a VMware partner, let's take data protection. Huge ecosystem companies like Veeam, that were created in that environment. Hot companies like Rubrik and Cohesity grew very much working in VMware. All of them now play natively with the cloud environments, but they also get pulled along when you do a VMware Cloud on AWS, on Azure, on Google, on Oracle. So VMware will pull some of the ecosystem with them, but that tug of war is well, if the customer decides to just go fully cloud native, that software needs to work there and you would think that the vendor actually makes more money if it's just natively there, there's not that middleman extra piece. So VMware has a slice the pie and like Microsoft or Oracle behind them, can they justify that value for the license that you're paying when I go to some of these environments. So VMware does not have the pull in the ecosystem Dave talked a bit about it. HPE, Cisco, IBM, all companies that were early, early big huge proponent of VMware now very much are investing heavily in alternative. So VMware major player but no longer the gravity that everyone orbits around. >> Dave, what do you think? >> I want to bring up another data point if I could I want to share something with you. This is a slide that talks about... It asks customers. Why would you not work with VMware? Why would you replace them? What are the reasons? And three things stand out to me, it's not around cloud on the very left alignment with Cloud they've taken care of that with the AWS deal and even now Oracle. And you look at the right hand side, you see technology lead or lag that's innovation. Look at how that gray a couple surveys ago, has gone down to the yellow. So that's off the table, not a problem with innovation, look at total cost of ownership that's gone down, in terms of concerns. The one concern is price and that stays up there. If that's your biggest challenge, that your price is too high, that says to me that VMware's ticking all the boxes of value. So they're in a really, really good position if they can continue to innovate and that's why I've been harping so much on innovation and R&D and key acquisitions they're are great acquire of companies. So, I see this as this data is very, very positive for VMware. If your price is too high and that's your big objection, all you need as good salespeople. >> Or also you'd lower the price and you shift the value to say new features, say cloud native or security. I'll see the movement they've been making with NSX Gelsinger famous quotes are things like, "Kubernetes the dial tone of the internet, "and NSX is the crown jewel security is a do over." So NSX Dave and Stuart, this been a big part of their theme every year. That's a core feature for their security play. That's where they're going to put a lot of value in there. You guys, what's your thoughts on that because you've got Cisco in going that " mh we're frenemies" that's what Sanjay Poonen says, but are they really frenemies? >> But culturally VMware is an engineering driven company they a great engineering team and they don't have dogma about these new... they don't get defensive about some new trends. They embraced Kubernetes, they finally figured out Cloud, they were sort of defensive originally, but they realized hey, and they got religion. So that's the smart thing to do, go on to the next way maybe take a little bit of heat if you've got to go through a transition, but they've done a phenomenal job of making those transitions and staying relevant >> What's the big wave guys? What's the big wave that VMware's riding? The 10 years out we're in we've seen the movie, we've been through a decade with VM world coverage Stuart Dave next 10 years, what's the big wave or waves plural? >> Well, cloud is the first one that they addressed no doubt and then they are in my mind, the leader, or certainly a leader in multicloud. Edge I think there's a big question Mark there, AI is going to be everywhere. I think security is the really interesting opportunity for VMware and it's going to be... the big battle and security is, do you go after these point products like Okta and CrowdStrike and Zscaler and SailPoint who are really doing very well right now in the market or do you want an integrated stack that can be, you good enough VMware will say it's best to breed. We'll see that is a huge opportunity for them because security just keeps getting more and more critical. We've seen that with COVID. >> Let's do final word on your thoughts on the next 10 years for VMware looking back and learn and looking forward. >> Yeah well Dave just building off what you were just saying there, we said that the mission for Pat Gelsinger was, could he do for VMware, what Indel had done for the longest time, which has expanded Tam, expand what markets to go into, but not completely tick off the ecosystem and have them run away. So you saw here at the show, I mean Dave, Zscaler is a partner there. Security absolutely is a monster opportunity and John networking, networking, right. But it should be multibillion dollar business for VMware and they can eat some of that multicloud environment. we talk specifically about SD-WAN, now that cloud's doing well. So VMware that's software across environments, hybrid cloud multicloud, they're well positioned today, they just need to move a little bit faster and make sure they don't bleed talent and continue to support their customers because Dave, you're right how many times have people said, "Microsoft too expensive. "Oracle's too expensive." Here we are in 2020, they still have pretty strong positions VMware still has a very strong position. >> Well, I'll just add, I think it just shows what happens when you have a technical visionary, like Gelsinger in the lead and you have an industry visionary of not just technical, not just financial, but industry luminary like Michael Dell. These are very powerful... VMware and Dell have extremely capable management teams and you're seeing it in action >> And you've got Sanjay Poonen who's a great executer as well, he knows how to execute, he knows technology. Guys it's been a great run. I got to say for me personally, I'm so excited that, for 10 years that we've had "theCube" and the team covering the enterprise tech space, you can't be more excited. At least I'm so excited at the number one IPO in the history of wall street is an enterprise tech company. You can't see any more proof points that enterprise technology is now with the whole end to end architecture with the edge. We're talking about space, we're talking about cybersecurity. We're having now conversations with "theCube" that is now ranging... It reminds me David of the B to C world it's almost like consumerized. Now the enterprise technology is now so important that is now taking over the appeal on wall street entrepreneurs, and to me, VMware can tap into that on this next wave and this will be huge. Your thoughts on- >> I think the Snowflake IPO tells us several things. One, I totally agree, it says the technology is the now trend, no question about it. It also really underscores the cloud and it underscores the demand for issues other than the big Apple, Amazon, Google, et cetera. But it's really interesting to see as well the street continues to reward growth. I mean, Snowflake has as a valuation higher than Workday comparable to VMware. In fact it exceeded VMware on its first day. So that says that the street is rewarding growth. It's rewarding technology, it's rewarding cloud. And so that's that to me says great opportunities for companies like VMware who have both growth, great cash flow, they're profitable and they have a huge, huge customer base. So right now things look good for tech >> Dave enterprise tech is hot, it's sexy. Don't you think? Enterprise tech these days? >> Used to be storage is sexy. Now Enterprise tech sexy. >> You guys great run great analysis again, VMworld's virtual, we didn't have the face to face. We didn't have the hang space, but we have the virtual cube. Virtualization has come to "theCube". We have multiple tracks on our site, check out the content. Thanks for the analysis guys. Great keynote announcement coverage of the Vmworld 2020. This is "theCube". Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Vmworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCube's 11th year of VMworld. Here we are in 2020 of course, rather than being together at the moscone or at the sand. We're coming to you in your place of work or home when you're watching video, happy to welcome back. We have two of our long time guests on the program. First we have Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President of Product Management with Dell Technologies and joining him is Lee Caswell who's the Vice President of Product Storage and Availability Business unit at VMware, Lee and Travis, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Steve, it's good to see you again. >> All right, so we love kind of the maturation of what's happened. I mentioned 11 years, I get to usually sit down and talk with both of you, we talk about strategy we talk about how customers, and at the end of the day, we know things are changing. Like 2020 things are changing more every day, but one of the big transitions here is talking about that, how applications are changing. In the old days it was hey, I have an application, let me just stick it in a VM and it's going to be good there forever. We know that today I need to be able to react fast, I need to move things forward. And that impacts what VMware and Dell are doing together. So hey Lee, if maybe we come with you give the VMware perspective on that application changing and what that means to there and Travis feel free to chime in when Lee's done. >> Sure. >> Yeah thanks so much Steve and great to have to be back here on theCube. And VMworld is always a great opportunity to talk about how the industry is changing. What's really happening here and so one of the things that we're all finding is that the pace of application change is speeding up. And you know what, I mean you think about infrastructure. We want to think about how you can organize around the fastest changing element. This is one of the things we kicked off with project Pacific and our Tanzu portfolio a year ago. And you're starting to see all the products come roaring through right now as we're integrating Kubernetes. So that container based applications can be managed, secured, protected, just the same way with all the same tools that we have with our traditional VM applications. >> Yeah it's an excellent point. I mean, we are seeing the adoption of the modern applications in VMware environments, just accelerate beyond belief. And we're getting increasing requests from our customers to protect, to manage production workloads in Kubernetes environments and with our power protect data manager. Yeah we're actually announcing that we have all support for the Tanzu portfolio. So that includes TKG TKGI, Kubernetes Clusters, Kubernetes Clusters, and vSphere. So we're really excited to be able to offer this capability to our joint customers. And I think one thing that we're seeing is that the roles in IT are oftentimes blending together. So one of the things we're excited about with our solution is that with our direct data protection integration and vSphere environments. It's actually the be admin that can provision, monitor, manage, and protect the Kubernetes workloads, give unified experience and provide that peace of mind in this next generation world. >> Yeah Travis I'm glad you brought up some of those changing roles. I mean, that was such a big theme for so many years as the Virtualization Admin taking on more responsibility. And Lee teed up the changing application, you've got other roles coming together. You've got the application development team, which often times is disconnected from the infrastructure team. So, from either of you just what are you seeing from your customers? How are they sorting through that? I need to move agile, I need to move faster and that's not traditionally how the infrastructure team has worked. >> Things that we've been working on for example is how we've integrated SRM with vVols and PowerMax. And when you think about that, and we've talked for years right about the vVols for example. What we're responding to now is that customers are coming back and saying, listen, I have HCI, but I also have storage system and I need your help to go and be able to manage these with a consistent operating model and the same team. And that career path for the Virtualization Administrator just continues to grow. They're adding now five native applications, Kubernetes Orchestrated Applications, and being able to manage those across traditional storage and newer HCI systems. This is a really interesting blend of where the companies are working together to make sure that customer responses are being addressed really quickly. >> Yeah, it's a great example Lee. I mean, if you think about Three-tier architecture and PowerMax being the flagship of the heart of a lot of data centers that have been in operation for decades, the fact that we're seeing from our customers, hey, can you take a SRM and vVols, Can you integrate it with PowerMax and SRDF and be able to provide me a step along the way on my modernization journey? Such that I can utilize what I've built up my IT operations about around over the last couple of decades along with the newer deployment models like Hyper-converged infrastructure. And we're seeing that kind of that step forward and a blurring of the lines in terms of roles all over the place. I think another good example Lee is Cloud Native App Dev, right? And customers looking object, S3 object storage capability to provide a simple dev apps friendly way of, developing applications and hybrid cloud environments. And that's why we're really happy that we're able to provide early access for what we refer to as object scale, which works in conjunction with the vSAN Data persistence Platform to allow our customers to deliver modern applications. But at the same time use infrastructure that the IT organization is deploying, for other standard applications. I think that's another good example. >> It's a good point we had blocks through VSand of course right? And added files, what was missing well objects. (laughing) And so... >> Exactly >> We're already together with this persistent storage platform. We've got a way to go on basically supply object scale, object scale storage that can be used for Cloud Native Development. And I think this is a good example, right? This isn't just one hand clapping, right? This is both companies working together to make sure that customers have a seamless experience. That's really important. It doesn't come for granted, right? I mean it really takes co-engineering, joint testing and developing and go-to market together between our companies. I've never seen it working better. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead Stuart. >> I know Travis I was just saying, we saw how fast VMware went from announcing project Pacific to the GA of the base solution where you needed the cloud foundation to update one already allowing everything to move open. That's going to be a little bit challenging to keep up with that pace of innovation. We've been talking for years on the queue, but we went from the 18 month release cycle to now, most things are like a six week release cycle. So, give us through any other pieces that were portfolio we need to understand the fitting with Tanzu and yeah. How do you move things along and where are the customers with their adoption? Are they sitting there waiting for it, or is this something that is going to be a more traditional enterprise slow roll? >> No I think you hit it spot on Stu the adoption and the deployments of these new architectures are coming very, very quickly, right? Traditional IT is trying to and in many cases successfully moving to a more cloud-like delivery CI/CD approach to how they run their shops and the speed of innovation and the speed and the dynamics of new technologies within the data centers are just, accelerating at a really fast pace. And in order to continue to keep up with these changes, it's I'll reflect back on a little bit on what Lee was talking about. It's understanding where customers are going and jointly working together to target those pain points. And I'll give a very specific example. And then I think maybe Lee, we should start to talk a little bit about Monterey as well, but I'll say a very specific example on joint innovation is, as customers have deployed VMware more broadly and they put more mission, critical large applications on VM, there's been sort of this persistent issue that some of those VMs just were so large or required such high availability, that they were what some IT professionals would refer to as unprotectable. And so we're actually demonstrating with VMware innovation that allows those VMs, those large mission critical Vms that can take zero downtime or even a pause in availability or performance, the ability to take backups without impacting the performance on those VMs. So, that's a very specific thing we're doing, a very specific pin point, but I think it's an example of us working together to target customer customer needs. And then I think more broadly, there's a big trend in composability that part talked