the other thing that we we foresee happening is that you know 5g starts getting built out at the end of this decade 5g will be potentially the largest capital filled out of the remainder of our careers you know I'm not going anywhere anytime soon you know we're healthy yeah so all I got you know but over the next 20 years this is the big kahuna almost two years announce the plan to combine a year since we completed the combination and we've been very clear the whole way through you know and and now again and into the future on the importance of the open ecosystem and this is why we created this concept of strategically aligned businesses so Dell EMC can work incredibly closely with vmware but so can all of Delhi MCS competitors ten years from now the debates that we're having around Sdn today will be so over and everyone will go of course you know you're gonna have a software-defined network that abstracts because networking is something that needs to span platforms right I think the M word has a vision and it's consistent it really hasn't changed for many many years we were advocating hybrid cloud long long ago and so now you're seeing is the delivery against that vision [Music] the blockchain in enterprise is not the technology it's our ability to think creatively on it right we are not able to envision these kind of things yet we do come in a year I think sorry we have to sit down and think about how to take advantage of that it's pretty exciting

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by vmware and it's ecosystem partners. (bright pop music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE on day three of our continuing coverage of VMWorld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin. My co-host for this segment is John Troyer and we're excited to be joined by Rob Young, who is a CUBE alumni and the manager of product and strategy at Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE, Rob. >> Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> So, Red Hat and VMware. You've got a lot of customers in common. I imagine you've been to many many VMworlds. What are you hearing from some of the folks that you're talking to during the show this week? >> So, a lot of the interest that we're seeing is how Red Hat can help customers, VMware or otherwise, continue to maintain mode one applications, legacy applications, while planning for mode two, more cloud-based deployments. We're seeing a large interest in open-source technologies and how that model could work for them to lower cost, to innovate more quickly, deliver things in a more agile way, so there's a mixture of messages that we're getting, but we're receiving them loud and clear. >> Excellent. You guys have a big investment in OpenStack. >> Yes we do and even back in the early days when OpenStack was struggling as a technology, we recognized that it was an enabler for customers, partners, large enterprises that wanted to create and maintain their own private clouds or even to have a hybrid cloud environment to where they maintained and managed, controlled some aspect of it, while having some of the workloads on a public cloud environment as well so Red Hat has invested heavily in OpenStack to this point. We're now in our 11th version of Red Hat OpenStack platform and we continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, innovation, and contributions. >> Rob, we were with theCUBE at the last OpenStack summit in Boston. Big Red Hat presence there, obviously. I was very impressed at the maturity of the OpenStack market and community. I mean, we're past the hype cycle now, right? We're down to real people, real uses, real people using it. A lot of very, people with a strong business critical investment in OpenStack and many different use cases. Can you kind of give us a picture of the state of the OpenStack market and userbase now that we are past that hype cycle? >> So, I think what we're witnessing now in the market is that there's a thirst for OpenStack. One, because it's a very efficient architecture. It's very extensible. There's a tremendous ecosystem around the Red Hat distribution of OpenStack and what we're seeing from enterprises, specifically the TelCo industry, is that they see OpenStack as a way to lower their cost, raise their margins in a very competitive environment, so anywhere you see an industry or a vertical where there's very heavy competition for customers and eyeballs, that type of thing. OpenStack is going to play a role and if it's not already doing so, it's going to be there at some point because of the simplification of what was once complex but also in the cost savings, it could be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment. >> You mention TelCo and specifically OpenStack kind of value for companies that need to compete for customers. Besides TelCo, what other industries are really kind of primed for embracing OpenStack technologies? >> So, we're seeing it across many industries, finance and banking, healthcare, public sector, anywhere where there's an emphasis on the move to open source and to open compute environment, open APIs. We're seeing a tremendous growth in traction and because Red Hat has been the leader in Linux, many of these same customers who trust us for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are now looking to us for the very same reason on OpenStack platform, because much like we have done with Enterprise Linux, we have adopted an upstream community-driven project. We have made it safe to use within an environment in an enterprise way, in a supported way as well, the subscription. So, many industries, many verticals. We expect to see more, but primary-use cases, NFE and TelCo, healthcare, banking, public sector are among the top dogs out there. >> Is there a customer story that kind of stands out in your mind as really a hallmark that showcases the success of working with Red Hat and OpenStack? >> Well there are many customers, there are many partners that we have out there that we work with, but I would say that if you look at some of the, four of out of five of the large TelCos - Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, others that we've recently done business with would be really good examples of not only customer use cases but how they're using OpenStack to enable their customers to have better experience with their cell networks, with their billing, with their availability, that type of thing. And we had two press announcements that came out in May, one is an educational institution of a consortium, a very high profile Northeast learning institutions, public institutions, that are now standardized on OpenStack and that are contributing, and we've also got Oakridge, forgive me, it escapes me, but there's a case study out there on the Red Hat website that was posted on May the eighth that depicts how they're using our product and how others can do the same. >> Rob, switching over a little bit to talking a little bit more about the tech and how the levers get pulled, right, we're talking about cloud, right, another term, "past the hype cycle," right? It's a reality. And when you're talking about cloud, you're talking about scale. >> Rob: Yes. >> We mentioned Linux, OpenStack, and Red Hat kind of built on a foundation of Linux, it's super solid, super huge community, super rich, super long history, but can you talk about scale up, scale out, data center, public cloud, private, how are you seeing enterprises of various sizes address the scale problem and using technologies like the Red Hat and CloudStack to address that? >> So there's a couple things, there's many aspects to that question but what we have seen from OpenStack is when we first got involved with the project, it was very much bounded by the number of servers that you needed to deploy an OpenStack infrastructure on. What Red Hat has done, or what we've done as a company is we've looked at the components and we have unshackled them from each other, so that you can scale individual storage, individual network, individual high availability, on the number of servers that best fit your needs. So if you want to have a very large footprint with you know, many nodes of storage, you can do that. If you want to scale that just when peak season hits, you can do that as well. But we have led the community efforts to de-shackle the dependencies between components so from that aspect we have scaled the technology, now scaling operational capabilities and skillsets as well. We've also led the effort to create open APIs for management tools. We've created communities around the different components of OpenStack and other outsourced technologies - >> Automation a big part of that as well, right? >> Automation as well, so if you look at Ansible, as an example, Red Hat has a major stake in Ansible, and it is predominantly the management scripting language of choice, or the management platform of choice, so we have baked that into our products, we have made it very simple for customers to not only deploy things like OpenStack but OpenShift, CloudForms, other management capabilities that we have, but we've also added APIs to these products so that even if you choose not to use a Red Hat solution, you can easily plug in a third-party solution or a home-grown solution into our framework or our stack so that you can use our toolset, single pane of glass, to manage it all. >> So with that, can you tell us a little bit about the partner ecosystem that Red Hat has, and what you've done sounds like to expand that to make your customers successful in OpenStack deployments. >> Absolutely, so as you're aware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we certified most of the hardware, or all of the hardware, OEMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a tremendous ecosystem around Enterprise Linux. For OpenStack, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Red Hat right now. If you look at the ecosystem and the partners that are just around OpenStack on its own, we've got an entire catalog of hundreds of partners, some at a deeper level than others, integration-wise, business-wise, whatever, but the ecosystem is growing and it's not because of Red Hat's efforts. We have customers and partners that are coming to us saying, we need a storage solution, we're using, you know, NetAMP as an example. You need to figure out a way to integrate with these guys, and certify it, make sure that it's something that we've already invested in, it's going to work with your product as well as it works with our legacy stuff. So the ecosystem around OpenStack is growing, we're also looking at growing the ecosystem around OpenShift, around Red Hat virtualization as well, so I think you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap in those ecosystem as well, which is a great thing for us. The synergies are there, and I just think it's only going to help us multiply our efforts in the market. >> Go ahead John. >> Oh Rob, talking again, partnerships, I've always been intrigued at the role of open source upstream, the open source community, and the role of the people that take that open source and then package it for customers and do the training, enablement. So can you talk maybe a little bit about some of the open source partners and maybe how the role of Red Hat in translating all that upstream code into a product that is integrated and has training, and is available for consumption from the IT side. >> Sure. So at Red Hat, we partner not only with open source community members and providers but also with proprietaries. So I just want to make sure that everybody understands we're not exclusive to who we partner with. Upstream, we look for partners that have the open source spirit and mind, so everything that they're doing that they're asking us to either consider as a component within our solution or to integrate with, we're going to make sure that they're to the letter of the law, contributing their code back, and there's no hooks or strings attached. Really the value comes in, are they providing value to their customers with the contribution and also to our combined customers, and what we're seeing in our partnerships is that many of our partners, even proprietary partners like Microsoft as an example, are looking at open source in a different way. They're providing open source options for their customers and subscription-based, consumption-based models as well, so we hope that we're having a positive impact in that way, because if you look at our industry it's really headed toward the open source, open API, open model and the proprietary model still has the place and time I believe but I think it's going to diminish over time and open source is going to be just the way people do business together. >> One of the things that you were talking about kind of reminded me of one of the things Michael Dell said yesterday during the keynote with Pat Gelsinger and that was about innovation and that you really got to, companies to be successful need to be innovating with their customers and it sounds like that's definitely one of the core elements of what you're doing with customers. You said customers and partners are bringing us together to really drive that innovation. