(electronic music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE News and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our news update for MWC in Barcelona, the premier event for cloud and to the telecommunication industry. News today, VMware in the news has lots of announcements, where it's expanding its line of products for communication service providers with Open RAND portfolio VMware's unveiled service management orchestration framework for simplifying and automating radio access networks and their applications. RANDs have traditionally been proprietary because of their need for low latency and speed and the Overran Alliance is championed open standard that would expand the number of players in the RAND ecosystem. According to Sanjay Oppai, senior vice president and general manager of the service provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware, VMware is the forefront of getting deployed in telcos both in the RAND as well as the core and VMware hopes they can extend their leadership from the enterprise data center and SD WAN and be the defacto standard in the RAND. VMware is also announcing a technical preview that'll allow communications service providers to run disaggregated and virtualized RAND functions directly on bare metal servers using VMware Tanzu. Project Hui is the initiative aimed at telecom providers that need flexibility in how they deploy edge devices. The VMware Telco cloud platform is also being improved to deliver carrier grade intelligent networking and lateral security features such as distributed firewall and intrusion detection and prevention, along with support for energy efficient use cases for 4G and 5G core load balancing. For enterprise customers, VMware is delivering new and enhanced remote worker device connectivity and intelligent wireless capabilities to its SD WAN and Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE Products, is also expanding its collaboration with Intel aimed at delivering new edge applications based on 5G connectivity that will support SD WAN use cases involving mobile and internet of things devices. Again, VMware spinning their portfolio in the news. Again, VMware is not stopping. Of course, theCUBE's, all the coverage of VMware Explorer will be coming up this year in 2023. Don't miss that. But at mwc, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, the entire Cube team are there for four days of live coverage. Of course, all the news and reporting is on SiliconANGLE.com. For all the action, go there. And of course theCUBE.net is where the broadcast is in Barcelona. This is theCUBE News. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Sumit Dhawan president of VMware is joining me today. Sumit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John, good to see you. >> You know, I remember Raghu when we were talking to him when the original AWS deal, we covered it many, many years ago. It seems like yesterday, but since then, again, it was a lot of people who were kind of like looking at that deal, not understanding. We were very clear that we thought that that was going to create clarity. If you look at the success of VMware's cloud strategy, since that moment in time, it really has been an amazing run for VMware. And so congratulations and looking at that trajectory, we're going into what even a bigger wave now we're seeing, coming out of the pandemic with Edge, 5g, Cloud Native going mainstream. This is like another tipping point, another inflection. Well, how are we want to look at it? This is really big. Can you share your thoughts on how you see your customers and AWS customers coming together with the VMware. >> Yeah, we are excited about sort of this phase, era or whatever you want to call it, where customers are looking at just the power of cloud for all of their applications. And in fact, what we call multicloud, where they are looking at private cloud, public cloud, sometimes even multiple public clouds and Edge and how they are going to leverage all of this power of cloud across all their applications. And we're excited about the partnership, like you said, John, we did with AWS, customers have last two years, have had a hard time modernizing their infrastructure. And now they're looking at their tier one applications, which are oftentimes the lifeline of their businesses and they have not been, the infrastructure has not been modernized. And our partnership with AWS brings to the customers a fully modernized infrastructure as a service, which is optimized for their tier one application. So they can embrace the power of cloud, not just for new modern applications that they have built for running their new digital services, but also all of their tier one enterprise applications instantly modernize their infrastructure, secure it run their tier one applications through the power and the scale of public cloud. And then gradually start modernizing, like you mentioned, modernization of application is a key element and we have provided a rich stack for customers to be able to build their new SRE and DevOps practices and enable developers to have a fast journey to build these modern applications, leveraging the power of public cloud and in fact multiple public clouds seamlessly, and we're extending the same thing to the Edge. So it's actually exciting times in the industry. We call it the multicloud era and VMware is enabling our customers what we call smartest path to cloud. >> Well, congratulations, first of all, on the new independent company, VMware, that's great news. You guys now are on your own very valuable company in and of itself, under Dell Technologies now out on the open and we've been covering VMware, theCube's been to VMware every year. And looking at this year's VMware and looking at VMware for the old folks, the veterans VMware has been synonymous with operations, IT operations, running workloads in data centers to power business, enterprise classic innovation for business value. Now with the cloud, you see operations DevOps being discussed in security. You're talking about, and you mentioned SRE the workloads. The game is still the same, but it is shifting landscape wise. You got cloud scale, you mentioned on premises and multi-cloud. So with operations going to full scale, your customers are building and running their businesses on VMware and AWS and other clouds. This is the same game, but different world. Can you just share what's the current similarities and differences from where operations used to be from a workload standpoint. >> John, you're a hundred percent, right. The need for operational scale and discipline is always, there has always been there and now it's extended to potentially lot more complex world of what we call multicloud. In this new world, the whole aspect of operations is no longer the world of system admins, where you would have people pushing buttons to control the infrastructure and it's lot more where infrastructure is now designed to be managed as a code. There is a lot more of what is considered shift left, where more and more of power of orchestrating the infrastructure as given to the developers because they're oftentimes the sort of ones who understand the business logic and understand how the infrastructure is required to scale up and down the applications. And so along those two key trends, there is still a critical element of how a platform is needed for customers to operate that environment okay. You can't sort of have operational discipline be lost just because you have the paradigm changed and that's what VMware is enabling now with VMware stack, you can manage your entire infrastructure, not just public cloud, but even private cloud as a code, you can create a platform where developers get this freedom and a great experience to leverage any public cloud, to build their services and work closely with DevOps and SRE functions, to make sure that the orchestration of all of their cloud environment in a multicloud environment is available and enabled seamlessly through Kubernetes. This doesn't have to be done through virtual machines anymore it could be virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestrated containers across all clouds. And so bottom line operations has always been critical, but it has been done in a certain way in the world of multicloud it's changed to where it's more and more of infrastructure as a service shift left to developers and cybersecurity is extremely important where it needs to be built into the platform. And that's what VMware solutions are now enabling for our customers. >> Yeah, and for all the young guns coming into the business that have developers, the DevOps is still the same game. You've got developers and you've got operations now at large scale. And I think this whole multi-cloud is really kind of the multi-vendor equation so I think clear synergies and congratulations on the trajectory. I think it's really relevant. Can you take us through on how this means for the businesses, because at VMWorld this year, you guys talked about cross-cloud services. Can you talk about what that is and what does it mean for the customers, and what's the focus at reInvent this year? >> Yeah, so VMware this year at VMworld announced our sort of portfolio for enabling customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. We call it cross-cloud services and they fit into five major categories. First is our cloud infrastructure that is available through partnership with all major cloud providers. We started with AWS and we expanded with all major cloud providers, including Azure, Google, Ali in China, Oracle, IBM. Secondly, our cloud native platform, Cloud native platform is where it doesn't have to be traditional VM based applications, applications built using modern cloud native technologies container-based, or that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes that are operationalized using our platform where customers can get any Kubernetes on any public cloud and operate them in a consistent and scalable fashion and enable a great developer experience at the same time. Third is networking and security services, which are underlay across both the cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud native services for this cloud management, how infrastructure as a code and shift-left developer function can be enabled through our management technologies designed for both private and public cloud, both VM based or VMware based infrastructure, as well as native public cloud infrastructure. And then lastly, at workspace and Edge services, enabling customers to build today's requirements of people working from anywhere and anywhere workspace experience for a hybrid workforce. So these are our five cloud services, John, that we call collectively as cross-cloud services, which enable customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. These are modular, easy to acquire services designed to run across all clouds. And obviously for customers looking at leveraging the power of AWS, these services enable you to embrace it AWS at the fastest speed. >> Yeah and I think anything cross-cloud, multi-cloud, the ease of use and choice is key, you have to have choice that's cool. Open source is driving a lot of that, which I want to get to with the Tanzu, but you guys have had a great partnership with AWS, both on a development level, as well as a business partnership. Take us through the evolution of the partnership between VMware and AWS, because I know Raghu was really into this with Pat Gelsinger and then Andy Jassy, we covered that. But if you look at what Amazon web services is doing under Adam's leadership now they're going to set the table for the next 15 years. And you've got Outpost is going to be a big part of that. You've got all of the cloud native high level services inside the cloud, inside AWS as well. So take us through your view of the evolution of the VMware AWS partnership. >> Yeah I mean, AWS and VMware started a partnership for those of you who don't know, we started our partnership about five years ago, where we announced the availability of VMware cloud on AWS, which is all of our fully sort of modernized software defined data centers infrastructure