a little bit about this morning Project Monterey I'll let Lee kick it off and then kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing to partner with VMware on this initiative. >> Yeah, well great. I definitely want to hear Monterey obviously, edge computing has everybody excited. Travis we've been hearing from the Dell team the last couple of years is that strategy's muttering some of the investment pieces that Dell's doing. So Lee, we hear edge computing. What does that mean? VMware has got a strong telco play that we've watched, for many years. So, just as you said Project Pacific rolled out pretty fast, help us understand a bit more of this Monterey and how fast will this turn into that cascade of products that you talked about for that we sell the last year. >> Yeah thanks, and it's exciting at VMware, right? We're willing to go and share a projects. Overtime project to become products, it's the way it works. And so the project is really a directional vision that says, if you think about what we did with Project Pacific a year ago, and Pacific being like going broad. The idea was applications are changing, we needed to go and basically make Kubernetes integrated with these sphere, with our full VMware Cloud Foundation, and then basically simplify it for customer consumption, and we did that together with the Tanzu brand. Now, Project Monterey, if you think of the Monterey Canyon is now going deep. And what it says is that not only the software architecture has to change, but also hardware, new hardware capabilities, particularly through the use of Smart NICs are a new way for us to think about re-architecting, how compute is basically optimized within a server and then across clusters and even across the hybrid cloud. And so Monterey will be a new way to look at how we go in efficiently offload CPUs and use these new Smart NIC offload engines as a way to think about where hypervisors run, where let's call it software defined, whether it's storage or compute. And most importantly and probably is security. 'Cause one of the things we're finding that applications new applications are demanding is encryption for example or distributed firewalls thinking about like how do we do that secure boot or how do we think about air gapping applications from the infrastructure? And so we're really thinking about how to re-architect the world of security. So the security is integrally distributed throughout an architecture. And so you'll be seeing with Project Monterey our ability to go and drive new products out of that and we're working very closely on an engineering to engineering level with Dell Technologies to make sure this new technology becomes available for customers and fully integrated in the VMware Cloud Foundation. So we have an easy way for customers to digest it which I think that's the thing Stuart right now is there's a lot of new technologies coming so fast, really their partnership means that we're able to consume those more quick. >> Wonderful, yeah Monterey so we're going to go deeper than the grand canyon is deep, but I guess we need to all a breathe under water too. So Travis, as I mentioned, Dell's had for a couple of years, some of these analysts sessions that I've had the opportunity to go through, been watching out that growth of the edge strategy, obviously Dell has everything from some of the hardened pieces on the consumer side, through tying into broad ecosystems. So the software obviously is going to be a huge component of what edges we saw in the keynote stage and video, a big partnership they're obviously a huge important partner for both Dell and VMware. So Travis, from the Dell side, what does this vision of Monterey mean? >> It's extremely important, I'd say transformational potentially for IT going forward and Lee did a really good job of describing the trends, whether that be cloud native Telco 5G, machine learning and data-centric applications, multicloud, and hybrid cloud and that security concern that Lee was talking about. Those are our real trends, and if we can offer infrastructure that is more composable into these dis-aggregated resources, across the edge, across the cloud, across the core, all software defined and seamlessly managed. I mean, that's a powerful vision. And we're just really excited to be partnering with VMware, jointly engineering this future focusing first on those Smartnecks that Lee was talking about because you need that higher compute, you need that increased bandwidth. You need easier manageability of a distributed infrastructure, and you need that ability to provide easier and more distributed security. So lots more to come, we will be incorporating these technologies specifically in the form of Smartnecks into our HCI and our server portfolio. But this like Lee said, this is a trend that will move from initiative to project to products very quickly. >> Wonderful, well we covered that breadth in that depth as you said Lee. Want to give you both just final takeaways, what you want people to take from Vmworld 2020 Lee we'll start with you and then Travis you get the final word. >> Yeah, we're really looking at a changing world in terms of applications. And so for customers around the globe, look for the partnerships that will bring those new capabilities and make it easy to go and deploy as fast as possible. We started off making sure that people weren't looking down at the infrastructure and started looking up at the apps. We're continuing that process with what we're doing around Tanzu, around our Kubernetes portfolio and stay tuned there'll be more to come, much more as we work together on Project Monterey, lots of exciting news and glad that you were here from VMworld to go and see it all of the light. >> Yeah, I think I obviously agree with everything that Lee just said. I think for me the this VMworld is just, another step forward in a great partnership across Dell technologies and VMware. And I mentioned several things, all of the things that we're doing together I forgot to mention actually that we're the first company to be, to offer a certified solution to protect VMworld Cloud Foundations which I use that specific example again expect more first, expect more joint in engineering and integrations. And I think the power of these two organizations coming together is what's going to be needed to help drive forward into this next generation of modern applications and dynamic workloads and dis-aggregated resources. And so we're just really excited about the innovation, the ability to address customer issues and the strong partnership that we have across Dell technologies and VMworld. >> Well, one of the measurements six that we have today is how fast everyone can respond and move fast. Congratulations on all the progress you've both made in your teams in the last year. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about Project Monterey as that matures. Travis and Lee, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks to you. >> Thanks to you. >> All right, and stay tuned for more coverage of VMworld 2020, I'm Stuart Miniman and as always. Thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online. Of course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we were getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote I'm sure most of you saw, Simon Kofkin-Hansen, chief technology officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so you know, obviously we know IBM quite well. We at theCUBE at you know, the virtual events, both RedHat Summit and IBM Think not too long in the past there. Talking a lot about you know, the open hybrid cloud many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments you know, it, multicloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we, you know, need to of course you know, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about you know, your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with Cloud. >> So Stu, yeah, I'm the chief technology officer of IBM, of Veeam solutions on the IBM cloud. Primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically, I'm providing automated solutions for our clients. Automated, secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. >> Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there, maybe you might remind our audience you know, I remember at VMWorld, before there was a big partnership, that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw you know, correctly, I'd love for you to be able to provide the data behind it. There are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe is the data I saw, I think. So bring us in little bit more, explain that relationship. >> So yes, we were, as IBM, beginning