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Michael Dell, by the way. But what we see is because of the open source model, you can release early and often, and you can fail early, and what that does is encourage innovation. So it's not only corporations like Red Hat that are contributing to upstream projects, OpenStack as an example or Linux as an example, or KVM as an example. There's also college students, there's people out there who work for Bank of America. Across the fruited plains all over the world. And the one thing that unites us is this ability to recognize the value of our contributions to an open source community, and we think that that really helps with agile development, agile delivery, and if you look at our project deliveries for OpenStack as an example, OpenStack releases a major version of its product every six months. And because of contributions that we get from our community, we're able to release our - and testing, it's not just, contributions come in many forms. Testing is a huge part of that. Because of the testing we get from a worldwide community, we're able to release shortly after a major version of upstream OpenStack because that innovation. In a pure waterfall model, it's not even possible. In an open source model, it's just the way of life . >> So as we're kind of wrapping up VMworld day three, what are some of the key takeaways for you personally from the event and that Red Hat has observed in the last couple of days here in Las Vegas. >> So there's a couple of observations that have kind of been burned into my brain. One is we believe at Red Hat, our opinion is that virtualization as a model will remain core, not only to legacy applications, mode one, but also to mode two, and the trend that we see in the model, that we see is that for mode two, virtualization is going to be a commodity feature. People are going to expect it to be baked into the operating system or into the infrastructure that they're running the operating system or their applications on. So we see that trend and we've suspected it, but coming to VMworld this week helped confirm that. And I say that because of the folks I've talked to, after sessions, at dinner, in the partner pavilion. I really see that as a trend. The other thing I see is that there's a tremendous thirst within the VMware customer base to learn more about open source and learn more about how they can, you know, leverage some of this not only to lower their total cost of ownership and not to replace VMware, but how they can complement what they've already invested in with faster, more agile-based mode two development. And that's where we see the market from a Red Hat standpoint. >> Excellent. Well there's a great TEI study that you guys did recently, Total Economic Impact, on virtualization that folks can find on the website. And Rob, we thank you for sticking around and sharing some of your insights and innovations that Red Hat is pioneering and we look forward to having you back on the show. >> Great to be here. Thanks. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage, day three, of VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright pop music)

>> Hi everyone, I'm Sam Kahane and you're watching The Cube from VM World 2017. Excited to be here with Henning Volkmer, the American CEO of ThinPrint. Henning, thanks for coming on the Cube today. >> Sam, thanks for having me. >> So, can you tell us a little bit about your company? >> Sure, ThinPrint's a pretty well-known name in the virtualization space I think. VM are actually licensed a bit of our technology for us and view we've been working with us Centrics for almost 20 years, Microsoft around their term of services offering. And really trying to build solutions that allow people to manage printing and the enterprise and make it as easy and performance oriented as possible. >> Great so we're now at Wednesday. The event's been going on for a while. And you've been talking to the community and customers, what have you been hearing? >> It's been pretty incredible. I think everyone's extremely excited about the announcement, about the new technologies that are coming out, things moving to the cloud and we've had an announcement of our own, I think that was well received, so it's been a good week. >> So that's part of the reason we wanted to bring you up here. You have an announcement, a big announcement. Could you share that with the community? >> Sure, we're announcing ez-bash. It's a truly cloud-based server that's print management solution. All of the annoying things like assigning drivers to printers, assigning printers to users, that all moves into the cloud. But the actual print process remains a local direct IP printing directly from the user to their printers so that they don't rely on any of the network connections outside of their office and also we never actually see any of the print data for anyone's concerned about privacy. >> What do you want the viewers to take away from this interview, one or two lines, what's the takeaway? >> Printing's important to their business. They may not recognize it as much as it actually is important. It probably is a little bit annoying at times. It really doesn't have to be. Just come talk to us, and we'll have a solution for you. >> Thank you, you heard it here on the Cube.

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is VMworld 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host, Peter Burr. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me back. >> So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked. What's happening at the show, a bunch of parties last night. How's the vibe? >> Colin: Huh, were there? >> Responses from customers to your announcements, give us the update. >> Nah, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Had to keep my voice. Shame. >> Dave: I went, I just didn't talk. >> Smart man. No, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show, and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, you know, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converge, because that's what I do for a living. You know, and I brought Josh along to talk about his experiences with hyper-converged. But I've been having a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about, and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. >> So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about, what's your role? >> Sure. Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa, if anybody's familiar with that. We're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. >> And your role? >> I'm a VP of information systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. >> Okay. So maybe paint a picture, well, let me start here. What do you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business, and how they ripple through to IT? What are those drivers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world, with the FinTechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisories, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation, where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. >> Yeah, so things like Blockchain and Crypto, and you guys launching your own currency any time soon? >> Josh: Nope. We are monitoring it, but nothing like that. >> So how do those, I mean somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, you know, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like wow, that's a pretty radical statement. And everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there. >> Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side, and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got an increase government's regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. >> So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. >> Sure. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stack, server, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, hyper-converged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. >> So can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the before and the after. What did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity, and how many of these and those, or whatever detail you're comfortable with. >> Josh: Sure. >> And what happened afterwards? >> Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-located our data center facilities, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continued to grow within that type of simplified, or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we've been able to reduce rack space. I think at my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four, and we're running the exact same work load at a higher performance. >> How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? >> It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services, and not always be the in the weeds, or the break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. >> So you went to somebody, CFO, business, whoever, to ask for money, because you had a new project. But you would have had to do that anyway, correct? >> Josh: Yes, yes. >> Okay, so... >> Was it easier? >> Was it easier with the business case or were you nervous about that, because you were sticking your neck out? >> No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it, so what I brought forward was well-vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC, and they just really were there the entire step of the way. >> And what was the business impact? Or the IT impact, from your standpoint? >> Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition of data domain, and the data protection software. >> Peter: Is that important in banking? >> (laughs) You want to make sure that people check your data, right? >> If it's my bank, yeah. >> So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. >> So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyper-converged or converged, is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hills Bank and Trust? >> You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. I've got a systems group, a networking group, and a security group, so transforming or doing things differently within that IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp-up time to get VxRail up and running was very minimal. >> You still have a systems group, a network group and a security group? >> At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that, and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point we're still operating within that. >> Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor? Whether it's FTE's, or how they spent their time? >> We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure, and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this, is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider, and not just an operational group that fixes servers and storage. >> So you're saying a little less? >> A little less. >> It wasn't a dramatic change? >> We're still transforming though, so we still have this traditional IT structure within our group, so I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I had to start with that hardware layer first. >> What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of freeing up resource, and what do you want to do with that resource? >> Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. >> And any desire to get more of your weekends back, or spend more time with your family, or maybe golf a little bit more? >> Exactly. Golf is always good. You know, we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend managing these platforms, or at least the hardware standpoint, firmware upgrades, and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware, and then we've got to appropriately match the storage side or the networking side of it. >> And the backup comment. Easier to back up, more integrated? >> It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software, and it's just really simplified it, so backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. >> Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and attentions to some other problems that might serve the business? >> Exactly. You know, one of the themes I've picked up here at VMworld has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking, but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. >> We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? >> You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger, and it was a solid relationship. They'd been there the entire way during the merger, every question was answered. It wasn't anything that was, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. >> So trust, really. >> Josh: Absolutely. >> And then if you had to do it over again, anything you'd do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? >> You know, I don't think so. Again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. >> Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful, then? What did you do up front that led to that success? >> You know, it was just a lot of relationship-building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships, and Dell EMC does that exact same thing. >> All right, gents. Thanks very much for coming back to The Cube. >> Josh: Thanks, guys. Good to be here. >> Thanks, Josh, take care. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from Vmworld 2017. Be right back.