available for running tear one enterprise applications on top of AWS all of their data centers globally. So our software with AWS hardware together as a managed service means customers could get fully modern infrastructure without refactoring any of their applications. They can run on AWS. And that relationship has grown significantly. We have continued to enable more and more of sort of different sized sort of platform infrastructure that we have continually made available. And the business has led to great success. We have at this point in time thousands of customers, joint customers running all of their tier one business applications, whether it's banking to healthcare, to insurance on top of our infrastructure, and it's been great. We then gradually expanded that partnership to other industries. Now we have customers in telcos running major telco cloud on top of our platform, we've expanded our partnership to other solutions. We brought our Tanzu, which is our cloud native platform for managing native cloud services on AWS, in an enterprise fashion, connected to all of their enterprise requirements as well in the marketplace we have brought other offerings, including security services on AWS marketplace for customers to get so over time. >> Hold on Sumit if you don't mind me asking, so you saying that Tanzu Carbon Black and VMware cloud are all in AWS marketplace. >> They're all available in AWS marketplace and they're all available to be transacted through even just the AWS's EDP. So the commercial relationship with AWS has strengthened significantly over time. >> EDP is their sales channel that's their direct. >> EDP is their enterprise agreement that's right. >> So you go to market together with AWS under the marketplace. >> Joint support integration so their customers can get joint support with us. So over time, the technology integration that started has led to strong commercial integrations, helping making sure customers can get one commercial agreement and one support agreement with VMware and AWS together. And that's been great for customers, customers have loved it and we are continuing to build upon it. Your second question was, well, what happens when AWS has new modern native services? And what we have done is for example, at Tanzu Solution, it is integrated with AWS's EKS. So their Kubernetes distribution can be fully operationalized as well as a great developer experience can be created for AWS native services using VMware Tanzu solution. So we are embracing the power of more and more of AWS services for our enterprise solutions. >> You know I love following VMware, especially and AWS. I spoke to companies, both very technical, pragmatic, very smart companies So congratulations on success. I got to ask you from a customer perspective, as you look at the landscape of the commercial side, what are the customers saying? What's the big summary of where they're at? What's the vibe, where's their head, what are they thinking? Take us through some anecdotal customer sentiment or data. >> Yeah, our customers tell us three things consistently. Number one, they say that they have, at this point of time, just decided that they're going to have some kind of a black solution, which will span multiple clouds, which could have public cloud, private cloud and Edge or multiple public clouds. In fact, we just did a recent survey, John and we found that 74% of our customers are already using multiple clouds. And 90 plus percent said that they want that freedom and choice to be able to use cloud of their choice and not be encumbered by any particular sort of just choice that they make. So that's the first trend we see, secondly, customers want to modernize their infrastructure and modernize their applications. They haven't been able to do so over the course of last two years, and modernization is a key requirement and VMware and AWS gives them that ability to do so now at this point in time, very, very quickly. And then third thing we hear is that customers are looking for some solution where cybersecurity is built in it's something where they are standardizing their enterprise requirements via a platform, which has a great experience for the developers, great operational scale and cybersecurity. And these are the three trends John, that VMware is solely focused on as part of our services and solutions and our partnership with AWS. >> Sumit, always great to talk to you. One final point. I want to get your reaction to a VMware has made a couple of big bets in the past decade. One, the deal with Amazon, which opened the door for multicloud, that path is clear. Cloud-scale check the box well done. And the other one was cloud native technologies and Kubernetes specifically, two big bets that don't, that kind of no one kind of saw coming, turns out they turned out pretty well. What's your reaction to that? Would you agree? And how would you talk about those two events? >> Yeah, we at VMware always considered sort of how we are going to keep innovating and the way we see the world is follow where the applications are going. It's pretty simple. Okay we saw that a few years ago where cloud and container technologies are where the applications are going. And we innovated through both our organic investments, as well as inorganic investments to bring our VMware cloud Solutions and Tanzu Solutions. And similarly, John, we're looking at now the next generation of applications where we fast forward three years down the road, we envision a great degree of innovation is going to happen in the Edge. And that's the third sort of area of innovation for us. So that public cloud or multi-cloud cloud native applications, as well as Edge applications can all be orchestrated using VMware's cross-cloud services. >> Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware thanks for coming on theCUBE we appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the event. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Sumit Dhawan president of VMware is joining me today. Sumit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John, good to see you. >> You know, I remember Raghu when we were talking to him when the original AWS deal, we covered it many, many years ago. It seems like yesterday, but since then, again, it was a lot of people who were kind of like looking at that deal, not understanding. We were very clear that we thought that that was going to create clarity. If you look at the success of VMware's cloud strategy, since that moment in time, it really has been an amazing run for VMware. And so congratulations and looking at that trajectory, we're going into what even a bigger wave now we're seeing, coming out of the pandemic with Edge, 5g, Cloud Native going mainstream. This is like another tipping point, another inflection. Well, how are we want to look at it? This is really big. Can you share your thoughts on how you see your customers and AWS customers coming together with the VMware. >> Yeah, we are excited about sort of this phase, era or whatever you want to call it, where customers are looking at just the power of cloud for all of their applications. And in fact, what we call multicloud, where they are looking at private cloud, public cloud, sometimes even multiple public clouds and Edge and how they are going to leverage all of this power of cloud across all their applications. And we're excited about the partnership, like you said, John, we did with AWS, customers have last two years, have had a hard time modernizing their infrastructure. And now they're looking at their tier one applications, which are oftentimes the lifeline of their businesses and they have not been, the infrastructure has not been modernized. And our partnership with AWS brings to the customers a fully modernized infrastructure as a service, which is optimized for their tier one application. So they can embrace the power of cloud, not just for new modern applications that they have built for running their new digital services, but also all of their tier one enterprise applications instantly modernize their infrastructure, secure it run their tier one applications through the power and the scale of public cloud. And then gradually start modernizing, like you mentioned, modernization of application is a key element and we have provided a rich stack for customers to be able to build their new SRE and DevOps practices and enable developers to have a fast journey to build these modern applications, leveraging the power of public cloud and in fact multiple public clouds seamlessly, and we're extending the same thing to the Edge. So it's actually exciting times in the industry. We call it the multicloud era and VMware is enabling our customers what we call smartest path to cloud. >> Well, congratulations, first of all, on the new independent company, VMware, that's great news. You guys now are on your own very valuable company in and of itself, under Dell Technologies now out on the open and we've been covering VMware, theCube's been to VMware every year. And looking at this year's VMware and looking at VMware for the old folks, the veterans VMware has been synonymous with operations, IT operations, running workloads in data centers to power business, enterprise classic innovation for business value. Now with the cloud, you see operations DevOps being discussed in security. You're talking about, and you mentioned SRE the workloads. The game is still the same, but it is shifting landscape wise. You got cloud scale, you mentioned on premises and multi-cloud. So with operations going to full scale, your customers are building and running their businesses on VMware and AWS and other clouds. This is the same game, but different world. Can you just share what's the current similarities and differences from where operations used to be from a workload standpoint. >> John, you're a hundred percent, right. The need for operational scale and discipline is always, there has always been there and now it's extended to potentially lot more complex world of what we call multicloud. In this new world, the whole aspect of operations is no longer the world of system admins, where you would have people pushing buttons to control the infrastructure and it's lot more where infrastructure is now designed to be managed as a code. There is a lot more of what is considered shift left, where more and more of power of orchestrating the infrastructure as given to the developers because they're oftentimes the sort of ones who understand the business logic and understand how the infrastructure is required to scale up and down the applications. And so along those two key trends, there is still a critical element of how a platform is needed for customers to operate that in Miami okay. You can sort of have operational discipline be lost just because you have the paradigm changed and that's what VMware is enabling now with VMware stack, you can manage your entire infrastructure, not just public cloud, but even private cloud as a code, you can create a platform where developers get this freedom and a great experience to leverage any public cloud, to build their services and work closely with DevOps and SRE functions, to make sure that the orchestration of all of their cloud environment in a multicloud environment is available and enabled seamlessly through Kubernetes. This doesn't have to be done through virtual machines anymore it could be virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestrated containers across all clouds. And so bottom line operations has always been critical, but it has been done in a certain way in the world of multicloud it's changed to where it's more and more of infrastructure as a service shift left to developers and cybersecurity is extremely important where it needs to be built into the platform. And that's what VMware solutions are now enabling for our customers. >> Yeah, and for all the young guns coming into the business that have developers, the DevOps is still the same game. You've got developers and you've got operations now at large scale. And I think this whole multi-cloud is really kind of the multi-vendor equation so I think clear synergies and congratulations on the trajectory. I think it's really