of all of this, I mean VMware and IBM have had a long relationship. And in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on-prems, and have done for the last 10+ years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and our codified experience from dealing with these, our client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product side to align this automated stdc stack on cloud platforms. And first to market with that automated stdc stack called VMware Cloud Foundation. First to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. >> All right well Simon, one of the most important pieces of that, you know, VMware stdc message is that I have VMware, I know how, I manage that environment, and it's got a really robust ecosystem, so, of course Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but you know the comment I've made on some of these interviews for VeeamON is, wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, Veeam could just go along for the ride, really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for you know, solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware is doing, and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. >> Well particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best products that's out there. Which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in this particular space. Obviously we chose Veeam for backup. I mean Veeam's reputation out there's the backup, it's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem. And it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning. Getting the backup products out into our platform and as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. >> Yeah, so Simon, you're a CTO, so bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even you know having to move my data between you know different data centers, you know there are, you know, the physics challenges, and you know sometimes I can, you know, get closer, I can (microphone cuts out) through there, and then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that, what is data movement in 2020, you know, what considerations do we have to have here, and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? >> So I'll answer your first question, I'll answer some of the last questions first. What does data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents what is used in an on-premises state, over in the cloud, enabling Veeam, or people who have existing investments in Veeam, to use that tooling for multiple different use cases. Not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back in 2010. I feel as though, I look at that, it's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data. But I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IMB perspective is I would say, is our openness, and our, how we're dealing with the openness in the community, and our commitment to open source. Our flexibility, our security, and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core. Actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure their data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us and particularly when we look at the regulated industries with their heavy focus on the financial services sector. And Veeam, with its capabilities and its ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two-for-one deal, in these days when they're trying to cut costs, and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. >> Excellent. Well, Simon, you know you laid out really the imperative for enterprises, you know today and how they're dealing with that, bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM-Veeam relationship versus just IBM is open and flexible, so there are a lot of options. You know what particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? >> Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers. But maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, back up and DR, because of the heavy data requirements are still one of the most important if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam, in not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers, and bare metal, by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vise-versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance, and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand, and keeping both client sets happy, both IBM and Veeam. It's challenging at times, but I guess it's what makes the job interesting and exciting. >> Yeah Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course from Veeam's standpoint, when vSphere 7 rolls out, that they are being supported in you know one of the first work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect, as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together. What should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progresses? >> So I would absolutely watch this space. Particularly as we move into this. Containers and VMs living very much side-by-side. With VMware's announcements around Project Pacific and tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly a furor around the market. And we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of RedHat and its containerization platform. All while maintaining our ability in the OpenShift community around Kubernetes. So Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle but just to say that, watch this space. There's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the carburetions between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape-- (mic cuts out) interesting times ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe you're right, don't want to get you in trouble as looking too much into the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having lots of conversations with customers, what's their mindset, you talked about, you know, there's bare metals, virtualization, containers, you know application modernization, I've always said the long haul of the dent in any transformation and modernization (mic stutters) doing, so you know, 'cause some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? >> So some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization (mic stutters) is taking a lot longer and its taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications, or all their VMs over a six or 12-month period, is just not reality. So we're living in this hybrid platform way, where you have VMware, you have virtual machines, and containers coexisting. Certain parts of the application, namely the, if I take the three-tier web app as an example, consisting of a http server, an application server, and a database. When you containerize that, or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the http server, which turns into the ingress/egress servers on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server, which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So what many enterprises the data migration, or the way that the database is transformed, is the thing that takes the longest. So we're seeing out there in the enterprises people who are running their apps both with the ingress/egress service, the application server container containerized, but the database still living on a virtual machine, for a extended period of time. And until that made the final jump or chone their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime VMs will actually disappear. Because we're seeing that in some cases it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing process. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized, and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So having tools and partners like Veeam, who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms, is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have. Like the one we have with Veeam. >> All right well Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims, you know, is IT always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything, we just keep adding to it and changing it and as you said, data is that critical component and I think you highlighted nicely how you know, Veeam fits in you know, very much for that story. So Simon, thank you so much for joining us, pleasure having you on the program, glad to have you in theCUBE alumni ranks at this point. >> Thank you Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. >> All right stay tuned for lots more coverage from VeeamON 2020 online, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome to "theCUBE"'s coverage of HPE Discover, 2020, The virtqual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Of course this year, we're getting to talk to HPE, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe. We've said many times this, we're together even while we're apart, having to dig into a really important partnership with HPE and VMware. Welcome into the program, first time guest on the program, Krista Satterthwaite. She is the Vice President of Product Management for Compute, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and welcome back to the program. Lee Caswell, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing for hyper converged infrastructure, at VMware. Of course, we're talking about vSphere and how that gets bundled into everything else. Krista and Lee, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so, Krista, let's start with you. So, I'd like to know a little bit about your background. And of course, the the HP and HPE relationship with VMware, goes back to, the earliest days, but give us a little bit about, where in the portfolio you focus on and how VMware fits in. >> Oh, sure, sure. So I've been with HPE for 24 years now. And I'm leading the business for Alliance and Synergy. And talking a little bit about the relationship with VMware. So we've been partnering for 19 years, and we have over 200, 000 joint customers together. And I'm actually often asked about the partnership and how we partner, and we really partner across all fronts. So it's from the innovation, to the CO engineering, to working with specific customers on what solutions are good for them to servicing our customers. So we're really working across the board and a lot of customers we work with closely, are really impressed with how closely we're working together because that's what they look for. >> And and Lee it's an interesting relationship to watch, obviously, the long history Krista talked about on the Compute side. But the VMware HPE partnership is more than just the Compute, maybe give us a little bit of a view inside, the joint engineering, joint go-to market efforts that you do. >> Yeah, you bet. I mean, customers always sit up straight when we talk together, because, both of our companies are just raw engines of innovation. And they look forward to not just the capabilities that we're bringing, but also the seamless way that we integrate that and make that seamless and easy for customers to digest. So, certainly on the server front, through vSphere, that's been a long standing participation, the VMware cloud Foundation, then this fully Software-Defined stack became a really interesting way for us to go and partner and show joint value to customers who are trying to basically get more speed, particularly speed. We're going to talk about a lot of that today, and then finally, VMware cloud foundation that we've opened up into storage systems. So there's certainly a hyper converged element of it. But now what we do with nimble three part and now primeira is a really interesting way for us to take the vVols technology that we have and extend a common operating model. So really just interesting innovation for customers to take advantage of, as they look to innovate themselves. >> Krista, from a research standpoint, we were really early in watching, new models of building out storage, and we said, the pendulum is swung back to pull it much closer to Compute. You talked about you've got a broad portfolio in Compute, Synergy has some really interesting ways to be able to compose things and leverage software capabilities, so maybe give us a little bit as to how HPE differentiates in the market. Because, VMware does partner with lots of people but what separates these point solutions from everything else out in the market. >> Sure, and Synergy is a great example because what we're seeing is a really, really high interest on, on Synergy with VCF. And the reason for that is because customers want a software-defined infrastructure, that they can compose, Compute, storage and networking, as they need to, to address any workload they have. And they want to do that with a partner like VMware and VCF. So what we see is customers choosing those two things together, and building their hybrid cloud environments on those two. When I think of some of the customers that we have, all given a specific example. So, Banco Santander is one of the largest banking groups in the world, and they are really trying to drive innovation across all of their locations that are in North America, South America, Europe, Asia. They're trying to drive innovation across, they have a big project. And they selected Synergy and VCF as a service GreenLake model to help them transform their business. And they're really excited because what they think this is providing to them is a reduced data center space, reduced power consumption, and reduced costs. And all of that with automation, more automation than they've had in the past, more flexibility than they've had in the past. >> Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the GreenLake, because, those other service models, cloud obviously has been a big discussion for the last few years. Lee, VMware is no stranger to working in multi and hybrid cloud environments. Give us a little bit about what you're hearing from your customers, you mentioned the GreenLake solution. How does that fit in the, overall, VMware multi cloud offering? >> Well, we all know these are uncertain Time's right? And customers in uncertain times are looking for flexibility. How do they go and basically, invest smartly, look to come out of uncertain times stronger. And what we're finding is that flexibility... Starting at, we're really impressed with this Synergy platform by the way. The idea of being able to flexibly configure, Compute and storage to tie into external arrays from that and to have the VMware cloud foundation as a unifying Software-Defined data center concept that's available on-prem and then extends into the hybrid cloud. This basically gives investment protection to customers who are looking for how to invest in, you've mentioned GreenLake as well. And I just mentioned that innovation on GreenLake is about true consumption-based purchasing models, if you will. And that's different than just a financial engineering aspect. I mean, that's real innovation and real technical innovation in terms of how customers can go and apply infrastructure. At the time that they need it, relative to the compelling business models. >> I'll chime in there too, I will tell you a little story about when I first presented the GreenLake model, at that time, it wasn't called GreenLake. But I presented it to a bunch of customers about 100 customers in an advisory council. And I have never had so many people come up to me afterwards, trying to figure out how they can get that for themselves, as I did when I had that presentation. What really resonated with people is that they wanted to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, but they didn't have big budgets. And when they did take advantage of those technologies, one of the challenges has been growth. So when they need to expand, that's another procurement cycle. You have to wait, you have to stand it all up. With GreenLake, you actually have that added capacity on site, and then also payfor what you use. So they were attracted to All of those things. And I feel like right now, in the environment we're in, many people had big, big projects, things they wanted to do. And they may have plan those capital expenditure for that, but that money may not be there. So GreenLake is one of those things that can help overcome that challenge. And what we found is when people use GreenLake, we don't see many people go back. So, I was talking with the GreenLake light team, and I said, what happens if they decide not to do GreenLake and they kind of pause, and they're like, "Well, we really haven't run into that very often." So it's very, very popular and customers were really happy with it. >> Yeah, talking about innovation and helping customers take advantage of new technologies. Lee, maybe we'll start with you and Krista, definitely want your input. Been a lot of feedback about vSphere seven. Of course, one of the big pieces of that, is how cloud native containerization Kubernetes can be pulled into the virtualization platforms. So we're talking a lot about VCF, Lee, that's the, the way to get it, the Kubernetes piece today. Tell us a little bit about that, what you're hearing from customers and then, Krista, I'd like to understand how that fits into the HPE offerings. >> Yeah, the data we have, shows that 95% of new applications, are being developed on containers. Why? Because it's the speed of development. And so, at VMware, we've re architected vSphere for the first time that in the last five years. And look carefully at what VMware