>> So, we see this picture, right, of the hybrid cloud. And we've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So, let's look over at the public cloud, and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the VMware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world. And, with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon, and on this stage, last year, we announced our first generation of products. No better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that, it's my pleasure to bring to the stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of AWS. Please welcome Andy Jassy. (crowd applauding) (upbeat music) Thank you, Andy. You know, you honor us with your presence. You know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last year. Can you give us some perspective on that, Andy, and what customers are doing with this? >> Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. You know, the offering that we have together, VMware Cloud and AWS, is very appealing to customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to manage their infrastructure for years, but be able to deploy it in AWS. And we see a lot of customer momentum, and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. In transportation, you see it with Stagecoach. In media and entertainment you see it with Discovery Communications. In education, MIT and Cal Tech, in consulting, Accenture and Cognizant and DXC. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment. And the number of customers using the offering is doubling at every quarter. So, people are really excited about it. And I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on-premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is MIT, where they're right now in the process of migrating, in fact they just did migrate 3,000 VMs from their data centers to VMware Cloud and AWS. And this would've taken them years before, to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. >> Yeah, it was really, really spectacular. And they're just a fun company, and, you know, to work with, and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases, as well. And, you know, probably the second most common example is, well I'll say, on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. And we have great examples of customers using it for that. And, one in particular is Brink's, right? Everybody knows the Brink's security trucks, and you know, armored trucks coming by. And they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for DR. So we quickly built a DR protection environment for 600 of the VMs. You know, they migrated their mission-critical workloads, and voila, stable and consistent DR, and now they're eliminating that site, and looking for other migrations, as well. >> It saved 10 to 15 percent in the process, doin' it. >> Yeah, it was just great. You know, one of the things I believe, Andy, customers should never spend capital on DR, ever again, with this kind of capability in place. It is just that game changing. You know, and, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach. We promised to make the service available a year ago, with the global footprint of Amazon. And now we've delivered on that promise. And, in fact, today, or yesterday if your an Aussie, right down under, we announced in Sydney as well. And now we're in US, Europe, and in APJ. >> Yeah, it's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course, Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering, too, in just the quarter that's been out there. And probably, of the many requests customers have had, you've had, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all of the regions that AWS has regions. And, I can tell you, by the end of 2019, we'll largely be there, including with GovCloud. So, GovCloud-- >> Oh yeah, you guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. >> Yeah, it's a government-only region that we have, that a lot of federal government workloads live in. And, we are pretty close together having the offering, FedRAMP authority to operate, which is a big deal and a game-changer for governments, because then they'll be able to use the familiar tools that they use in VMware not just to run their workloads on premises, but also in the cloud as well, with the data privacy requirements and security requirements they need. So it's a real game-changer for government, too. >> Yeah, and as you can see by the picture here, basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are, and have an availability zone, we're going to be there running on top of you. >> Giddyup! >> Yeah, let's get with it (laughs). Okay, we're a team, go faster, okay. You know, and, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation. And, you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect. And since we went life, in the Oregon region, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases. M2 was really about mission-critical at scale, and we added our second region. We added our Hybrid Cloud Extension. With M3, we moved the global rollout, and we launched in Europe. With M4, we really added a lot of these mission-critical governance aspects, started to attack all of the industry certifications. And today, we're announcing M5, alright? And, with that, I think we have this little cool thing that we're doing with EBS and storage. >> Yeah, well you know, two of the most important priorities for customers are cost and performance. And so, we have a couple things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those. On the storage side, we've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block Store, or EBS, with VMware's vSAN. And we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that is much, it's very high-capacity and much more cost-effective. You'll start to see this initially on the VMware Cloud native USR5 instances, which are compute instances that are memory-optimized. And so, this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use EBS by default, and it'll be much more cost-effective for storage or memory-intensive workloads. It's something that you guys have asked for, it's been very frequently requested, and it hits preview today. And then, the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate VMware's NSX along with AWS's Direct Connect, to have a private, even higher performance connectivity between on-premises and the cloud. So, you know, very, very exciting new capabilities that show deep integration between the companies. >> Yeah, you know, and that aspect of the deep integration has really been the thing that we committed to. You know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day, right, on bringing together, and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way, so that we can deliver new services. Just like Elastic DRS, and the vSAN EBS, really powerful capabilities. And, that pace of innovation continues. So, M Next maybe, maybe M, maybe six? I dunno, we'll see. Alright, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation. You know, completing all of the capabilities of NSX, you know, full integration for all of the direct-connect capabilities, really expanding that. You know, improving license capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding PKS on top of, for expanded developer capabilities. >> Yeah! >> So just, oh, thank you. (audience applauding) I think that was formerly known as storage Chad, so anyway, alright. And, you know, we're continuing this pace of innovation, going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today, Andy. >> Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We have a pretty big database business in AWS, and it's both on the relational and on the non-relational side. And the business does billions of dollars in revenue for us. And, on the relational side, we have a service called Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS, that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using, because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate, and scale their databases. And, so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode, and will be for a while. And a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases, but on premises? And so, we talked about it, and we thought about it, and we worked with our partners in VMware, and I'm excited to announce today, right now, Amazon RDS on VMware. (audience applauding) And so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon RDS to VMware's customers for their on-premises environments. So, what you'll be able to do is, you'll be able to provision databases, you'll be able to scale the compute, or the memory, or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create read replicas, to scale your database reads. And you can deploy those replicas either on premises or in AWS. You'll be able to deploy in high-availability configuration by replicating the data to different VMware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises, or in AWS. And then, you'll be able to take all those databases, and if you eventually want to move them to AWS, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It'll be available on Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, and MariaDB. I think it's very exciting for our customers. And I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership, and listen to what customers want, and then innovate on their behalf. >> Absolutely. Thank you, Andy, it is thrilling to see this. (audience applauding) And as we said when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go-to-market. But also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they want it. Cloud, on premise, right, on premise to the cloud, it really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base, and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for joining us here, >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> At the Emerald 2018. >> Thank you guys. Appreciate it. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here at VMworld 2017 day three wrap-up. We're going to wrap up the whole show. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Keith Townsend. Cube, set, two sets of coverage. Guys, great job, we have Justin Warren as well, John Troyer, Lisa Martin. Great team, guys, amazing. Three days, a lot of content, wall-to-wall coverage. Double barrel shotgun of Cube content. Amazing. What's left in the tank? Let's get this done. Dave, your thoughts as VMworld comes down to a close. >> Well, so I missed VMworld last year as you know, 'cause I was doing another show. Pat was giving me a lot of grief for that. But if I go back two years ago, two years ago VMware was shrinking. Its license revenue was in decline. Its cloud strategy was in continued disarray. Customers were kind of, you know, losing a lot of faith. >> John: Ecosystem was in turmoil. >> And the world thought that Amazon was going to completely destroy this company. Fast forward two years later, license growth, you know, 12-13%, the company's growing. It's nearly eight billion dollars, three billion dollars of operating cash, big stock buybacks, clarity on the cloud and, I think, and I'd love for Keith's opinion on this, a recognition of the customers that "I can't just throw everything in the cloud." Okay, that's one thing, but what I can do is try to bring the cloud model to my data, and AW, I mean Amazon, sorry, VMware is going to be a partner in doing that. And I think those have all been tailwinds along with some product cycles and some >> John: And Dell Technologies buying out from the federation which was taking on water. Let's not forget. Let's not forget about the federation EMC owned VMware and that was bought by Dell. >> People talk about the Dell discount. I'm not seeing the Dell discount right now. >> What is a Dell discount? What does that mean? >> The Dell discount is because Dell owns VMware, just like when EMC owned VMware, it somehow shackles them and depresses the value. Michael obviously doesn't agree. >> So product focus as well has been not diminished at all. The products are front and center. They still got the sessions. Guys, on the product side, what's your view? >> Strong product offering. I really love the message they want. A lot of the response from the community was like, "Pat is feeling energized." He has this shadow of what is going to happen post-acquisition. Is there going to be a Dell discount? You know what? VMware, you know, famously, five years ago, Pat was onstage. He said he's going to double down on virtualization. He jettisoned Pivotal, and we were all wondering, "What is he doing?" Proved over the long run he was right. Last year, this year, he's doubled down, not on just virtualization, but on this concept of SDDC. And it's finally starting to pay off. We're seeing consistently this concept of VCF. VMware cloud foundation on premises, off prem, and even in AWS, ironically. You know, three or four years ago, we were