relevant. Can you take us through on how this means for the businesses, because at VMWorld this year, you guys talked about cross-cloud services. Can you talk about what that is and what does it mean for the customers, and what's the focus at reInvent this year? >> Yeah, so VMware this year at VMworld announced our sort of portfolio for enabling customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. We call it cross-cloud services and they fit into five major categories. First is our cloud infrastructure that is available through partnership with all major cloud providers. We started with AWS and we expanded with all major cloud providers, including Azure, Google, Ali in China, Oracle, IBM. Secondly, our cloud native platform, Cloud native platform is where it doesn't have to be traditional VM based applications, applications built using modern cloud native technologies container-based, or that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes that are operationalized using our platform where customers can get any Kubernetes on any public cloud and operate them in a consistent and scalable fashion and enable a great developer experience at the same time. Third is networking and security services, which are underlay across both the cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud native services for this cloud management, how infrastructure as a code and shift-left developer function can be enabled through our management technologies designed for both private and public cloud, both VM based or VMware based infrastructure, as well as native public cloud infrastructure. And then lastly, at workspace and Edge services, enabling customers to build today's requirements of people working from anywhere and anywhere workspace experience for a hybrid workforce. So these are our five cloud services, John, that we call collectively as cross-cloud services, which enable customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. These are modular, easy to acquire services designed to run across all clouds. And obviously for customers looking at leveraging the power of AWS, these services enable you to embrace it AWS at the fastest speed. >> Yeah and I think anything cross-cloud, multi-cloud, the ease of use and choice is key, you have to have choice that's cool. Open source is driving a lot of that, which I want to get to with the Tanzu, but you guys have had a great partnership with AWS, both on a development level, as well as a business partnership. Take us through the evolution of the partnership between VMware and AWS, because I know Raghu was really into this with Pat Gelsinger and then Andy Jassy, we covered that. But if you look at what Amazon web services is doing under Adam's leadership now they're going to set the table for the next 15 years. And you've got Outpost is going to be a big part of that. You've got all of the cloud native high level services inside the cloud, inside AWS as well. So take us through your view of the evolution of the VMware AWS partnership. >> Yeah I mean, AWS and VMware started a partnership for those of you who don't know, we started our partnership about five years ago, where we announced the availability of VMware cloud on AWS, which is all of our fully sort of modernized software defined data centers infrastructure available for running tear one enterprise applications on top of AWS all of their data centers globally. So our software with AWS hardware together as a managed service means customers could get fully modern infrastructure without refactoring any of their applications. They can run on AWS. And that relationship has grown significantly. We have continued to enable more and more of sort of different sized sort of platform infrastructure that we have continually made available. And the business has led to great success. We have at this point in time thousands of customers, joint customers running all of their tier one business applications, whether it's banking to healthcare, to insurance on top of our infrastructure, and it's been great. We then gradually expanded that partnership to other industries. Now we have customers in telcos running major telco cloud on top of our platform, we've expanded our partnership to other solutions. We brought our Tanzu, which is our cloud native platform for managing native cloud services on AWS, in an enterprise fashion, connected to all of their enterprise requirements as well in the marketplace we have brought other offerings, including security services on AWS marketplace for customers to get so over time. >> Hold on Sumit if you don't mind me asking, so you saying that Tanzu Carbon Black and VMware cloud are all in AWS marketplace. >> They're all available in AWS marketplace and they're all available to be transacted through even just the AWS's EDP. So the commercial relationship with AWS has strengthened significantly over time. >> EDP is their sales channel that's their direct. >> EDP is their enterprise agreement that's right. >> So you go to market together with AWS under the marketplace. >> Joint support integration so their customers can get joint support with us. So over time, the technology integration that started has led to strong commercial integrations, helping making sure customers can get one commercial agreement and one support agreement with VMware and AWS together. And that's been great for customers, customers have loved it and we are continuing to build upon it. Your second question was, well, what happens when AWS has new modern native services? And what we have done is for example, at Tanzu Solution, it is integrated with AWS's EKS. So their Kubernetes distribution can be fully operationalized as well as a great developer experience can be created for AWS native services using VMware Tanzu solution. So we are embracing the power of more and more of AWS services for our enterprise solutions. >> You know I love following VMware, especially and AWS. I spoke to companies, both very technical, pragmatic, very smart companies So congratulations on success. I got to ask you from a customer perspective, as you look at the landscape of the commercial side, what are the customers saying? What's the big summary of where they're at? What's the vibe, where's their head, what are they thinking? Take us through some anecdotal customer sentiment or data. >> Yeah, our customers tell us three things consistently. Number one, they say that they have, at this point of time, just decided that they're going to have some kind of a black solution, which will span multiple clouds, which could have public cloud, private cloud and Edge or multiple public clouds. In fact, we just did a recent survey, John and we found that 74% of our customers are already using multiple clouds. And 90 plus percent said that they want that freedom and choice to be able to use cloud of their choice and not be encumbered by any particular sort of just choice that they make. So that's the first trend we see, secondly, customers want to modernize their infrastructure and modernize their applications. They haven't been able to do so over the course of last two years, and modernization is a key requirement and VMware and AWS gives them that ability to do so now at this point in time, very, very quickly. And then third thing we hear is that customers are looking for some solution where cybersecurity is built in it's something where they are standardizing their enterprise requirements via a platform, which has a great experience for the developers, great operational scale and cybersecurity. And these are the three trends John, that VMware is solely focused on as part of our services and solutions and our partnership with AWS. >> Sumit, always great to talk to you. One final point. I want to get your reaction to a VMware has made a couple of big bets in the past decade. One, the deal with Amazon, which opened the door for multicloud, that path is clear. Cloud-scale check the box well done. And the other one was cloud native technologies and Kubernetes specifically, two big bets that don't, that kind of no one kind of saw coming, turns out they turned out pretty well. What's your reaction to that? Would you agree? And how would you talk about those two events? >> Yeah, we at VMware always considered sort of how we are going to keep innovating and the way we see the world is follow where the applications are going. It's pretty simple. Okay we saw that a few years ago where cloud and container technologies are where the applications are going. And we innovated through both our organic investments, as well as inorganic investments to bring our VMware cloud Solutions and Tanzu Solutions. And similarly, John, we're looking at now the next generation of applications where we fast forward three years down the road, we envision a great degree of innovation is going to happen in the Edge. And that's the third sort of area of innovation for us. So that public cloud or multi-cloud cloud native applications, as well as Edge applications can all be orchestrated using VMware's cross-cloud services. >> Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware thanks for coming on theCUBE we appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the event. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. It was last week, we're going to have some continued conversations here. I've got a couple of guests joining me. One is an alumni. That's Jen Felch, the Chief Digital Officer and CIO at Dell Technologies. Jen, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thank you. And joining Jen is Deepak Patil the SVP and GM of Dell Technologies Cloud. Deepak, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you very much Lisa. Excited to be here. >> So the event was last week. It was huge. We know that. And, of course, challenging in the fact that we're also used to being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people in Las Vegas and thousands and thousands of partners, but it's still a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to engage its customers and its partners in the ecosystem. We heard a lot, Deepak, last week about this shift from Dell to deliver as a service. This is what Project APEX powered by Cloud Console. What can you tell us about that? >> Absolutely, Lisa, and what an exciting week it was. We did announce Project APEX at the Dell Technologies World. We are very excited about it. Project APEX marks a strategic milestone for us and our company in three specific areas. Number one is we are on a path to significantly accelerate our transformation into an as a service world. Number two, we are investing in radically simplify the way our customers engage with us. Discover, purchase, manage offers from us. And number three is we are continuing our commitment to provide more flexibility, more choice to our customers. And to make it happen, Project APEX essentially brings all the efforts across the entire Dell Technologies from product development to services, to go to market motions, marketing, finance under the Project APEX umbrella. It's a significant endeavor and we are really excited about it. Of course- >> Companies, oh go ahead, sorry. >> I'm sorry. Of course the Cloud Console that you mentioned is a key component of realizing the Project APEX Division and taking Project APEX to our customers. We are in the public preview of the Cloud Console. Using the Cloud Console with a few clicks, our customers can browse through a catalog of cloud services from us, as well as our partners using a self-serve immersive experience, they can then purchase products like the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform subscription. IT professionals then can provision and deploy workloads, including hybrid solutions like VMware Tanzu. Our customers can then manage and monitor workloads, and using real time insights and data, they can take actions like extending and expanding the system when the capacity is running low. As you know, we also announced storage as a service offering, but an offering like storage as a service using Cloud Console, our customers can see real time insights and cost breakdowns by the teams or cost centers. So, in many ways, the cloud Console really brings the power of