integrates into the hypervisor, because that's what we believe is going to be really benefiting from performance, efficiency and management. And so we've integrated Kubernetes directly into the hypervisor itself. And then through our Tanzu portfolio, introduce an upstream, compatible, Kubernetes development environment so that we have developer-ready infrastructure. And that's really important because at the speed of new applications, basically, you need to be able to respond quickly to those. And what VMware has always offered, which is a resilient underlying infrastructure with an intrinsic security model built in. And separately important, when containers are being spun up more quickly, destroyed more quickly. They're being portable now they're portable across the hybrid cloud, those models mean that you need, and you get the value right from this integrated model that leverages all of the experience and knowledge that people have around how to run this center and this sphere. So really exciting. And it's available in VCF 4.0 with Tanzu and Synergy. >> Yeah. And I will say that it's very exciting because I actually see the interest I see customers asking about and inquiring about it. I can, definitely second everything that Lee just said. I think Lee you're going to see a really fast transition over because there's so much value added in. >> Excellent. Okay, Krista, while I've got you on the Compute piece, Lee said that 95% of new applications are being built on containerization. How has that, impacted architecture in how you're working with customers? >> Yeah, so what I find is that customers, are very interested in containers. What we're doing is we're helping them from a services standpoint, a consulting standpoint. Many of these customers are adopting for the first time trying to figure out how they could leverage containers in their environment. From our standpoint, it's making sure that we have the right platforms and we're advising and consulting and helping customers get there. Excellent. Lee, Krista talked about Santander, wondering if you've got any customer examples you'd like to share. >> Yeah, great one is Porsche, I love the Porsche example, just because Porsche, just The epitome of speed. And so the idea of this flexibility. The way you're finding, is the flexibility starting from, let's say, from a Synergy, and flexible on hardware allocation? And then with VCF now being able to be flexible across the hybrid cloud, and now with VCF 4.0, with Tanzu, the flexibility of introducing new modern application support, and finally layering GreenLake on top of that, which Porsche is also using, it gives you this idea that, especially in uncertain times, but regardless, the changing business environment where everyone's responding to app development, pressures, timelines, and innovation, we've got a really interesting model now for customers to invest responsibly and be able to respond quickly. >> Excellent. Krista, I guess the other piece, onto Discover, any updates in the portfolio expanding the VMware solution that you can share? >> Yeah. Yeah, so I'd like to talk a little bit about our pre validated Synergy VCF solution stack with built in automation. So we've literally gotten rid of hundreds of steps, pre and post deployment. So we could speed deployment by five times. So we're talking to point in hours instead of weeks. So we're really, really excited about that. We're working together to make sure we're making things easier for customers, making that journey to a hybrid cloud. Very, very simple. So we're really happy to offer that to customers. >> Right, Lee, any final words you can share on HPE partnership? >> Yeah. what I might say is that the pace of innovation from our companies is so great. That really VMware Cloud Foundation is a way in our joint effort and joint delivery, is a way for customers to assimilate all of this innovation. So that day zero, it's guaranteed to work And then day two, you can lifecycle manage all the individual components from a common SVC manager interface. That's the value that we're bringing together today. Is that, listen, putting all this in place can seem daunting until the VMware cloud Foundation, with Synergy with all of the joint value we have basically makes it manageable, so that you can go and basically stop looking down at infrastructure. Look up at the ass. >> All right, Krista, I'll let you have the final word and final takeaways from HPE Discover. >> Okay, sure, thanks. Together, what we're trying to do is simplify that journey to Hybrid Cloud, makes sure that customers can innovate faster, provide stable operations and reduce their costs. >> Well, Krista and Lee, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress. Looking forward to watching down the road. >> All right, thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from "theCUBE", HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (cool music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio today, the COVID thing is continuing to go, and one of the huge impacts, right, is obviously in the conference business, our world. Those things have all been canceled or made virtual, and everyone's still trying to figure out, what does a virtual event look like, what are the characteristics of it, and we're really excited to have one of our favorite CUBE alumni, guest host extraordinaire, Keith Townsend. You know him as the CTO advisor joining us, Keith jumped in with both feet, right when this thing went down, and said "I'm going to have my own CTO Advisor "virtual conference," so first off, Keith, I miss you, great to see you, we haven't run into each other at the Sands in an awfully long time, so great to see you, how are you doing? >> Good to see you, if it's only virtual, good to see you too, Jeff. >> So tell us about your decision to jump in with both feet, and go ahead and test the waters on this virtual conference concept. >> So I talked about this a little bit on a random, just a YouTube update, but roughly 30, 35% of my revenue comes from in-person events. And plus my brand, The CTO Advisor, is tied to people seeing me on theCUBE, seeing me at the shows, creating the content, kind of on the ground, guerrilla style, kind of like how John started out early on. So we needed a practical solution for most things, one, we feed off the energy of the community, so we need to be on the ground as much as possible, so that we can create content and get you guys the stories and the data that you need to make purchasing decisions, and two, we needed the practical problem of solving our own revenue problems, so we jumped in, head in, to say "Let's do a virtual event." I don't know if I would've done it if I wasn't as naive as I was back then, but we jumped in. >> So before we jump into the processes, make sure, give us a full-on plug, when is it, where should people go, registration I assume is still open, want to just get that out there for the folks. >> So even if you see this after registration closes, quote unquote closes, it's April 21st, >> 10: 30 AM central to 3:30 PM central, that's US time. You can register at CTOAdvisorVirtualConference.com. >> Excellent, so let's talk about some of the interesting things about virtual. One of the things as you said in a physical event, you've got people, you've got time and space and geography that we all come together in that space, and there's a lot of advantages to everybody being at the same place at the same time. A virtual event, almost by definition, is now you've broken up the segments of content capture, if you will, and creation, which can or cannot be on that date. The actual display, or the publishing of that content, if you will, and then the consumption of that content, which may or may not happen on the 21st. How have you worked with this expanded palette, if you will, to be able to work in an asynchronous world, and how are you finding it in terms of actually day to day execution? >> So you guys have done plenty of remote content at this point. When you're in theCUBE studio, you have commercial internet, it's fairly reliable when you're on premises, maybe a little bit less reliable from the sense that it's conference-centered, but it's still enterprise class internet access, so you can do real-time video on theCUBE fine. We can go to Cube.tv, Cube.net, and see what you guys are doing real-time, and it's pretty much without blip. In the virtual conference world, what we're dealing with where I'm coming in, remote to you, while my video and audio looks fine now, it may blip. So we embrace two things. We embrace the fact that this is a virtual event, so in a background, you'll see that we're in Keith Townsend's basement, the other