like, well, is OpenStack going to eat VMware's lunch? VMware has turned the tables and become that OpenStack layer, that consistent cloud layer, at least for that legacy type of way to do IT. Taking your internal data center processes and moving them to the cloud consistently across their vCAN network in the AWS. >> So if I get this right, you're basically saying that VMware essentially went from a position where they're twisting in the wind at all levels, turmoil in every department, every, house is on fire, to pulling one major bold bet, grab it out of the hat, kicking ass, taking names, Pat Gelsinger and team made good calls. >> You know what, I'm not a fan of calling what VMware's SDDC thing a private cloud. I don't think it's true private cloud. It is valuable to the infrastructure, but it's not private cloud, but customers love the message. Take what I'm doing now, check an easy box, move it into AWS or vCAN and it's resonating. >> Well certainly, Stu just gave you the eye dagger, 'cause Stu, the true private cloud report from Wikibon, which has been going viral at the show, been the talk of the show, everyone has been talking about it, Wikibon's true private cloud report. People love that, too, because the message is simple, take care of business at home, called the on prem. Yeah, change the operating model, that's going to take some time. >> So, my thought on this is, for years, we were talking about the stack wars. Lately, we've been talking about the cloud wars, and for the last few years, when I talked to the partner ecosystem, they were shrinking their booths. They were looking for alternatives. Remember Cisco? Aw geez, flaying anything but VMware. Let's see if we can do this. You know, IBM who was a big VMware partner. Well, they got rid of X86. Where are they going to part with VMware? On and on, HPE going closer with Microsoft. Even Dell, pre-acquisition, how much deeper they going to go with Microsoft? Now, you know, John, we've been talking on theCUBE for a while. You know, there's Microsoft. Their stack, their partnerships, their application, where they're putting it. Amazon, huge elephant in the room, when they made the deal it was like, oh well, you know, Pat's on his way out the door, and he's kind of, you know, pulling one over on Dell before he leaves. Now, I think we understand a little bit better where this fits in that portfolio of the Dell family. Open source, still something we beat on Pat and EMC before that. They're not really open source. They've got a proprietary software alternative that their partners seem excited about. They've really fumbled around with their cloud strategy for a year. They've got one that seems to be going well. We'll see, 4,500 service provider partners, the Amazon thing. We will still see where revenue comes. >> Stu, that's a good point. Pat Gelsinger was kicking ass as a CEO now, but his channels on his job many times, so props to Pat. He made some good calls, stayed on course, held the line on the direction, did not cave at all, him and his team, they did it. There's been some turnover as we know in VMware. I'll see the results. I'll clear the scoreboard. They're winning. Question I'll put to you guys right now. Impact of Andy Jassy from AWS here on day one. How much of an impact was that? He made some statements. And the question I want to ask you, in addition to the impact, is he said, "This is not an optical deal." Most companies make optical illusional deals, make it look like they're all in, and they don't really deliver. So one, impact of Jassy being here and two, who was he talking about? >> Dave: Well >> Where's the Barney deal? >> Well, so okay, first thing is I saw, I've always seen that AWS deal from Andy Jassy's perspective as TAM expansion. Big part of a CEO's job is, I've got to expand my TAM, especially when you see the growth of AWS, and it's slowing down a little bit, even though it's still impressive. He's got to expand his TAM. Well, how does AWS do that? Look to 500,000 VMware customers. So that's number one. Barney deal? There are a lot of Barney deals out there. I mean, most... >> What are you referring to, 'cause Google came on the stage the next day. I was getting tweets saying "Azure?" Stu, guys, who's the deal? Who was Andy Jassy talking about when he was looking at the VMware customers saying, essentially, this is not, implying others are? >> I'm not sure that he was necessarily throwing shade at anyone specifically. What there was is there was 18 months from when this deal went through, a lot of work. This was a lot of engineering work. Talk to the cloud foundation team, talk to the VSAN team. The amount of work to actually integrate, because we know Amazon actually has an extensive engineering team. They hyper-optimize what they're doing, so this is not some white box that I just slapped VMware on and said the BIOS, you know, it works and everything where I still am a little concerned if I'm, you know, a VMware employee as customers, I talked to some customers that really excited about this, the Lighthouse customers. They say it's going to get my team that loves their vCenter. They love everything, it's going to help them move faster. Then, you're talking to, "Oh there's these services they're going to be able to use." I'm like well, how much are they going to realize oh hey, this is great, and the VMware sales reps are just going to get eaten by the lion while the customer goes off. >> And so the impact's big then, you're saying, but you won't answer the question of who he's referring to. You don't think he's referring to anyone. Keith, what do you think? >> Let's look at, I like the comment about how difficult the integration was. Last year when I read, it said something like, wait, hold on what, the AWS, who is notorious about controlling their message, what I thought was funny is that Andy didn't use the term private cloud, he didn't use the term VMware cloud, he, VMware infrastructure and AWS, which is a massive engineering effort. So from that, I question whether or not they could execute upon that, but Andy Jassy being onstage on Monday showed the commitment that we're going to make these other services work, the total addressable market of 500,000 additional customers. You don't do this for bare metal servers. >> John: VMware has 500,000 customers? >> Yeah. That's the total addressable market, but that's not where AWS is going to grow by halting physical servers, by selling more Lambda, selling more CDN, selling more PAS, is the key, and where VMware and AWS relationship his weak is in that true integration between the two hybrid IT environments. So when you say, "Where's the barney deals?" the barney deals are, I think it's across the industry. Unless you're getting fully in bed and committed to make that level of investment >> No but engineering resources, this comes back down to what, the new kind of engagement between biz dev deals look like. You need to have that kind of level. >> I have no problem pointing to the Nutanix Google deal, anything that people are doing with Azure, no one's partnered at this level. >> Okay, Azure is a good one too, because I've heard from startups that have been enticed by the dollars, 'cause Microsoft's been sprinkling some cash on, who have left to go back to AWS, because of technical reasons, reverse proxies, basically software clued just to basically make stuff work. >> Well, so, where do we, how much do we know about the IBM VMware relationship? Because I mean IBM's >> Pat brought it up today. >> Soft layer hosting, right? They've got a lot more experience with VMware, IBM has said, I think they're shipping, they've been shipping for quite some time. So there's an example of engineering that had already largely been done, that's actually delivering value for customers. Pat probably brought it up because it's a great distribution channel for him. And I think Keith's right on. AWS doesn't speak in terms of VMs. They talk in terms of cloud services, like Lambda, database services, middleware, PAS layers, that's really where they're going to hook people in this community into their platform. >> Okay, so here's a question to end the segment as we wrap up the show, because this is kind of where it's all going. To me, my big epiphany was the following. Andy Jassy, statesman, Harvard MBA, now CEO of AWS, ticking names, ticking this, huge accomplishments, he's done great in his career, he's only getting better. And then Sam Ramji, great developer chops, knows software ecosystems, not Andy Jassy in terms of the title, but in terms of status, still a solid guy. Two contrasting positions, running the biggest cloud today, to Google brainpower, okay? So you're looking at that and you're saying, "Hmm, where is this going to go?" So the question on the table is, what does it take for someone to be successful in today's IT environment? Does IT need to be smarter in business or does need to be more smarter in IT, or both, and does Google have enough IQ in IT to actually make the products fast enough or are they at risk? >> Well I'll take the customer point of view, and you know, we always talk about people, process, technology. The technology is maturing, and it's maturing pretty quickly, but maybe still not quite to the point where the true private cloud vision is where we need it to be, but what's going to slow that down is the people and process side is going to take a lot longer. Stu, you made a comment yesterday, VMware's moving at the pace of the CIO. >> It's Keith's line, he's been using all week. >> Okay, great line and Robin Matlock heard that today, course marketing CMO said, "And the CIO needs to move faster." (men laugh) Well guess what? They can't. I thought that was just a perfect testament >> But that is exactly the dilemma isn't it? >> It really is, and this stuff is hard. And cloud doesn't necessarily make it any easier, (laughs) if anything, it makes it more complex, 'cause it's a completely new business model. >> But remember the old term, forklift upgrade? Okay, you don't have forklift upgrades anymore, you have rip and replace, whatever word you want to use. >> Stu: Now we have lift and shift. >> Lift and shift, rip and replace, lift and shift. Is Google, and this is my challenge to Sam, I didn't have time to ask him this question, I'll certainly do one on one next time I see him. Is Google smart enough with IQ in IT, certainly we know they're smart enough, but do they have enough IQ in IT to really make the transformation, or are they betting on a rip and replace version of a cloud? >> So John, no doubt Google's smart, and they built amazing things that, the ripple that Google has through the industry is phenomenal. They spin off whole industries based on what they're doing. Google played a very different game than Amazon is, you know, when you talk to customers and how they're first getting onto Google, you know, data's really important, analytics of course. Couple of years ago Google was saying, "Oh, we're just going to be that data analytics cloud," now of course they're trying to be a big player. Amazon, the company, remember, Amazon isn't just AWS. Andy Jassy fits into Jeff Bazer's great plans. You know, I'd love to hear, when we go to reinvent, what's happening in Whole Foods that's impacted by AWS. They are everywhere, they are, you know, Walmart did. >> How about TAM expansion, my wife's checking Amazon even more. >> But this is really interesting right, because Walmart's now using its muscle to say, "Hey, you going to do business "with AWS" >> Absolutely >> "And Whole Foods? "You're not doing business with us." So the point being that digital business is allowing companies to traverse industries and now you're seeing it in really interesting competitive lashbacks. >> So Capital One was onstage, I say something that over the past couple of years been controversial, no one believes me, but I believe this is what needs to happen. Capital One claimed that it's a technology company, they're not a bank. Well I want to bank with a bank, that' a whole 'nother conversation. But technology is just a tool to get your job done, and just like we had bookkeepers that knew Excel and then eventually Excel just became a part of your toolkit. AI, I talked to Chuck Hollis of Oracle about this on the podcast the other day. AI is just going to be a business toolkit that a business user uses. To the question, business users will become smarter at using technology. The cloud providers that enables the business user to have the least amount of friction to use that technology, to solve business challenges will win. The question is, is that Google or Andy Jassy, who has done it with Amazon, or some other cloud provider that's eating their own dog food. >> Okay guys, let's wrap this up. Let's go around the table, one word, two words, how do you wrap up VMware's position vis a vis as they go forward? >> VMware's on fire, I think the data center's on fire, the ecosystem is reforming around the cloud. And