Project APEX and the entire cloud operating model to our customer's fingertips. We're very excited about it. >> Lot of work there. So one the things I remember talking Dell Technologies World 2019 about the big digital transformation that Dell Technologies was undergoing. Deepak, you mentioned from a Project APEX perspective, this acceleration of transformation. Jen, over to you, as the Chief Digital Officer and the CIO, how has your team been able to enable this shift to the as a service model to facilitate the self-service and all of the capabilities that Deepak talked about? What's that been like? >> Well, it's been pretty exciting from a couple fronts is, you know, we've always had some aspect of as a service in our offering, whether that is software, our DFS organization, or, you know, as funny as it might sound, our actual services organization is certainly as a service. But as Deepak mentioned, and what our customers tell us, is that let's do more of that. Let's take the broad portfolio of technical solutions and services that we have today and make them simple, consistent, give IT leaders and organizations choice. And so, as the internal team, internal IT team, we play two roles. One is to, we're an internal customer. We're a very large customer of all of the Dell technology products and solutions. And so, we get to offer a lot of feedback about how we would like to work, what we've been doing to really innovate in terms of how we bring things together. And mostly we get to be those early adopters for our product groups in groups like, like Deepak's, which is wonderful to be able to give that early feedback and contribute to great solutions. The second part of it is actually doing the enablement of as a service of how, what are the underlying components that go into the engagement platform that Deepak mentioned, the Cloud Console. How does that leverage the scale of Dell, yet create those really simple consistent, transparent choices for our customers? So our teams get to sit side by side in terms of how we develop these solutions and how we're bringing Project APEX to life, both as a customer and as a development partner, so that we can really bring that together for our customers. And I'm pretty excited about using the solutions. We get to, you know, be involved with it every day. And I can't wait until it's running even more of our infrastructure internally. >> Big, big effort. Deepak, let's come back to you and talk about the market. As we know, this is a very competitive market, congested. You talked about some of the other things that we talked about on theCUBE as well for Dell technologies, world storage as a service. With this landscape that is highly competitive and has been for quite some time with this new strategy, Project APEX, what part of the market, or parts, is Dell going after? >> Absolutely. And just one comment on what Jen said. The work that Jen's team and my team are doing sitting side by side is an example, and just one of the many examples, but a shining example of how we are putting the power of unified Dell technologies behind this effort. Going back to your question, Lisa, we are in what we call it the fourth industrial revolution or whatever you want to call it. We are in a massive shift to a simple, flexible and an operating model full of choices with respect to this as a service cloud transformation, across the industry. Over the next few years, whoever essentially captures the market is going to have to deliver three core promises to our customers. Number one, is we know that we're in the middle of a multi-cloud hybrid cloud world. Any service provider, any cloud provider that eliminates the seams across different cloud environments and makes a multi-cloud experience truly consistent and simple and modern and seamless is going to have a massive advantage. Number two, customers' workforce are going to be all over the place. Good portion of their workforce are going to be in their data centers, good portions of workloads are going to be on Edge, And then are going to be good portions of workloads that are going to be in public cloud. Anybody who meets customers where they're at so that customers don't have to massively invest, invest massively in re-engineering and the VR protector and refactoring, but still enjoy the benefits of this new cloud operating model, from performance and reliability to scalability and efficiency, with the minimum possible efforts, is going to create a significant value proposition. And number three, anybody who essentially focuses on outcomes and experiences and workloads, rather than products and specific offers is going to have a significant benefit. And the work we're doing under the umbrella of Project APEX essentially delivers on all three of those promises. As I mentioned, we radically and massively simplify and eliminate the seams across different cloud environments. We focus on outcome based conversation and with the work that we're doing on with VMware on our massive 4,200 plus people partner, 4,200 plus partner ecosystem, we are working to meet customers where they're at instead of forcing them to re-engineer and re-architect and move to cloud instead of the cloud coming to meet them wherever they're at. So we do believe that the strengths that we traditionally have always had with respect to the broad technology and product and services portfolio, 30 plus thousand sales force, 4,200 plus people partner ecosystem, and a massive asset through the partner, just the best 20 plus year old partnership we have with NEOM brand, and the broad product, as well as partner portfolio at NEOM. We even like a chances in terms of helping each and every customer we work with fundamentally modernize their own portfolio, help their customers and make significant progress on their digital transformation journey. >> We definitely know that there was a big engine, a lot of momentum behind the size and the scale of Dell itself. So going back to you, Jen, if we think about some of the things that we heard again at Dell Technologies World, when we spoke with Jeff Clark, who's the COO and Vice Chairman of Dell technologies. Just in the last couple of weeks, he talked about six areas and IT innovation that Dell is focusing on. and I wanted to get your thoughts on these. Pirate Cloud, Edge, 5G, AI and ML, data management and security. In your opinion, Jen, what of this suite of six areas of IT innovation sets Dell up for success? >> That's a good question. And you know, I would say these six areas are not foreign to us. They're not necessarily brand new. They're all sit kind of right next to areas where we have very deep expertise. And so I think about the fact that, you know, we design, manufacturer, service and manage IT solutions all over the world. Large customers, small customers, consumers. We have an incredible breadth and reach of what we're doing today both from the solutions that we provide and the experiences that our customers are driving. Whether that is, you know, extending work from home or learn from home or they're, you know, going through a digital transformation as Deepak talked about, trying to really simplify their ecosystem. Oftentimes it's Dell, that's sitting right there with them. So we have an opportunity, I think unlike many others, to bring the technical expertise from the products and services that we offer, along with the experience from really working with the best and brightest of customers, as well as this ecosystem of partners 42,000, I mean, Deepak, that's a really big number, but that creates a real opportunity for innovation as things like 5G really emerge. And we have the power behind the data management analytics to support ML and AI. So, you know, when I step back and, and look at kind of what sets us up for success, it's not something that just happened yesterday. It's something that's been happening at Dell for a very long time, which is the deep technical expertise and really close engagements with our customers so that we can focus on bringing technology to solve the problems of today and set us up for the future. I know, as an IT leader, I appreciate the fact that solutions from Dell are very open. So they give us a lot of flexibility to not only provide a solution for today, but solutions that will last over time, that we have some flexibility. We don't have an incredible lock that we can never get out of it. So I am very optimistic about the future and look forward to these innovations and really, we have solutions in most, all of these areas today. I know they'll just continue to get better and better. >> Jen, last question for you before we wrap, because of course, Project APEX that Deepak talked about and kind of dug into, massive undertaking, of course, during the time of a massive change to the entire world, where suddenly, this shift to work from home was a rapid pivot. I can imagine as your teams, you talked about both of your teams really kind of not co-locating physically anymore but being able to work together. How did you manage that, and to enable the team to stay on track, to deliver this for Dell Technologies World? That's a big, it's a big task. >> It is a big task, but we have great teams. And, you know, I think as we've, we've kind of, the status quo has been disrupted, not necessarily by us, right, but by the environment that we're in. And so Deepak and I, and several other leaders, we keep our teams close and focused on where we're aiming, what we're, you know, what our mission is so that we can continue to innovate. And I will tell you, I feel like we have an incredible focus. The vision is clear as to where we want to go. And it probably just sounds simple but it's just engaged leadership. That's how we keep people focused. That's how we're keeping our eye on the ball of where we're headed. >> That's, couldn't be more important. You know, you talked about simplicity, about that engaged leadership is so key. You guys, thank you so much. There's so much more we could dig into. I wish we had more time. Thank you for sharing what's going on with Project APEX, Dell technologies, how it's helping customers transform, because we know right now, that digital transformation is only accelerating. So we'll have to have you back to talk about what's going on. Deepak, Jen, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, Jen Felch and Deepak Patil, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the virtual experience. (digitized music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World. We've been covering Dell Tech World since it started really. It used to just be Dell World and there was EMC World after the merger and this is the all virtual version but we're excited to be here and we've got a great panel coming up. I think you're going to enjoy it. Our first guest is Rajesh Janey. He is the Senior Vice President of Global Alliances for APJ for Dell Technologies. Rajesh, where are you coming in from today? >> I'm speaking to you from Gurgaon, India. >> Awesome. It's the power of the virtual, right? It's not all bad that we don't have to get on planes all the time. >> Absolutely. >> And joining him is Utpal Bakshi. He is the Vice President and Global Vertical Head High Tech for Wipro. Utpal, good to see you. >> Nice to see you. >> And where are you calling us in from? >> I'm from Dallas, Texas. Actually suburb outside of Dallas called South Lake. >> Oh, excellent. Great to see you and again didn't have to get on a plane to do this so not all bad. And also joining us is Satish Yadavalli. He is the Vice President and Global Practice Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Wipro. Satish, where are you joining us from? >> Hi, I'm joining from Bangalore, India. >> Excellent. Welcome. So gentlemen let's just jump into it. Wipro's a huge services firm, does a lot of work with Dell so I wonder Rajesh if you can talk really about the importance of partnerships and the importance of having somebody like Wipro within the Dell ecosystem. >> Absolutely. Thank you for having us on with Wipro. Wipro and we have had a partnership which is over two decades old and we have a multifaceted 360 degree kind of relationship with Wipro. Wipro is a platinum partner