thing that you'll see is that we won't produce live content, because there's not much value in it being live, if I can't interact with you. One of the great things about theCUBE, is that it's live, but there's this element that people are on the ground, they're watching it live, they're interacting with it live, we're tweeting about it, so how do you reproduce, if not that exact feeling of it being live and you're being part of it, but the conversation around the content, and that's what we focused on, creating high quality video content, that you can consume, kind of as a watch party, so on Twitter, in the platform that we're using, we're having conversations real-time, so that you can enjoy the community, and the speakers who are presenting, you can interact with them because they're not presenting real-time, they're in the chat room, they're on Twitter, they're running as their session is running, and they're able to interact with you, so we've embraced the medium, and then after the fact of course we can do all kinds of things to run asynchronous content after the fact, 'cause the majority of people will watch it after the video's done. >> All right, and I'm just curious, how many sessions are you going to have, approximately? >> So we have I think 21 sessions, in a five hour period, so we're running three separate tracks, two super techy, geeky tracks, then a sponsored track is kind of by itself, and we're not expecting everyone to consume it all at one time. >> Right, you know it's just so interesting to me, talking about your tracks. If you were to go rent a venue, that had the capacity to run 21 tracks over five hours, it'd be a pretty decent-sized venue, it'd be expensive, and then you would have to pick your sessions and your tracks based on the limitations of the budget that you had and the window that you had of rooms that you could put these people in, and who could do it now, when, there, the other thing, and so it's really interesting that now this opens up the amount of sessions, is really a function of what you can manage, or what the community can kind of self-organize, you're not really limited by how many rooms are in the Sands Convention Center, and the other thing that you brought up, which I think people completely miss is that if the content is recorded in advance and puts in the can, to your point, the presenter can actually participate in the conversation while the session is happening, which they can't do in a physical event, because they're actually presenting, so, we had a guy in the other day, Ben Nelson, he talked about a car is not a mechanical horse, it's not the same, digital's not the same as physical, and there are some things that aren't as cool, but there's a whole lot of things that you can do in the digital space that you can't do in the physical space. >> Yeah, a lot of my presenters were kind of put off by the idea of, "Wait, hold on, I'm not going to present live? "How will I interact with webinars now?" And I think this is the other end of the spectrum, Jeff, I think you guys have probably found this too, it's not a in-person event, and it's also not a webinar, so don't treat it as a webinar. You don't have to have these canned, phony questions that some people have behind the scenes, it is a real, authentic thing. Oddly enough, I discovered this as part of helping my church put on their worship service. I was watching the service, I'll look off the screen a little bit to the left, I was watching the service, and the minister's delivering his sermon, and in the Zoom meeting, there he is, playing with his little two year old daughter, while he's giving the talk, and I just opened chat at him, and next thing I know there's an explosion of conversation around just life and the topic at hand, so it is a really unique experience. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point, it's not only what is a digital event, but what is it not, and it can't be a webinar, and when we were first going through this kind of shake-up, and we were really trying to identify some of those things, and we specifically did not want a digital event to be a webinar, 'cause what's a webinar, it's generally a one way communication of information for the vast majority of the session that you're sitting there, and they only open it up to Q&A at the very end, and it's only a moderated Q&A that very few people get a chance to get their question in, and you don't know how they're picking, and it only goes to the hosts, so, really having an open, live engagement around an engaged group of people, with a piece of content as kind of the coalescing of those people, really, it's not a webinar, it's a very different kind of experience, and sounds like you're really embracing that. >> Yeah, it'll never replace a live event, live has, again we talked about the energy, the, people are like "Do you really "want to smell the Sands, Keith?" You know what, it's all part of the energy, it's instant reminders to "Oh, I remember when I interviewed Pat Gelsinger here," and you have these instant cues that we as humans love, we don't get that, but I think it is something that's going to be with us to stay and it'll augment, I'd love to hear how you guys are thinking about how being able to have this capability will augment theCUBE once we return to physical events. >> Yeah, I mean I think this behavior that we're now been forced to engage in, in terms of increased working from home, and kind of increased use of videoconferencing, and that is a different communication mode, I think those behaviors are going to stick quite a bit, actually, I think if you look at what a conference is, there's a couple different tracks, as you said, there's the expression going around, kind of the rally moment, right, the keynote, we want, we have a strong message, the CEO wants to get something out, and I think that's of tremendous value, but then you look at all the breakout sessions and the information flow and the community engagement, those quite frankly can be done online much more efficiently and with much less cost, so will the new conference be kind of this, the celebration and basically a customer appreciation event, they want to have a party, but really that, I don't think it will be quite the information flow, 'cause why should product group A wait until the conference date, if they're ready to release their information, and wait for product group B or C or D, so this kind of forced aggregation of the communication into this very small window of three days in Vegas, I don't think it makes any sense, you know, it's Waterfall versus DevOps, and if this group's got stuff and they're ready to go, again, why hold the information back, it really doesn't make sense, and decouple the customer celebration, the rally moment, if you will, and the education, they don't necessarily have to be this contiguous big unit for three days in Vegas. >> Yeah, I'm looking forward to first quarter 2021, usually January, February, first half of March, really slow news channel product teams release stuff and they really want some big stage to release it, I think this will really make the dissemination of information coming from product teams super interesting as folks like theCUBE, The CTO Advisor, we're able to put on independent events virtually that have a sense of gravitas to it, that our partners will come and embrace. >> Yeah, the other thing, Keith, and I wonder, as you've been collecting your content for your show next week is that, the pressure on the quality of the content has escalated dramatically, right? If you're stuck in a huge conference hall, surrounded by 10,000 people, in the middle of a keynote that's not that exciting, it's kind of hard to get up and walk out. But if you're sitting at your desk with the entire world an alt-tab away, not to mention pesky things like email and Slack and everything else that we have as a distraction, it's really going to come in on the content provider and the engaged community to deliver, or else you're going to lose the audience, and I think it's going to be really interesting, people that overly have relied on the 100 foot video screen and the electronic violin music in the morning, and some of these tips and tricks, aren't going to carry the weight, because if it's just you sitting in front of a screen and you got to deliver the message, it's got to be crisp, it's got to be powerful, and it's got to be engaging, or people are just going to step away. >> And more importantly, how do you bring people back? So, you know how, when I take a break at a conference, I'm kind of captured. Eventually I'm going to walk back to the conference center, I might go back out to take a call, et