there's a lot of momentum right now, I mean I'm wondering, okay, what's going to happen to derail this, but right now the fundamentals look very good. >> Relevant, John. >> Yeah. >> Cool and relevant again. It's right, you know, cool, we can all argue, you know, look, I like what I heard with Amazon, it was better than I was expecting coming in. You know, getting in there, they talked about serverless, they talked about edge computing, something I actually had a couple really good conversations ticking to, partners doing IoT, and customers looking at that. If they can be relevant, not just in the data center, but in the cloud, and even at the edge, VMware's going to have a good life going forward. >> Yeah, and I'll wrap it up, you stole my word relevant, so I'll say, I'll a little bit further than relevant, VMware is still the leader in enterprise infrastructure software. They're not letting that lead go. >> But just on that, the last thing, they're an infrastructure software company. I think they showed how they can be more than that in the future. >> And my take is, smart strategy playing out, now people are starting to realize the long game that Pat's been playing. It's showing up in the financial results, and there's clarity, and you can see the game playing out, you're starting to see there where they're going to position, so good job, guys, that's a wrap. Want to thank our sponsors. Without sponsors theCUBE would not be able to come for the three days of wall-to-wall coverage provided to the community. We get great support from the folks on Twitter, we get support from the folks who watch the videos, want to thank you for watching, and also the sponsors, VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell EMC, IBM, OVH, CenturyLink, Datrium, Densify, Druva, Hitachi, INFINIDAT, Kamarino, NetApp, Nutanix, Red Hat, Rackspace, Rubrik, Skytap, Veeam and Zadara Storage. Thanks to all the 20 sponsors that we can go out and bring our best stuff here. Really appreciate your support. Thanks for watching theCUBE. This is a wrap from VMworld, thanks guys, thanks everybody here, and that's a wrap for VMworld 2017, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (bouncy upbeat music) >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. This is theCube. I am your host, Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined for this special segment. Calling it the independent wrap analysis multi-hybrid focus with Blue Cow. Blue Cow is here. First-time guests on the program and Blue Cow has brought a few of the friends. Friends of mine, people that I got to know through this phenomenal VMware community also guest host on the program here. Been a pleasure working with all three of you. John Troyer from Tech Reckoning Justin Warren from Pivot 9 and Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming here. Now, we're independent when we come to this and I don't think any of us are shy as to kind of sharing our opinions. I think all of us have had "I can't believe what you said on Twitter" at least once. In fact, I remember when John Troyer was working for VMware I did get a call every once in awhile. I've said, if I didn't get a call at least once a year from him saying, "Hey Stu, can you moderate that a little," I'm probably not doing my job. Let's get into it. The first thing I'd say is it's 2017. We blinked and like we're getting towards the end of it. Of course, there's the big party. There's still a whole bunch of sessions going for another day. Reactions on the show, high-level things. Keith, let's start down with you. >> First off, the energy of the show this year was, I have to say it was, I have to say it was up a notch. There was a lot of uncertainty around the acquisition and even Pat's future, whether or not he would be here for the VMworld this year, as the head of VMware he announced, I think it was kind of like with a little bit of pride, that he said "This is my 5th year as CEO of Vmware" and he bought the energy Monday and I think that energy has transferred throughout all of the VMware staff and throughout the show for the past few days. >> Just in that question, of course, and how many selfies has Blue Cow done at the show? >> Not as many as usual, unfortunately, because we've been very, very busy with briefings and meetings, so we haven't had as much selfie time as we've had, but we still make time to take a few photos around the show. And, yeah, I agree with Keith. The energy this year, and I think it had started with the example that Pat set at the first keynote. Which, it's just been lifted this year and I've been saying for, I've been hearing it from a lot of different people and I've been having it in conversations as well that this year, VMware stopped apologizing for existing and it's embraced itself, and I'm sure that having the stock price hit a nice high of a 107, I'm sure that helped with Pat and his idea of, "That makes you happy. Makes it a lot easier for you to keep your job." >> That's great, there was a comment actually The first time most of us remember. The week of Vmworld? The stock actually was going up. John, you know, you've got lots of experience with this community; your take. >> Certainly more energy than last year. I mean, let's look at the micro and the macro. There's always tactical stuff going on. Last year, Vster 6.5 had not been released. Dell acquisition and nobody was sure what was going on exactly. This year, the big VMware cloud on AWS announcement, I think, is an acknowledgement of maybe, that we can talk about. That, wait a minute. Once you get down to the nitty-gritty plumbing infrastructure layer, you still need to partner with somebody like VMware. I think the industry and the analysts, and the market, that's one of the things they like and then look at the macro trends on the economy. If you look at the Expo floor this year? Huge, lots of money being spent, lots of vendors here. There's something macro going on as well with the people here. >> Let's talk about two things I look at. Did VMware meet expectations? Was it what you expect? And, what are we going to be looking back at when we come here? John, I'll start with you, you hit on the big topic from my standpoint, looking at VMware and AWS. What will VMware look like in the future? Are they going to be a SAS provider? How does that transition from an infrastructure software company to a different fit for how they do cloud today versus the whole Vcloud era and everything before it? That was era not error even though, you know... >> Hey, they had a lot to do, of messaging and a lot of product-in announcements and a lot of introductions this week. I don't know, let's give them a B for that because there were a lot of them and they had a lot to do in a short space especially, like, through the lens of say the keynotes which is the lens a lot of people have. I think AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS is the big story. I don't know, I predict that in a year or two VMware will probably be the biggest VMware hoster service provider, right? I think a lot of workloads are going to shift into the AWS service through VMware and that will happen to excess capacity. It'll happens through a lot of different things. But, that's my prediction. >> I'm sorry, you say VMware will-- >> VMware will be the largest VMware hoster within a year or two. >> I feel like I'm watching the NFL Network. Bold predictions, here we have it. VMware has got 4500 partners, John. I've have Ajay Patella on a couple of times talking about his tiers of partners and everything like that. But let's let some of the guys weigh in. >> I'll extend on that, I kind of agree. I think that there's a lot of customers who will basically do a lift and shift and use cloud and I think having to choose between which of their children is the most beautiful and which one they love more has been has been really tearing them apart and I think that now they don't have to make that choice. I think they're going to be a lot easier for, particularly CIOs, to just say, "Yep, I'm doing some cloud." The announcement on Tuesday sort of felt a little flat for me because they were talking about Google container services which is running on Pivotal. Pivotal's sort of an unappreciated part of the whole portfolio, I think. There's a lot of companies some really interesting software development work there. But, as we mentioned, the development community? That's not this community. This is much more about infrastructure people. That kind of whole announcement and what they were talking about on Day 2? Just kind of went, it felt a little bit off for me. >> Yeah, I want to echo, I think a couple of statements that you've made. One, that VMware's seemed to embrace... Monday, they seem to embrace being VMware. You know what? We may pick on the concept of VMware VSphere being cloud. That VMware is very proud of calling their SDDC strategy which is an important strategy. It adds a lot of value to, not just legacy IT but current things that people are doing in their data center and they embraced being what they do well on Monday, and then we had cloud pizza on Tuesday which kind of broke that but I think I loved the message for VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, this concept, this reference architecture, this validated design that I can run in my data center. I know that at a Rax pace, at a CNF such as... take your Switch, take your choice between Switch and CenturyLink, etc. I'm going to get that consistent openstack what should have been openstack filling across cloud providers, but John, I agree with you. AWS is AWS at the end of the day and it's a easy checkbox to say VMware Cloud on AWS? Really easy to do and it's easy to consume. I don't have to go and choose between Cloud providers. >> One of the things of this show is that there never enough hours in the day, even Vegas. I actually have to admit I got to bed at a reasonable hour every night. We still have one more night for me here so we'll see on that. Hallway conversations, parties, some of the really cool stuff on on the show floor we talked about a little. I'll start off with kind of, from a customer standpoint, Some customers I talked to; a number of them seemed to be, "I want to move faster. "I'm interested in trying new things "and price isn't necessarily number one on my list. "It's further down the list." Which reminds me: It's not quite there yet but I go to Amazon Reinvent and this will be the fifth year and we are doing the Cube at that show. That's the thing that really excites me. There's cool new things we're trying. I echo and agree with a lot of what you all said about Day 2. Most of the customers here aren't ready for PKS. Sure Pivotal has lots of customers that are using Vmware, but the average attendee's not there. Kind of a wild card, customer insights, cool parties, things there. John, do you want to start down on your end? >> Sure, my channel check and the most surprising thing that I saw this week were talking to SC's from VMware and saying that their customers were coming to them and asking "Help? I now have Kubernetes in the house. "What do I do with it?" That surprised me. I have been a Kubernetes and Container advocate but a skeptic as far as adoption and at least anecdotally the folks that I talk to, it sounds like actually it's now trickling its way and kind of to the mainstream to where the VMware accounts are going to be able to have to deal with it. Now I will say on the flip side, Stu, if you look out at the show floor there are no developer tools, dev ops tools, cloud tools, maybe some cloud tools. That side of, that AWS side of the house, the people that are there, those companies that are there who are not here. If you were a customer, if you were an IT person looking to, this year, finally, educate yourself on how to do that that wasn't here at this show. >> For me, it's been about migration. This is about we have a whole bunch of stuff running on VMware, it's already there and that was one of the reasons VMware was popular in the first place, was that you could take stuff you already doing and you can virtualize it and then you could increase the capacity utilization that you have and you could get some more efficiencies out of that and then people started to layer additional services on top of that and to do interesting an new things on that. It allowed them to do that because it kind of freed up some time. I think we're going to say that again as things start to move to the cloud people start to do them in different ways. the workloads will migrate. It's not just going to happen tomorrow and some of the things that we're seeing, one of the things that impressed me about the show was a company called Densify who had been around previously. They were called Server and they did a rebrand and repossession and nailed it and it's a very, very simple tool that actually sells about the business. It's not about a technology, they don't actually talk about how the thing works or what's going on underneath it. But it allows you to understand the effect of what's happening if you move from VMware here over to that cloud, this cloud or the other cloud and it shows you the pricing. I looked at that and just went I can walk into a CFO and I can sell them on the idea just showing them this. That kind of experience, I think, we're going to start seeing a lot more of that as people moved to the cloud. >> So Monday gave me a new catch phrase for VMworld. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO and, you know what? With hallway conversations I still talk to, John, I don't remember like one-third of the attendees of VMworld are all first-time attendees, I talked to a lot of first-time attendees and it's amazing because VMware has an enormous sales team and they are very aggressive getting to accounts and talking about the overall message. I had people coming up to me and saying "Man you know what, I just found out about this "vRealize Log Insight and it's amazing!" and I'm thinking, Wow, that doesn't get much much more traditional IT than log management with vRealize and you know VMware has preached that for the past 5 or 6 years at the show I think it just shows the Delta in the community from those looking to do the developer, dev ops and cloud-native integration. Us, as analysts, pushing VMware saying, "Hey, what's your digital transformation story? "It's something other than cloud pizza," to all the way, to the keeping the lights on with SAP and Oracle apps that will not change and haven't changed and probably won't change for the next 10 to 15 years. >> Yeah and actually it brings up an interesting point; I had a conversation with Pumela this morning and we were talking about how it used to be, come to the show and it's the virtualization show. Now, It's a pretty broad ecosystem and in some ways it's, I wouldn't say fragmented but I'm grasping for a better word because you walk through the show floor and Dentrify, interesting. We had one of their co-founders on as to that kind of cloud management, and how all those pieces, these big hairy issues that people are solving. We've got people working at analytics and data. You've got all the cloud pieces, security all over the place, networking, we've always had storage at the show. But I'd been a little jaded coming to VMworld. It's now my 8th year and I've kind of re-energized this year. I know that some people have stopped coming. There's a new influx coming in. Let's fast-forward to VMworld 2018. What are you hoping to see from this ecosystem? Any final things you'd want to say? "Hey, this is what we can do better?" Or, "This thing, Do it absolutely again especially!" We've got one more year in Vegas then I think we'll probably go back to San Francisco. You've all been to many of these. Where do we start? >> I'll take two. One, is I like'd to see more basketball players and rappers. We had a lot of them on. >> Did you hang with KD? >> I did not. I was busy. He called my people and I don't know if you want tee that one up, what that one is. >> You could mention that absolutely. >> Sure. I mean Rubrik was here winner of the Best of Show of VMworld. Also spent a lot of marketing dollars on Kevin Durant who was also an investor and also Henson Nischlak >> Did they make cards? I'm on a trading card. How hilarious is that? >> Keith: Trading cards were cool, I have one. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> They came to play and and they bought it this year. Marketing dollar spent, I actually have a second predication which is that next year or the year after we'll be talking about, it seemed like VMware and Red Hat are throwing down against each other so I think next year we might be talking about the Dell technologies Red Hat wars in the cloud. >> Open source comes up but hadn't been discussed much except we did some Red Hat interviews here. Red Hat? Absolutely. Hybrid cloud environment, Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat all players there. John's been thinking about this wrap for a while I know. >> Well I'm going to switch completely differently and into the future what I like to see just to shake it up a little bit. I don't think we should talking about AWS things around containers. I think there will be some of that conversation but what I want to see is that VMware starts hosting a function service. I want to see functions on VMware because I reckon that's where the industry is going to move to in the long time. >> Stu: Serverless, you're saying? >> Yeah, Serverless. >> Like I mentioned on Day two? >> I want to see a functions as a service on VMware on AWS. >> Oh, that will happen. >> There you go product management. That's what you can go build. >> You can tie it into Lambda right now, right? You'll have your... >> yeah but if you're tie it into Lambda that just plays right into AWS's hands. >> Give Chris Wolfe a call and Kit Colbert will make that happen. >> You know what? Full disclosure. I was part of judging for best of VMworld and Rubrik won Best of VMworld. I don't want to see more data protection. I don't want to see more secondary storage. I think one of the driving elements that part of that discussion, pulling back the onion a little bit was about redefining something in the data center that had been forgotten, that API level access Rubrik pushes API level access to the data center. This is something that I've asked from VMware forever which is to basically be the API to my data center. You may not ever, I may never get function as a service. I may never get PaaS, I may never get all these cool things from a developer perspective that I want from VMware but at the very minimum, you're the software defining data center. I want to have APIs into the data center and that data center is not just my physical Data Center but this whole VCF thing that's pushed whether it's in my data center, in Rackspace, or some other VCAMP partner or in AWS. My interface, If infrastructure is going to continue to be VMware's customer then you should enable me from an API perspective to manage my software-defining data center, believe it or not. >> Unfortunately, I love to chat with these gentlemen for hours at a time if I can. We're limited with the queue. We only give you a taste of what's happening at these shows if I've mentioned before, you need to come to these kind of events to talk to these quality people. We also mentioned a few of the sponsors on the show. Sponsorship helps us bring, not only the Cube to the event, but helps me bring high quality, independent analysis from gentlemen like this. Please check out all of our sponsors. Check out all of our content on theCUBE.net. These, all three of them, creating a lot of content. Go to their Twitter handle, @ctoadvisor, @jpwarren, and @jtroyer, I'm @stu. Thank you so much for joining us for our coverage of VMworld 2017. Reach out to all of us. Really, we'll get back to you. Love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. [bouncy techno music]

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to live coverage. This is theCUBE at VMworld 2017, our eighth year covering VMworld, going back to 2010. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, and my co-host this segment, Justin Warren, industry analyst, and our guest, Alan Cohen, Chief Commercial Officer, COO for Illumio. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Special guest appearance, guest analyst appearance, but also Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio is a security start-up, growing. Thanks for coming on. >> It's not even a startup anymore. >> Justin: It's technically a startup. >> John: After five years, it's not a startup. >> It's not a startup right, you raise $270 million, it's not exactly a startup. >> (laughs) That's true. Well, welcome back. >> Alan: Thank you. >> Welcome back from vacation. Justin and I were talking before you came on, look at, let's go get you on and get some commentary going. >> Alan: Okay. >> You're an industry vet, again, in security, some perspective, but industry perspective, you've seen this VMware cycle many times. What's your analysis right now, obviously stock's 107, they don't to a cloud, no big catback, so it's good. You've made a decision. What's your take on this? >> I've been coming to VMworld for a long time, as you guys have as well, and from my perspective, this was probably the biggest or most significant transition in the history of the company. If you think about the level of dialogue, obviously there's a lot about NSX, which came from the Nicira, I'm always happy about. But, if you hear about, talking about cloud, and kind of talking about a post-infrastructure world, about capabilities, about control, about security, about being able to manage your compute in multiple environments, this is, I think, the beginning of a fundamentally different era. I always think about VMware, this is the company that defined virtualization. No one will argue with that point, so when they come out and they start talking about how are your computes going to operate in multiple environments? And how you're going to put that together, this is not cloud-washing, this is a fairly, all right they have fully acknowledged that the cloud is not a fad, the cloud is not for third tier workloads, this is mainstream computing. I think this is the third wave of computing and VMware is starting to put its markers down for the type of role that it intends to play in this transition. >> Yeah, I agree. >> We have to argue if you don't agree (laughs). >> I'll mostly agree with you, how about that? >> All right that's good. >> At this show, VMware has stopped apologizing for existing. I think, previously, they've been trying to say, "No, no we're a cloud too, "in fact, we're better than cloud "and you shouldn't be using it." It forced customers to choose between two of their children, really, like which one do you love more? And customers don't like that. Whereas at this show, I think it's finally being recognized that customers want to be able to use cloud, as well as use VMware, so that they're taking a more partnership approach to that and it's more about the ecosystem. And, agree, they're not about the infrastructure so much, they're not about the Hypervisor, they're about what you run on top of that. But, I still think there's a lot of infrastructure in that because VMware is fundamentally an infrastructure. >> Alan: Well, you got to get paid, right? >> That's right, (Alan laughs) and there's a lot of stuff out there that's already on VMware. What do you think about the approach? Like with cloud, they have a lot of people doing things in new ways and you mentioned this is the third wave of computing that we're doing it a new way. A lot of VMware stuff is really the whole reason it was popular is that we have people doing things a particular way on physical hardware and then they kept doing more or less the same thing, only on virtual hardware. What do you say about people who are still essentially going to be doing virtual hardware, they're just running it on cloud now? That's not really changing much. >> The way I think about it is: Are you going to be the Chevy Volt or are you going to be a Tesla? What I mean by that, and by the way now GM has the Bolt, which is their move toward Tesla, which is that if you look at the auto industry, they talk about hybrid and you talk about it, and you talk to Elon Musk and he goes, "Hybrids are bullshit." Either you're burning gas, or you're using electricity. To me, this cloud movement is about electricity, which is: I'm going to use cloud-native controls, I'm going to use cloud-native services, I'm going to be using Python and Ruby, and I'm going to have scripting, and I'm going to act like DevOps. And so, cloud is not just a physical place where I rent cycles from Amazon or Azure, it is a way of computing that's got a distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. When you're in your virtualization on top of cloud, you're still in your Chevy Volt moment, but when you say, "I'm going to actually be native "across all of these environments," then you're really moving into the Tesla movement. >> Hold on. Let me smoke a little bit, I'll pass it over to you because that's complete fantasy. Right now the reality is, is that-- >> It's legal here in LA, in Las Vegas. >> (laughs) I don't think so yet, is it? >> Only outside. >> You can go to Walgreens across the street. >> Whatever you're smoking is good stuff. No, I agree, cloud obviously as a future scenario, there's no debate, but the reality is, like the Volt, Tesla is a one-trick pony. So, greenfield-- >> But, once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, John, but my point is that VMware and most of the IT industry is not there. Most companies don't have DevOps people, you run up and down, you go to all of these shows, ask these guys how many of these guys does Ruby, Python, real scripting, they don't do that. They