and what's more while we bring a lot of technology and products and the depth of product which are relevant to customer's transformation scenarios today, coupled with Wipro's consulting and services and design abilities this becomes an unbeatable power house so to say whereby we can work closely with a customer to help them transform and live in what we are calling the next normal. >> Yeah that's great. Utpal to you there's a lot of interesting trends going on. We've had cloud and big data been going on for a lot but really the talk in social media is what's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CIO or COVID and we all know what the answer is. So we've got a lot of new stuff in terms of digital transformation, working from anywhere, workforce transformation. Wonder if you can speak a little bit about how COVID has accelerated some of the priorities that your customers are trying to get done. >> Yeah. I think that's a great point. Wipro has been transforming over the last several years. We were a strong, large scale system integration partner, large IT organization but over the last several years we pivoted hard into the digital transformation world moving into the design side, leading the design, moving to cloud and helping our clients help make that journey and all of that got accelerated with the whole COVID situation. The work from home became all pervasive and the whole virtualization of the workforce really pivoted with some of our key transformational ideas around live workspace and the virtual desk which we've been working very closely with Dell have taken shape. So that has been a big part of our ongoing strategy. Doing the modernization off the network has also accelerated the customer networks and infrastructure was not necessarily set up for enabling these hybrid work environment. A lot of our clients are coming back and saying they want to modernize and actually accelerate. So that has all changed with COVID. Some of it is very positive actually for the business. >> Right. >> From an SI perspective. >> Satish, you've got cloud and infrastructure in your title. Public cloud really changed the game when Amazon kind of came on the scene and now we're seeing this evolution and change over time between a public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud and cloud on cloud. I wonder if you could speak to and then even have an AWS inside of other people's clouds. They're trying to get it out there. The evolution of cloud both as a technology but really more as a way of thinking in terms of rapid deployment of new functionality to support the business and what you're seeing with your customers today. >> So let me share a perspective, right? Enterprises today are looking at options to extract greater value from hybrid cloud investment. It's a brownfield environment today where customers have their existing data centers but the hyperscalers have really come into play now and right cloud is the strategy which most of our customers embrace to address the market demands which are primarily focused on business outcomes today. As Wipro we have invested in developing a holistic extensible platform led approach called Wipro BoundaryLess Enterprise to drive business outcomes to customers. So the BLE construct is all about providing a ready to use plug-and-play platforms making IT easily consumable from multiple stakeholder personas be it admins, be it line of businesses, developers and partners. So basically we have built a holistic solution and our BLE solutions has majorly five building blocks. The first building block would be the BoundaryLess Data Center. The second is the BoundaryLess Container Platform. The third is the BoundaryLess Data Protection Platform. The fourth is the BoundaryLess Cloud Exchange where we get together all the internet connections and define the software defined network part to give access to the workloads across hybrid environments and the BoundaryLess Integration Platform which we call it as BLIP. Basically this is what we have put together to deliver an outcome to the customers powered by BLE. >> So BLE again, you call it the BoundaryLess Enterprise. What's the most important components of BLE? What are the things that most people are missing to actually implement the strategy? >> So if I actually build on you, right? The five building blocks let me elaborate in detail. The first is on the BoundaryLess Data Center. This enables our clients to deliver an infrastructure as a service across data centers and public clouds and enables customers to seamlessly move workloads from Edge to Cloud and manage them in a consistent and efficient model. That's the first building block of our BLE. The second important building block is container, right? We all know today container orchestration is key across hybrid cloud and with micro services and architectures becoming more prominent we see huge search for managing various Kubernetes enrollments with our clients. So our BLCP platform leverages solutions like VMware Tanzu, which is again a Dell company to enable clients manage the multicloud Kubernetes enrollments through a single pane of glass and provide seamless migration and movement of workloads across cloud environments. That's going to be the key in the future with microservices being dominant and every enterprise embracing microservices architectures this becomes very important building block in our overall solution. The third important stuff is BoundaryLess Data Protection. Now that data is all cross in hybrid cloud environment and application actually consume this data it is important to protect the data which is intellectual property and very critical to every business. So with the BLDP platform we ensure that we deliver availability, solidarity, security and reliability of cloud adoption increasingly and rapidly across multicloud platforms. So our solution leverages the DTC of Dell and other existing Dell storages and data production solutions to offer seamless and right cost models which will be very critical for any cloud transformation and schedules as we move forward. The fourth point which I was talking about is BLCE. This is basically a cloud exchange where in a hybrid cloud environment you need to establish connectivities across PaaS and SaaS platforms as well as on-premise networks to provide seamless access to data and the workloads which are in multicloud scenarios. So that's about BLCE. With respect to BLIP it is an integration platform. Today we are in a software defined world and when I talk about providing a single pane of glass solution it is important for us to have an integration platform where I can bring all EPIs together and do northbound and southbound integrations with the architectures of clients and the cloud providers to spin off workloads, to commission, decommission and provide a seamless consumption experience to clients across multiple hyperscalers and on-premise infrastructure. >> Thank you for that summary. I think you hit on all the big trends. I want to go back to you Rajesh 'cause you said that this is a really unique time. You've been in the business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of other transformations and you've seen a lot of big trends. Why is this one different? What makes where we are today such a unique point in time in this IT industry journey? >> Excellent. I think I would say we are in a period of what is called an enforced innovation. While most of the time transformation in IT has been very, very sequential or continuous I think we are seeing an order of shift in the transformation and this whole situation is forcing everyone to accelerate the pace of innovation and transformation. There are two key priorities for every organization in this time. One, build resilient operations and second employee safety. These two parameters have forced the organization to look at their businesses differently, look at their IT infrastructure differently and created a sort of opportunity you can say which is ripe for Wipro's BoundaryLess Enterprise because there are no boundaries. People are working from home. They're no longer in an office confined or boundary. So that's smart. Coming back we are seeing an accelerated innovation. That means our partnership to deliver customer transformation at scale becomes all the more important. Bringing all the good technologies of Dell on one side and combining it Wipro's size, scale and services help us lead in the marketplace for customer transformation. And what's more, we are adding our Dell financial services solutions as Dell Tech on demand to enable all this to be consumed as a service and with flexible payment options which Wipro helps us translate it to customer offerings. >> That's great. Utpal, I want to go to you and get your perspective on how customers, in terms of this boundaryless, how things have changed since March 15th which at least here in the US, I don't know if in India it was on the same date when everything basically got shut down. So it was this light switch moment. Everybody worked from home, no planning, no thought like ready, set, go to now we're six, seven, eight months into this thing and clearly we're it's a marathon not a sprint and even if we go back to some semblance of what was the old normal the new normal is going to be different and everyone is not going to go back to work full time like they did before. So how, from a customer perspective, from a technology implementation perspective and from an initiative and getting this stuff done how has that changed pre-COVID then oh my goodness, it's the light switch moment and now it's, hey, we're in this for the long term. >> Yeah. I think Rajesh did hit upon that a little bit. This is truly that moment where it was a forced innovation. Some of it was happening anyways and it was bound to happen but I think the COVID kind of accelerated all of it. What has impacted is it all started with, okay, how do we enable work from home? And that is when the whole BoundaryLess infrastructure, the virtual desk solutions and all of that started getting impact. I think after that most companies have realized that this is not a short term fix. It is a longterm it's going to be here for staying so they wanted to have a longterm fix so they wanted to come in with innovation but at the same time from a business perspective they've had impact in business so they wanted very creative business models for them to get set with the technology innovation quicker but they didn't want to do it in a traditional way of paying it all upfront and moving it to that. So that is where the creativity in terms of joint innovation which we did with Dell, in flexible payment options, bringing in some kind of an asset lease model and things like that have gained traction. A lot more conversations are around we want to transform help us find a way to make the transformation sooner with maybe less investment upfront and find a way to fund this from the future savings we'll get so that we can be ready for the future without necessarily impacting the bottom line today. All of that has changed, I would say in summary, has accelerated the adoption and the rate of change but it has also led to all of us thinking some creative business models and new approaches to doing business. >> Right, right. Satish back to you. What are the big conflicts that always exist? There's innovation versus security, right? And enabling innovation and giving people more power, more tools, more data to do things at the same time now your tax surface has increased you don't necessarily have everybody locked down on their home infrastructure and they were forced into this. When people are talking about digital transformation, how do they continue to drive forward and how are you helping them on innovation and enabling innovation at the same time as you talked about keeping the data protected and really thinking about business resiliency and continuity in this to increase the tax surface not only because of mobile, but now with the working from home thing? It's increased exponentially. >> Yeah. So I would just take an example of how Wipro handled this pandemic when it hit us and what solutions we get. So let me just give you