cetera, but getting people to come back, even if the content has been awesome and engaging and great, how do you get 'em to come back, they don't have to come back that day, or even real time, but they have to come back to the portal, so we're working on kind of the next 30 days after the event, this is the thing that's really funny about putting on a virtual event, there's kind of the exhale after the day of the event, a virtual event, you know what, you've got a third of your audience that first day, a third of the audience the next week, and then the rest of the audience creeps in over the next three or four weeks, and how do you engage them, how do you get them to come back, and ultimately consume your content and your message? It's something that I haven't, I don't know if I've cracked the formula for it yet, but it is going to be a very interesting challenge. >> Yeah, but I think we have, right, in the way, how do you consume video today, how do you find information, right, you go to YouTube or to Google and you search, right, and right now the biggest phenom in pop media is the Tiger King, right, so when do people watch the Tiger King, how do they hear about the Tiger King, when do they actually sit down and watch it, has nothing to do with when you watch it unless we decide to trade messages, I say "Hey, Keith, have you seen the new episode?" So when you look at consumption patterns, to me it's really interesting, it's kind of bifurcated, you either binge watch, and just really get into something that you're into, and you just go go go for hours and hours and hours, or you're getting snippets, you're getting little quick hits, quick hits, quick hits, and I think it's this kind of ugly middle, where you don't have enough content or richness or engagement to have people hang, but you're a little bit longer than a quick hit just to get your message out, and I think it's really going to kind of bifurcate, and the beauty of digital is you can consume it in lots of different ways, and piece parts, and you don't have to necessarily kind of sit through kind of a straight row consumption as a captive audience, I think the opportunity's really really good, if the content is up to snuff, properly tagged, search terms, all those types of things of course as well. >> So yeah, John talks about the value of community a lot, and one of our co-hosts on theCUBE, and also a CUBE alum is Corey Quinn, and he does a really great job of this with curating content after it's been consumed live. He'll to his audience say "You know what, I'm going to live tweet this session "from three months ago," and that refreshes the conversation, it's not about when the content was created, it's about the conversation, as long as it's relevant, and finding mediums to help amplify that message. >> Yeah, I think it's just a great opportunity, you know, we used to do some work with Live Nation in another lifetime, right, and Live Nation around concerts, they had that particular event when you go to the show, and a lot of their efforts on the marketing side were what they call extending the glow, right, extending the glow after, and also kind of building the excitement before, and moving that window of that event to more than just the night that the show played, and I think we've got the same opportunity here, that's why again if you get good quality content, it's not speeds and feeds, but it's evergreen themes that have legs, you can go back to that well and you can stir that thing up, and you can get it back out there again, and then again hopefully people stumble upon it, whether it's via community or whatever. The other thing I think that's really interesting is you talked about community, and you talked about QuinnyPig, @QuinnyPig I think is his Twitter handle, is this whole idea of collaboration, and I think that's another thing that we can take from the internet, I know you do a lot of that, so working with other influencers if you will, or other people in the communities, and introducing each other's community to one another, I think it's a really big part of what makes a lot of the big YouTubers famous is that they do things together and they kind of cross-pollinate their communities, and if there's some overlap there then they both have kind of a win-win, and again I think in digital, where you don't have destruction, you don't have single use, you can use stuff more than once, it really opens up this opportunity for much more win-win, let's work together, and build community together, cross leverage, versus it's either yours or mine, and it's really more of a competitive thing. >> And I've been collaborating a lot with some of my European peers, and you bring up a really interesting concept. Our friends at VMware's going to be putting on VMworld in the next few months, and they usually had a US conference and a European conference, were both pretty sizable conferences. It's basically going to run concurrently as one conference. So if it's going to run as one conference, why do I have to limit the live experience to the US timezone? Why can't I cater this, and why is it just a fixed hour, I don't know if it will be, but it shouldn't just be a fixed hour event, it's going to be a all-out hour event that's going to happen across Asia, Europe, and the US, and tailoring the content to each continent and time zone, and cross-pollinating, so that content that I would not have typically have gotten at the US event, or in the Europe event, I can now get that experience and cross-cultural flavor as a natural part of digital, so there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot to miss about in-person events, but I think there's opportunities that are just massively untapped. >> Yeah, yeah, and I'm just going to get one more concept, which I don't think is getting enough action, get your take on it, but if you think of the value to the company, let's just stick with VMware for a minute, we're great fans of Pat and Sanjay, there is a information transfer when Pat gets up and does his keynote as from one to many tens of thousands, and there's value there, and again we talked about this rallying moment, but think of turning that on its head, which is really what digital provides, now there's an opportunity for Pat and Sanjay and the entire VMware senior team and junior team and product managers to now flip that information flow. So if you think of the user experience from the attendees' point of view, is it better for Sanjay to talk to 10,000 people in an audience, or would Sanjay rather hear from 10,000 people, and have that flow of information going back in? So if you think of it as a community event versus a one way communication of here's our exciting news, I think the value to the sponsor goes up dramatically, 'cause there's so much institutional knowledge and tribal knowledge and experience within all those people that are just sitting passively listening to that keynote. If this is a way to better suck that information back into the company, I don't think they'll ever go back to the other way it was. >> Yeah, two points, two data points on that. One, again, from the worship side of the house, at our Easter service, our church enabled every member who cared to to kind of do a five, eight second "Hey, this is the Townsend family, "happy Easter," and then 15 minutes before the live church service started, they just ran a video of family after family after family that I recognize, saying "Hi, happy Easter," so you have that moment, and how do you capture that online? VMware's social media team already does this well, they amplify end user content, there was a guy that did a video on how to install VMware Cloud Foundation in three hours, went viral. You have these opportunities, again, to hear from sources and have conversations that's really not practical from a typical conference perspective. I think I heard it best the other day, one of my attendees and presenters said "You know what, Keith, the virtual conference "is such a democratizing event because "it enables me, whether I could not afford "to go to a conference before, "or I couldn't travel, or whatever reasons "I could not attend a conference before," the virtual conference gives opportunities for collaborations that could not have taken place otherwise. >> Yeah, it's great, so again, Keith, thank you for spending a few minutes with us and sharing your thoughts, and again, for everybody, April 21st 2020, next week, >> 10: 30 AM central time, join the CTO virtual conference. Keith, always great to catch up, man. >> You too, Jeff, thanks a lot. >> All right, take care. He's Keith, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching, I'll see you next time. (calm music)