still have Lu-Wise and management consults and they have the old IT, but this is the beginning movement-- >> They've got legacy bag, I mean we call it legacy baggage in the business, we know what that is. >> Heritage systems. (all laugh) >> Well, Gelsinger was here, I had him in at one o'clock and I kind of, sometimes VMware, they make the technical mistake in PR, they don't really get sometimes where to position things, but the Google announcement was very strategic intent, but they kind of made it a land grab and they tried to overplay their hand, in my opinion, on that one thing, it's strategic intent. This audience, they're not DevOps ready, they're Ops trying to do Dev, so they're not truly ready. So, it's okay to say, "Here's Amazon. "Great, that's today, if you want to do that, "let's get going, checking the boxes, "we're hitting the milestones." And then to dump a headroom deal announcement, that's more headroom, which is cool, but not push it on the Ops guys. >> Here's the opportunity and here's the risk: If Amazon is a $16 billion a year business, it's a rounding error in IT spend. When you take the hype away, nothing against it, and I love that prices are cheaper at Amazon and you can buy a Dot in the fruit aisle, that would totally-- >> John: I think the margins are like 60% (laughs). >> On your cloud. >> My wife took a picture of a rib steak and it said $18, now $13.99, I said, "Fantastic, thank you, Jeff Bezos. "We're eating well, "and we're going to have a little extra money." What I think this transition is not about infrastructure, it's about how IT people do their job. >> John: That's a main point. >> Justin: That's a big, big change. >> Yeah. >> Okay, in this show today doing your job, Justin I want you to comment on this because you were talking with Stu about it. I'm a VMware customer, what do I care about right now in my world? Just today. >> Well, in my world I've got conflicting things, I need to get my job done now. There's nothing different about the IT job, really, which is a shame because some of it needs to change, but there is a gradual realization that it's not about IT, it's not about building infrastructure for the sake of, "Because I like shiny infrastructure." It's, "I'm being paid by my business "to do IT things in service of the business." I have customers who are buying Apples, or using Apple docs, you're laundering. >> In IT you're paid for an outcome. You don't create the outcome. The way IT works is business creates the outcome, IT helps fulfill the outcome, unless you work-- >> John: Is IT a department today? >> Yeah, it's still a department. >> It's still a department? >> Yeah, it is, but it's a department in the same way that, well finance is important, but it's actually the business. Sales is part, they're all integrated. In a really well-run business, they're all integrated. >> How do you know what a real business is? You go to a building, you go to the main offices, you visit the marketing floor, you visit the IT floor. Tell me what the decor is like. They'll tell you what they care about in a business. (John laughs) I've been in a lot of IT shops, not the beautiful shiny glass windows because it's perceived as a back office cost center. >> Digital transformation is always about taking costs, that's table stakes, but now some of the tech vendors need to understand that as you get more business focused, you got to start thinking about driving top line. >> You're also thinking about being in the product. For example, my company, we have three of the four top SAS vendors, as Illumio customers, we do the micro-segmentation for them. We're not their micro-segmentation, we're a component in the software they sell you guys. >> Justin: You're an input. >> Yeah, you are a commodity in the mix of what somebody's building and I think that's going to be one of the changes. The move to cloud, it's not rent or buy, it's not per hour per server, or call Michael Dell and send me a bunch of Q-series, or whatever the heck it's called, it's increasingly saying, "We have these outcomes, we have these dates, "we have these deliverables, "what am I doing to support that and be part of that?" >> Justin: That's it, it's a support function. It's a very important support function, but there's very few businesses, like digital transformation, I don't like that as a term-- >> What the heck does that mean? >> It means something to do with fingers. >> Alan: You use it a lot, what does it really mean, digital transformation? >> To me, first of all, I'm not a big hype person, I like the buzz word in the sense that it does have a relevance now in terms of doing business digitally means you're completely 100% technology-enabled in your business. That means IT is a power function, not a cost center, it's completely native, like electricity in the company-- >> Unless, let's say I have two customers, I have the Yellow Cab company of Las Vegas and I have Uber or Lyft as a customer. My role, as a technologist, or technology provider, is dramatically different in either one of those-- >> Digital transformation to me is a mindset of things like, "I'm going to do a blockchain, "I'm going to start changing the game, "I'm going to use technology "to change the value equation for my customer." It's not IT conversation in the sense of, let's buy more servers to make something happen for the guy who had a request in that saying, "Let's use technology digitally to change the outcomes." >> But, given that, if we assume that that's true, then there's two ways of doing that. Either we have the IT people need to learn more about business, or the business people need to learn more about IT. >> That's right. >> Which one do you think should happen? Traditionally-- >> I think they're on a collision course. >> I don't think you can survive as a senior executive in most businesses anymore by saying, "Oh, I'll get my CIO in here." >> I would like to believe that that's true, but when people say that it should be a strategic resource and so on, and yet we spend decades outsourcing IT to someone else. If it's really truly important to your business, why aren't you doing it yourself? >> Justin, it's a great question and here's my observations, just thinking out loud here. One, just from a Silicon Valley perspective, looking at entrepreneurial as a canary in the coalmine, you've seen over the past 10-15 years, recently past 10, entrepreneurs have become developer entrepreneurs, product entrepreneurs, have become very savvy on the business side. That's the programmer. When we see Travis with Uber, no VC, they got smart because they could educate themselves. AngelList, Venture Hacks, there's a lot of data out there, so I see some signs of developers specifically building apps because user design is really important, they are leading into, what I call, the street MBA. They're not actually getting an MBA, they don't read the Wall Street Journal, but they're learning about some business concepts that they have to understand to program. IT I think is still getting there, but not as much as the developers. >> Here's a great question that I've learned over the years, and look, I'm coming out of the IT side, as we all are. When I visit a customer and I try to sell them my product, my first question is, "If I didn't exist, what would you do? "And if you don't buy my product, what happens in your business?" And if they're saying, "I have this other alternative." Or it's like, "Ah, we'll do it next year." I mean, maybe I can sell them some product, but what they're really telling me is, "I don't matter." >> All right, let's change the conversation a little bit, just move to another direction I want to get your thoughts on. And I should have, on the intro, given you more prompts, Alan. You were also involved in Nicira, the startup that VMware had bought-- >> Alan: Before all this NSX stuff, I was early. >> Hold on, let me finish the intro. We've interviewed Martin Casado. Stu talks to us all the time, I'm sure Chess has been hearing on the other set, "Oh, hey Martin Casado." It was a great interview, of course they're on theCUBE directory. But, you were there when it was just developing and then boom, software-defined networking, it's going to save the world. NSX has become very important to VMware, what's your thoughts on that? What does the alumni from Nicira and that folks that are still here and outside of VMware think about what's it's turned into? Is it relevant? And where is it going? >> Look, I could have not predicted five years ago when Nicira was acquired by VMware, it would be the heart of everything that their CEO and their team is talking about, if you want to know if that's important, go to the directory of sessions and one out of every three are about NSX. But, I think what it really means is there's a recognition that the network component, which is what really NSX represents, is the part that's going to allow them to transcend the traditional software-defined data center. I have two connections, so Steve Herrod is my investor, Steve is the inventor of the software-defined data center. That was the old Kool-Aid, not the new Kool-Aid. We've left the software-defined data center, we've moved into this cloud era and for them NSX is their driving force on being able to extend the VMware control plane into environments they used to never play in before. That's imminently clear. >> John: Justin, what's your take on NSX? >> NSX is the compatibility mechanism for being able do VMware in multiple places, so I think it's very, very important for VMware as a company. I don't think it's the only solution to that particular problem of being able to have networks that move around, it's possible to do it in other ways. For example, cloud-native type things, will do the networking thing in a different way. But, the network hasn't really undergone the same kind of change that happened in server or it did in storage, it's been pretty much the same for a long, long time. >> You've had an industry structurally dominated by one company, things don't change when-- >> Justin: And it still is, yeah. >> John: Security, security, because we've got a little bit of time I want to get to security. You guys are in the security space. >> Thanks for noticing. >> (laughs) I still don't know what you did, I'm only kidding. Steve Harrod is your investor, former CEO of VMware, very relevant for folks watching. Guys, security Pat Gelsinger said years ago it should be a duo, we've got to fix this. Nothing has really happened. What is the state of the union, if you will, of security? Where the frig is it going? What the hell's going on with security? >> There's two issues with that. If we put our industry analyst hat on, security is the largest segment of IT where nobody owns 5% market share, so there's not gorilla force that can drive that. VMware was the gorilla force driving virtualization, Cisco drove networking, EMC, in the early days, drove storage, but when you get to security you have this kind of-- >> John: Diluted. >> It's like the Balkans, it's like feudal states. >> Justin: It's a ghastly nightmare. >> What I think what Pat was talking about, which we also subscribe to, there are some movements in security, which micro-segmentation is one of them, which are kind of reinstalling a form of forensic hygiene into saying, "Your practices, if they occur, "they will reduce the risk profile." But, I think 50% of the security solutions and categories-- >> So, if I've lost my teeth, I don't get cavities. That kind of thing going on. >> If you're a doctor and you're making rounds in the hospital, you wash your hands or you put on gloves. >> And that's where we are. That is the stage we are at with security is we're at the stage where surgeons didn't believe they should wash their hands because they knew better and they'd say, "No, this couldn't possibly be making patients sick." People have finally realized that people get sick and the germ theory is real and we should wash our hands. >> Your network makes you sick. Your network is the carrier. Everything that's happening in network is effectively the Typhoid Mary of security. (John laughs) We're building flat, fast, unsegmented Layer 3 networks, which allow viruses to move at the speed of light across your environment. So, movements like, what's that called App Defense? >> Justin: App Defense, yep. >> App Defense or micro-segmentation from Illumio and Vmware, are the kind of new hygiene and new practices that are going to reduce the wide-spread disease growing. >> From an evolution theory, then the genetics of networks are effed up. This is what you're saying, we need to fix-- >> No, the networks are getting back to what they were supposed to do. Networks move packets from point A to point D. >> The dumb network? >> Alan: Yes, the dumber the better. >> Okay. You agree? >> Alan: Dumb them down. >> Dumb networks, smart end points. Smart networks doesn't scale as well as smart end points, and we're seeing that with edge