a perspective. As we all know the current pandemic has disrupted many industries and we were no exception. Basically COVID has brought to the forefront many crucial factors in terms of business continuity process, the quality of employee experience and the automation connected with the employees. So while we enable our employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate with ease from anywhere from any device in a secure way with a consistent user experience powered by Wipro LiVE Workspace platform which actually takes care of delivering a seamless onboarding of user via the Wipro LiVE Workspace platform and consume all the services the way they used to traditionally consume when they were working from office? So this is something which is the power of Wipro LiVe Workspace platform we have implemented to deliver a seamless employee experience access to the workspaces. That's one but also there are some learnings. When we implemented the solutions on the flip side as businesses we must also acknowledge and be cognizant of the fact that employees are trying hard to juggle between frequent interruptions at home and notifications from various applications we receive both on corporate and personal devices. Basically in a nut shell it is difficult to have the culture of corporate to be working from home. Basically that's another big learning. While all of us are adjusting to this new normal we are in constant touch with our employees and trying to improve the overall employee connect and experience. From a solution perspective let me just give you what we actually did. We have close to 175,000 employees across the globe. Suddenly started working from home post lockdown. What does this mean? The traffic pattern suddenly changed the directions which were traditionally moving on a East to West direction started moving North to South. Basically this means a 100% of the workforce in a corporate started coming from the internet to access the corporate infrastructure and then gain access to the customer network. So basically we had to quickly swing in with our solutions and got our engineering teams to re engineer and tweet the infrastructure and security architecture to this new normal. By leveraging our Wipro BLE and video architectures which is powered by Dell VxRail, NSX we were able to spin off and build capacity on on-prem as well as on cloud in less than 24 hours post one got approvals from the client. Lastly we also deployed a back to work IoT solution which helped our employees to get back to work safely. Basically the solution offers various security parameters. Apart from traditional COVID updates it also helps in scanning the employees' temperatures, employee movement within the office premises, bundled with video analytics and enables secure touch less access to the ODCs for employees who are coming back to work. So we are putting all these solutions together and we pretty much seamlessly were able to navigate from the pandemic situation and get our business back to operations in a matter of days. >> 175,000 People. It's really interesting to think about how that network traffic completely changed from inside the firewalls to everything coming from the outside. It's a lot of people to get working from home right away so congratulations on that. As we come to a close Rajesh, I want to come back to you and talk about again, partnership in the age of this rapid acceleration of technology adoption, new technology move. We talked about the work from home. We've talked about cloud. We haven't talked very much about there's this other big thing that's coming down the pike which is 5G and IoT and kind of this entirely new scale of communication that's machine to machine, not person to person and now these connected devices. The amount of traffic continues to go up into the right at an accelerating rate. Tell us a little bit about the meaningfulness of having a partnership like Wipro that you guys can build solutions around new cutting edge technologies and have that real close connection with the customer or with all the supporting services. >> We'd love to. And maybe first I'll give you a perspective on how our employee base started working from home. Some other statistics that they wanted to show maybe add on towards what Satish said. We transitioned 120,000 employees. Twice the normal to work from home within two weeks and every day we are running something like 20,000 meetings and 16 million zoom minutes per day. That's the kind of traffic IT has seen. >> 16 million zoom minutes per day? >> Zoom minutes per day. >> Wow. >> That's the kind of traffic and our VPN traffic user load just tripled. At software or IT we call Dell digital. It was just a smooth and seamless experience. Now coming back, you said rightly. While we have partnered so far to deliver to the solution which are here today and the customers needs which are here today, what are we going to do for the future needs especially ie 5G IoT? We believe as a corporation that Edge is going to be the next wave of innovation. And next way our customers will benefit. Therefore connectivity to Edge via 5G becomes critical. IoT devices and managing the traffic and contain it there itself rather than flowing it back to data center becomes critical. As an example Wipro and Dell technologies are using our hyper converge solutions along with VMware telco and software for a European telco to provide automation and AI to deliver rapid results for the customer. So these are just early parts of it. We are partnering with Wipro to build solutions around 5G as well as telecom related innovation that'll come into the picture. IoT Satish spoke about a simple example of employee attendance. Imagine this is a need which will only accelerate from every organization, multiply it with the automation and AI that needs to be built into machines and feeding all the data back to drive some intelligence and refine the processes, refine the business outcomes. So I think we are working together on many such things and what's important is in all this, when the universe just explodes to devices and millions of devices, security becomes a paramount feature and we are working with Wipro to build what is called an embedded security into each of the solutions that we are designing. Security cannot be an afterthought or a bolt on it's becoming an integral part of the overall solution as we move towards the Edge. >> Yeah, right. And I think as Satish talked about all the distractions and notifications there're a lot of great opportunities for applied AI too to help people know what to do next. It's hard to be context switching all the time, not only on your work, but also the spouses working from home, the kids are doing homeschooling. It's not an optimal environment at all. Gentlemen thank you for your time. Congratulations on your partnership and hope you have a fantastic Dell Tech World. Sorry we can't be in person but this is not too bad. >> Thank you. >> Jeff >> Thank you >> Thank you Utpal, thank you Satish for your partnership. >> All right. Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Alright. Stay with us for continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. (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)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis I want to lay out my 2020 predictions using insights gleaned from theCUBE blended with ETR spending data. You know, 2019 marked our 10th year of doing theCUBE. Over that time we've had the pleasure of covering nearly 1000 events and milestones, including the exit from the great softness of 2008 and 2009. You know theCUBE has extensively tracked a 10 year bull market. We've covered the era of data. We saw the rise and profitless prosperity of the big data and opensource Hadoop movement, where we predicted the practitioners, not vendors, would benefit the most from big data. We've covered many dozens of acquisitions including the 60 billion dollar chess move made by Michael Dell acquiring EMC, and a launch of hundreds of startups in flash, hyper-converged, big data, AI, blockchain, crypto, security and SaaS. There'll be other days to talk about theCUBE and review that, today's all about predicting the future, using spending data and insights from the thousands of interviews we've done on theCUBE. So let's get right into the ETR data and start with the high-level spending. Remember in October, ETR released its survey results and stated that we're coming out of a multiyear investment cycle in digital transformation. Enterprise IT buyers have learned what works, and on which technologies they're going to double down. They're now narrowing their investments on emerging technologies, picking those winners for the next gen tech, and at the same time, they're cutting redundancies from legacy players that they were keeping on as a hedge. Buyers are picking bundled suites from a handful of mega vendors, and solidifying their investments. We're seeing a multi-generational dynamic repeat itself, where buyers are creating a balance between the convenience of packaged offerings, i.e. bundles, and leveraging best of breed technologies to drive innovation. So on balance, the ETR data shows that a contraction in spending and tepid CIO sentiment is impacting both emerging vendors as well as traditional players, and these trends are most pronounced in the very largest organizations, which have always been the best bellwether in ETR's data sets. Let me share with you what one IT executive said recently that I think really sums up the situation quite well. He said, "ETR's findings mirror what we're doing today, "in that we spend most of 2018 bringing in "a lot of the new, core technology. "I believe what you're seeing now is not a lull in spend, "but an operationalization of what we've already purchased. "We're not spending on what's next yet, "because we're still rolling out what we just bought." This is from a VP of global IT at a large public manufacturing company, I said he, it could be a she as well. I think that she's summing it up correctly, and it reflects many of what customers on theCUBE tell us. Now, let's take a look at the macroeconomy. GDP growth is going to come in at about 2.3% this year, give or take. It's not going to hit the Trump administration's goal of 3% plus, but consumers are clearly powering steady growth. At least for now. IT spending should grow at about a point or two above GDP, so let's put that at, say, 4%. We're right in the middle of a Santa Claus rally, and the S&P is above 3200 today. Tech has been a powerful tailwind for stocks, and I think stocks, tech stock's going to take a breath in early 2020, but I expect continued strong growth in the economy and tech spending after a Q1 pause. I could see the S&P flirting with 3700 or even higher in 2020, and I think the tech sector will be a benefactor of that momentum, providing an impetus for continued growth. Here's my thinking on that. So much of 2020 is going to be about the election, and to me the election is going to be really about the economy. And I predict the economy is going to remain steady. And as the IT leader I quoted earlier said, customers will be operationalizing what's been previously purchased. Here's what's different in 2020. Tech projects have historically been very risky investments, and have required higher internal rates of return, IRRs, to get approved by CFOs. But the cloud has altered two factors. One, is that it's allowed more experimentation for way less money. The second is cloud, by shifting CAPEX to OPEX, allows for much more incremental, lower risk investments. So I think you'll see continued steady growth, powered by the cloud, which allows experimentation, and importantly higher hit rates of success. These successful projects will throw off cash for companies, and CFOs are getting on board because they realize it's driving innovation. They also realize that IT does matter, maybe not in the form that Nick Carr envisioned, but a new generation of IT that creates competitive advantage. This brings me to my first main prediction, which is the growth of cloud computing is going to moderate, but the cloud will continue to steal significant share from on-prem spending. Now the narrative that the pendulum is swinging back in my view, is a false narrative. Rather, the pendulum has swung, and the cloud is the underpinning of innovation. Now having said that, I do think we're seeing a bit of an equilibrium in spending, where buyers have identified those workloads that are going to remain on-prem, which is why you see, for example, AWS, Azure, and Google making moves in hybrid. Hybrid slash on-prem offerings. What this chart here shows from ETR, so from 2010 through October '19 survey on cloud spending, I had to block out the 2020 survey as it's currently in the field, I'm not allowed to show that data. The yellow line is market share, which in ETR parlance, as you remember, is pervasiveness, or mentions in their survey. The blue line is spending momentum, measured as net score, which essentially subtracts the percent of customers spending less from those spending more. The long, steady march of cloud, as you can see, continues, and there's no indication that it's going to abate. That said, the penetration of cloud has become much more meaningful, so share gains will be more hard-fought for the cloud guys. Now, you may see this as a non-prediction, or a hedge. It's not, let me be clear. Cloud will continue to steal share from on-prem, but share gains for the cloud vendors will be more difficult. Which brings me to part B of this prediction. What I'm showing in this chart is market share from ETR's January 2016 survey through October '19. And I'm showing spending for three on-prem vendors within AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud accounts. And I'm picking on Oracle, IBM, and Dell EMC as three prominent on-prem proxies, and you can see the steady decline in market share for these companies. And even though there's a bit of an uptick in October, I don't see this as a reversal. What's going to happen is that traditional on-prem vendors are going to step up their cloud strategies. Specifically with multicloud management. This is going to be the case with Dell, who's going to leverage VMware, and in the case of IBM, they'll try to take advantage of Red Hat in that multicloud game. Now both IBM and Oracle, who each have public clouds are going to dig their heels in, they're going to get customers in a headlock, and provide big financial incentives for them to use their captive clouds. All right, so with the high-level spending comments that I made earlier, and that cloud discussion that we just had as a backdrop, the question is, which companies will do well in the coming year? I'm going to call out five companies, that I want to highlight where the ETR data intersects what we're seeing on theCUBE. The prediction is these five players will do well in 2020, they're going to power through any downturn in spending, and they're going to thrive in the face of the cloud share shift. So the chart here shows data from the ETR October 2019 survey, and it lays out net score or spending momentum for these companies, that I am predicting will be winners in 2020 and beyond. And the five companies are UIPath, Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, and Rubrik. Let me start with UIPath. They are the leader in robotic process automation. I think RPA is going to do well even in a downturn, because more companies will be looking to automate and save money, even in a softer climate. Automation Anywhere is another player in this space, they're doing pretty well, and I predict that UIPath will come out on top of this space, but both UIPath and Automation Anywhere can thrive. Next company is Snowflake, they are changing the analytic database market, and I've covered them before in previous Breaking Analysis segments. They are going to continue to grow nicely in my view. They are 100% cloud-based, and they participate in all popular cloud platforms. Now ironically, they compete with AWS RedShift, who continues to copy some of the innovations that Snowflake has popularized. But AWS and Snowflake are strong partners, so there's room for both companies to thrive. Snowflake especially, as they play in clouds other than just AWS. Which brings me to Databricks. We're seeing a new type of workload emerge in the cloud for modern analytic databases, where organizations are taking all this data that they have, lots of it in the cloud, and they're structuring it within a Snowflake database, or RedShift, and they're bringing Databricks tooling to the equation to be able to query and visualize the data in near real time. Now of course, as I say, AWS plays here with RedShift, and they're selling a lot of EC2, so they love Snowflake. All major cloud players are seeing this type of workload enter the mix, and it's going to be a strong area of growth in 2020 and beyond. Next thing I want to talk about is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is capitalizing on this trend toward cloud-native computing. The company provides opensource tooling for developers, and is all about simplifying application deployment independent of the underlying platform, whether it's virtual, container, or cloud. Five years ago, the players in the space that got all the attention on theCUBE were Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Salt, and today, especially again on theCUBE, you hear the most about Hashi and Ansible, and in fact we were at AnsibleFest with theCUBE, and we heard lots about HashiCorp, so they both complement and compete with the older players. To me, this reminds me of Spark within the Hadoop ecosystem. Hashi has raised about 174 million in VC, and as you can see they have very strong spending momentum in the ETR dataset, with a net score, as shown, of 63%. Now finally, I want to talk about Rubrik, which has been a consistent performer in the ETR dataset. They're trying to transform backup into data management as a discipline. They compete with established players in the data protection space, guys like Veritas, Dell EMC, IBM and CommVault. Now Rubrik is not the only new or newish player here, that's doing very well, Cohesity, who's relatively new, Veeam, which has been around for a decade, both doing very well and showing up strong in ETR surveys, especially Veeam, but Rubrik has been a consistently strong performer and has been outpacing the others, so I want to call them out. Look for these five to do very well in 2020, and into the next decade. So that brings me to my next prediction, I want to talk about Kubernetes. This prediction is twofold. Kubernetes is going to continue its strong showing as this data from ETR shows. This is Kubernetes' market share in the October 2019 survey, so Kubernetes spend had a 76% net score. So very very strong. But the other part of the prediction is that Kubernetes will become embedded into virtually every platform, and people will stop thinking about it as a separate market. Already today, there's little discussion of the idea of a Kubernetes distro, I mean Anthos is an example of a Kubernetes stack, but it can be run in the cloud, it can be run on-prem, anywhere. VMware Tanzu, Microsoft Azure Arc are other examples, they're really not stacks, but they're management platforms that can manage anyone's Kubernetes instances. I like to think of this as kind of like flash. You remember when everyone looked at flash storage as a separate market, well today it's just embedded everywhere. And that's kind of what's happening with Kubernetes. So spending momentum is going to continue to be strong, but by 2023, Kubernetes will be ubiquitous, and not really thought of as a separate entity. All right, for my next prediction, I want to talk about cybersecurity. I did a Breaking Analysis earlier this year on security, and I showed this slide. And as you can see, I've added a little something in the red stars for my prediction. So what this chart shows is two views of net score, the left-hand side shows the ranking by net score, and you can see CrowdStrike, Okta, Shape Security, which was just, by the way, bought by F5, that was an announcement. Twistlock, which is now Palo Alto Networks, and you can see the others down that list. On the right-hand side is net score, but it's ranked by shared N, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the ETR dataset. What I've added is the four star companies, that is those companies that have both spending momentum and are pervasive in the ETR survey. So the prediction is 2020 we'll see the four star companies maintain their position and gain strength in 2020. These include established players with portfolios where they can bundle like Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Proofpoint, Fortinet, and CyberArk Software. And then the newer companies like Okta and CrowdStrike are going to continue to gain share faster than the larger players. Now you also may see companies like SailPoint, Illumio, and SentinelOne emerge as four star companies over the next 24 months. Now the one company that's not on this list that is a major player in security is AWS. AWS is the cloud security leader, and is in a category all by itself in many ways. As I said in my security segment earlier this year, the market is incredibly fragmented, and it's going to stay that way. Each year we look back and say "Did we spend more on security?" and "Are we more safe?" And every year the answer is yes, and no. And 2020 will be no different. Now if you look at the various data sources, we spend approximately 120 billion dollars annually on cybersecurity. The worldwide economy is about 85 trillion in dollar terms, so on balance, we spend about .14% on securing our economy, so we're barely scratching the surface. The market is going to remain highly fragmented, the rich will get richer if they have four stars, new players will continue to enter the space, and M&A will continue to be robust. Now if you exclude my long shot that the S&P will break through 3700 next year, that makes nine predictions. For my 10th and final prediction, I don't have hard data from ETR, but I have a strong opinion on this, and that is that the edge will be won by developers, you've heard me talk about this before. Specifically, platforms like Outposts, which are essentially programmable infrastructure which bring a cloud development platform to the edge, is how that space will evolve. It won't be won by shoving traditional servers and storage boxes out to the edge. Rather, it will grow by coders being able to build new applications and workloads on top of infrastructure as code. Okay, that wraps up my 2020 predictions. I'd very much like to hear your opinion, so you can leave your thoughts or your own predictions in the comments sections of this video, or go to my LinkedIn posts. You can reach me @DVellante on Twitter, love to hear your thoughts. And don't forget, this series is available on iTunes, Spotify, and other podcast platforms for your listening pleasure. I'd like to wish everyone a safe and restful holiday season and a prosperous, healthy 2020. Enjoy your families, enjoy this time, this is Dave Vellante, signing out from the latest episode of theCUBE Insights powered by ETR, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Moscone here. We're at San Francisco VMworld 2019. I'm John Walls, along with Stu Miniman, here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here for our first of three days of coverage here at a very exciting program. I was just blown away by the keynotes this morning. We'll talk about that with Beth Phalen and Rajiv Ramaswami here. Beth is president and GM of data protection at Dell EMC, and Rajiv, of course, the chief operating officer at VMware. So thanks to you both for joining us. >> Good to be here, yeah. >> John: Good to see you both. >> Glad to be here. >> So first off, let's just talk about, if you will, the vibe of the keynotes. Pat, great command of the stage, obviously. Lot of big announcements. But I was just, I thought the whole presentation and the size of the crowd and their reactions were fairly impressive. What was your take on that? >> I totally agree. Being in the audience, it was comprehensive, it was holistic, it told a story that people could connect with, and it recognized just how much the world of IT is changing, and what VMware is doing in influencing that. I was impressed. >> Yeah, no, no, from my vantage point of view, being on the inside here-- >> Yeah. >> It's, yeah, our portfolio continues to get broader and broader. Our relevance to customers keeps getting bigger. And this year in particular, we had a whole series of announcements here. There were two major acquisitions, our largest two acquisitions, over the last week. So there was a lot to digest. And in fact, we were actually working on putting that story together at the very last minute, as you can imagine, because these acquisitions were literally announced on Thursday. (Beth laughs) So a lot came together, it came together beautifully. I thought Pat did a great job putting it all together and giving the story. >> Yeah, I know, the Pivotal, obviously, everybody went 10 days ago, two weeks ago, saying, "It can't happen that fast, can it?" Well, the answer is yes, it can happen that fast. >> Rajiv: Let me give you one more story there. >> Yes, yes. >> You might remember Callum Eade was on stage. He was the guy who swam across the English Channel-- >> Beth: Mm-hm? >> At the very beginning. So just to tell you how last-minute that was, he finished his swim, I talked to him on Friday morning, and then I went to Pat and said, "Pat, you know, one of our guys "actually swam across the English Channel." (Beth laughs) He said, "Yeah, we should have him ontage at VMworld." (Beth and John laugh) >> So we flew him over over the weekend-- >> Wow, wow. >> Here, got him to Vmworld, and there he was onstage. >> (laughs) Oh, man, that's impressive. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It was a great story. It was a good call to bring him in. >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> All right, so obviously, you have this strong partnership that got a little stronger with some announcements today. >> Rajiv: Yeah. >> So let's get into that a little bit. Beth, if you would, talk a little bit about what you announced on stage, or what was announced onstage today. >> Yeah, I mean, there are three things that we're talking about this week, with our good partners at VMware. How we make sure that we have data protection for the Dell EMC cloud, for the VMware Cloud, excuse me, on Dell EMC. Previewing what we're doing to protect Kubernetes environments, which is super exciting. And then the project we talked about just quickly on stage this morning, around how we're doing work together to bring PowerProtect into, as tight as possible, to the best integration for vSphere and our VMware customers. So, Rajiv, anything that I missed, or-- >> Yeah, no, no, at the big-picture level, look, I mean, you've had a long history in data protection solutions. You modernized your portfolio quite a bit over the last year-- >> Beth: Yeah. >> With the introduction of the new X400 appliances and the IDPA PowerProtect software. >> Beth: Yeah. >> And we've been talking together for a while now about, what can we be doing together better? >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> And this just came across, you know, we've been working on this together, and now we have specific things to talk about. So on the first one, which is really data protection for VMware Cloud, now, VMware Cloud on AWS, one of the first use cases, important use cases, is actually around disaster recovery. So customers want to use the cloud or the data as a backup for a DR site. And very cost-effective to do that, it makes a lot of sense. Now, we've been working to continue and improve that solution, and making it much more broadly applicable, making use of native cloud storage capabilities. For example, Amazon S3. And so, that's really the collaboration that we are doing with Beth's team here, where we're using their underlying technology to build a VMware data disaster recovery as a service that will work on our VMware Cloud environments and make use of native cloud storage capabilities. So, very powerful, brings a lot of value for our customers together. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think that everybody watching probably understands just how important it is to have a DR site, but for many companies, it's cost-prohibitive and really old-school to think about having a dedicated DR site. So using the cloud as your destination, if something were to happen, you had to recover, it is an excellent fit, and I expect it to be one of the fastest-growing use cases. We're already seeing it. It's going to continue to grow dramatically going forward, having DR as a service as a core to people's recovery strategy. >> Yeah, Rajiv, one of the things we've been watching is, VMware's always had a robust ecosystem, but it's been going through a major shift. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> You know, VMware kind of at the center, and the server, storage, and network around it to where everything fits in the multi-cloud environment. When we see data protection with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, it's obviously a natural fit, because it's under there. What do you talk to your partners about when you say, "Okay, the Dell side of things is getting "further embedded into VMware"? How do you make sure that you have an open and robust ecosystem without unbalancing that? >> That's a great question. VMware has always prided itself on being a platform company, and you're only a platform company if you actually have a broad ecosystem of people who are building and developing on your platform. >> Stu: True. >> So we are not walking away from that one little bit. We continue to support a very broad-based set of providers across many different functions, whether it be data protection, whether it be security, whether it be compliance, you know, a whole bunch of things around the platform. What we will do, though, is we will pick a set of partners, and we will do deeper integrations with them, right? We are always going to have broad APIs available for everybody. Just as another example with Carbon Black that you saw today, yeah, we had actually partnered with Carbon Black on a deep integration between Carbon Black and AppDefense, okay? But at the same time, we have open APIs with every Guest Introspection provided that there is, and we will continue to maintain that, with every endpoint provided that there is. It's much the same way here. We're going to do deep integration with Beth's team. We are actually using some of their technologies to enhance our services, but also enabling them to do better integration with vSphere and the whole VMware environment, while at the same time allowing a rich ecosystem of third-party providers to work with us on top of our platforms. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Beth, was wondering if you could help us dig in a little bit to that Kubernetes space. >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> So, obviously, a big presence here at the show, you know, Prevalent talked in the keynote. When I walked the show floor, everybody's talking about Kubernetes. >> Beth: Mm-hm, mm-hm. >> So from the data protection standpoint, what's been done to more into that environment? What's different that people might not have known from your group from just a couple of years ago? >> Yeah, a couple of things. One, we've been working on this jointly with Jon Rose's organization and doing an incubation on this for well over a year, and working with Velero, making sure that everything we're doing is tied very closely with what's going on at VMware. And as you start talking about the container space, what you're saying with data protection, it's a different set of assets that you need to protect. You have to make sure that you're protecting the metadata, you have to bring up the whole environment. And so it's sort of a variation on a theme, and what we're particularly proud of is that we're approaching it in a way that's really ground-up and designing data protection, not retrofitting the past, but what are the needs for a Kubernetes environment, and make sure that they can restore that, come back to whatever data they need to do and whatever applications they need to get back to. >> Beth, you talked about Velero, too. I mean, so, what you're talking about, how does that enhance or how is that adding to the data protection capabilities of that, then? What are you building on, in terms of enhanced services there? >> Well, I think, what I understand about the project, I'd like to hear your point of view too, is as Velero builds out and working on the Kubernetes environment, it becomes the center for people's production environment, right? And as you move into a production environment, data protection becomes an essential part of that. So whereas a couple of years ago, Kubernetes might have been something that people were dabbling with, or maybe had not their most important applications running on, it's now becoming center and core. And so, what we're doing, working with VMware, is making sure that directly integrated into that, the UCS has that need around backup, disaster recovery, and all types of RRTO and RPOs are all met, even though now the application's being run in a Kubernetes environment. >> Sort of the conversation around, as we talked about Tanzu, VMware Tanzu-- >> Yeah. >> Which is in our portfolio. >> It's a great name, by the way. >> Thank you. (Beth and John laugh) So the portfolio, the idea here is you're going to have build, run, and manage, and when you look at the manage component of this, it's not just that every service is going to be developed by VMware. There's going to be a set of third-party services that run on top of this platform that will do functions like backup, disaster recovery, for Kubernetes clusters. And my anticipation is that Dell would be a second party, third party on that environment as part of the overall Tanzu portfolio, as a marketplace-type service. >> Beth: Yep, that's what we're working towards. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, just following up on that Tanzu, VMware has mostly been a platform, an infrastructure layer for applications-- >> That's correct. >> You know, Pivotal was the group that really dealt with the modern. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> But you've made some acquisitions. Data protection's always had that integration with the application. What's changing now that requires Dell and VMware to kind of delve upstack a little bit more than it might have in the past? >> For us it's very simple, as Pat already articulated. The world is moving to where it's all about how to build and manage your applications portfolio. That's become a CIO's top job. And so, for us to be relevant to that space, infrastructure companies naturally need to move up-- >> Mm-hm. >> Address the needs of application developers, and while at the same time the application developers need the infrastructure teams to deliver the infrastructure that they can easily build around and manage these apps without having to do it all themselves. So that's really, the bringing together of the developers and the IT operators is what we are doing. And that's the rationale for why we brought Pivotal in-house, and why we are building this overall Tanzu portfolio. >> It's kind of what goes around, comes around, right? >> Absolutely. Well, as Pat explained, right? >> Right. >> You know, six, seven years ago, we weren't really in a position to focus on it. >> Right. >> And it made sense to have Pivotal stand alone-- >> John: The time was right. >> And they invested, they built up their franchise over time, and here we are. The time is right. >> Right, Rajiv, Beth, thank you. I appreciate the time, good to see you. >> Beth: Great discussion. >> Congratulations on day one! Off to a great start, and-- >> Not over yet. (Rajiv and Beth laugh) >> (laughs) Oh, I know, I know, and nor for us. But a great start. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, sir, good to see you both. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Beth, always a pleasure. >> Yes. >> Thanks for being with us once again. >> Thank you. >> Oh, sorry, (laughs) sorry. >> With more live from theCUBE, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2019. (upbeat electronic music)