computing, for example. Distributed networking is a hard problem and there is so much compute going out there, everything has a computer in it, they're just getting tinier and tinier. If we rely on the network to secure all of that, we're doomed. >> Better off at the end point. And this fuels the whole IoT edge thing, straight up one of the key wave slides out there. >> What you're going to have is a lot of telemetry points and you're going to have a lot of enforcement points. Our architecture is compatible with this, VMware is moving in this direction, other people are, but the people that are clinging to the gum up my network with all kinds of crap, because actually people want it to go the other way. If you think about it, the Internet was built to move packets from point A to point B in case of a nuclear war and, other than routing, there wasn't a whole lot-- >> We still might have that problem (laughs) >> Yeah, well there's always that (laughs). >> Fingers crossed. >> Guys, we got to break, next segment. Al, I'll give you the last word, just give a quick plug for Illumio. Thanks for coming on and being a special guest analyst, as usual, great stuff. Little slow from vacation, you're usually a little snappier. >> Alan: Little slow off the vacation mark. >> Yeah, come on. Back in Italy-- >> Too much Brunello di Motalcino, yeah. >> John: (laughs) Quick plug for Illumio, do a quick plug. >> We're really great to be here. John, you and I talked recently, Illumio is growing very rapidly, clearly we are probably emerging as one of the leaders in this micro-segmentation movement. >> John: A wannabe gorilla. >> What's that? >> You're a wannabe gorilla, go big or go home. >> We are, well, gorillas have to start as little gorillas first, we're not a wannabe gorilla, we're just gorillas growing really rapidly. It takes a lot more food at the zoo to keep us going. About 200 people growing rapidly, just moved into Asia, Pat, we got a guy in your part of the world we work with. >> First of all, it's not a zoo, it's still a jungle. The zoo is not yet established. >> That's true. We're going to establish the zoo. Things are great at Illumio. We have amazing things on the floor here today of, basically the system will actually write its own security policy for you. It's a lot of movement into machine learning, a lot of good stuff. >> All right. Guys, thanks so much. Alan Cohen with Illumio, >> Alan: Thank you. >> Chief Commercial Officer. And Justin Warren, analyst, I'm John Furrier. More live coverage from VMworld after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Good night everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are live here at VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Gray is here as the director of product marketing for hybrid cloud platforms at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> OK, so, we're here talking cloud, everybody's cloud crazy, but it seems like, as Peter said, the technology has matured. >> Kevin: Yeah. >> And we're actually at a point where we can deliver what we've been talking about for the past five or six years. So how does that relate to what you guys have, what are you showing here at the event, and what are customers saying? >> Peter: Yeah, what are the announcements? What's happening? >> Well, one of the things we're announcing is enhancements to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. You've heard a lot at VMware about VMware Cloud Foundation with added support for the extract SDDC, which is our turnkey VMware cloud foundation platform. We've also enhanced support for VxRail, so we've added multi-site capabilities, so we now support up to four data center sites, and we've also added support for disaster recovery through Recover Point VM. We're also added support for native hybrid cloud, so with native hybrid cloud we now have a support for... we have a new turnkey platform for VxRail, and we're supporting our new access testing tool, which is really focused on helping developers, right? So what the access testing tool does is it really focuses on when companies are going through and really looking at re-factoring applications for things like when they're going to microservices, it has that ability to really go out and test to make sure the dependencies and services are still there. We also have a capability around called our Application Deployment Tool, which really pushes, as you look to push an application out to multiple instances of foundations of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can actually help, it does that in one push. So if you look at PCF, you can use a CF pushkim, and push it out to multiple instances, and in this case, it'll do that in one step. >> So that's all the things that you've done on an individual announcements basis in the tools, but Kevin, let's step back. Let's take the customer's perspective for a second. When you summarize all this-- >> Right. >> So you're standing in front of a customer and you're saying to the customer, "We are pointing towards this vision." >> Right. >> "We want you to be here with us." What is that here? Where do you want them to be as you start to think about designing and priority for this broad portfolio that you have? >> So you heard Bob talk a little bit about sort of customers buying more outcomes, per se, and one of the things you'll see, with for instance our native hybrid cloud, is that ability to really get a repeatable process with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So if you look at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they're moving real fast, right? They have a release every 90 days, pretty much, and you need to be on the latest release within nine months-- >> Let me make sure that I understand this. >> When you say "repeatable process "with Pivotal Cloud Foundry," what you're talking about is that the organization, the shop, can think about developing an application in Pivotal, deploying it out on Cloud Foundry, and then running it on whatever underlying hybrid or conversion for structure that they might want and being able to do that over and over and over, so they can increase their focus on the application function that they're generatng. Is that basically what you mean? >> Absolutely, and-- >> So it's that level of repeatability. Focus on the business problem, build it, and then take the pain and suffering out of deploying it wherever it needs to be. >> Absolutely, and maintaining it. So if we look at large customers, as I mentioned, one large financial institution was looking at how do they do this repeatably across multiple data center sites, right? And how do they keep pace with that change over time, you know? That's not an easy process when you're moving really fast, and it's just one of those things where they tried to do it themselves for a while and realized it's better to buy that outcome than to try and create it on their own. >> You know, Dave, I was talking to a large user here on the show floor not too long ago, yesterday, in fact, about the fact that DevOps is not taking the world by storm the way that many people thought it might, and he identified specifically, one of the reasons is because there's not enough support from the technology companies to start packaging and organizing their capabilities, their technology set, their product sets, to support a DevOps mentality. It almost sounds, you haven't said this, Kevin, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it almost sounds as if what you guys are saying is, we're going to start designing and packaging and organizing our systems to support that sort of DevOps orientation so the system administrators can evolve in the way that they need to evolve as the business demands new change. >> Yeah, so if you look at our hybrid cloud platforms, they're really intended to be that easy button for deploying either a full vRealize Suite, vRealize Suites stacked in our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, or Pivotal Cloud Foundry for native hybrid cloud. Another thing we introduced this week was our ready systems. We have ready systems for VMware and we have ready systems for Pivotal. If you look at the VMware ready system, one of the things we found, for VMware, one of the things we found was that many customers, if you look at Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, it gives you a lot of benefits that a lot of our large enterprise customers are looking for, so, it supports multiple sites, it supports disaster protection, and it supports a turnkey platform where it's an engineered system, but for a lot of customers, it meant that you were always a couple of releases behind. So we give them that experience, right? And we make it a little bit, we give them an opportunity with the ready system to get that support from VMware, where we'll take on the HCI piece and support it. Same thing with native hybrid cloud and our Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal ready system, you know, they'll get their support from PCF, from Pivotal, but they'll build it on HCI. And we're also introducing a Pivotal ready system based on PKS. And I think PKS is interesting, simply because if you look at the Kubernetes environment and the work that's been done with Kubo, it's really a platform that's more likely where people are going to want to build, right? If you look at those people that are doing it, they want more control over, you know, their build process and their pipeline, and therefore they're more likely to build, and with the PKS system, the ready system based on Pivotal, Pivotal ready system, they can get that outcome. >> So at the end of the day it's all about changing the operating model, >> Kevin: Absolutely. >> And having a business impact. Peter, we were in our Palo Alto studio, and one of our clients was in, very prominent end user and market practitioner, saying if you can't change the operating model, you know, you might get a little bit of business benefit, but if you're a large company, you're never going to take a billion dollars of cost out. So my question is, what are you guys seeing, are you being able to affect the operating model, and can you share any of your favorite examples or even generic sort of proof points? >> Sure, absolutely. We had one customer, CICC, they're a large HR outsourcer in China, and by implementing Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, they were able to accelerate the time it took to get new application services by 60%. This is simply a means of taking IT out of the middle and really being able to accelerate delivery of-- >> Peter: We're taking certain tasks-- >> Exactly. >> Peter: That IT performs. It's not necessarily taking IT out, it's taking those low-value tasks out, right? >> Kevin: Absolutely. You know, self-service portal pieces, exactly, so-- >> Dave: And then maybe re-deploying those resources to higher-value activities. >> Kevin: Absolutely. Right. So those are the types of outcomes. We also see, if you look at Pivotal and some of the capabilities they have, if you look at sort of traditional IT infrastructure we see many customers moving to, you know, daily, weekly releases, as opposed to, if you think of a traditional model, it would be a much longer process, so that's the type of outcome we see as well. >> Dave: Well, one of the things you've been saying for years, I think Benioff stole it from you, is there's going to be way more SAAS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies to your point, everybody's now a software company, and they're releasing code on a constant basis, but they're not technology companies, so they need help, right? >> He might not have stolen it from me, but it's a nice validation point. And I think we said it before he did. >> Just kidding, Marc. Alright, Kevin, hey thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you. >> Appreciate it. Thanks. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas Mandalay Bay. Day three, VMworld 2017. We'll be right back. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Paul Hodge, who's the global marketing manager of Honeywell Process Solutions, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Alright, so Paul, you have to tell us, so Honeywell's the company, I think many people are aware. The process solutions; maybe you can tell us a little about that part of the organization and what your role there is. >> Sure, sure. So yeah, Honeywell, multi-national conglomerate, hundred thirty thousand people, forty billion dollars. Honeywell Process Solutions is then a subdivision within Honeywell that serves the manufacturing industry. So we go through and provide goods and services that allow people to go through and automate their plants for those pharmaceuticals or refining, and those types of things. >> And your role here coming to the show, you're actually a partner of Honeywell. >> Yes we are. >> Sometimes we've got tons of practitioners here, so tell us a little bit, you know, manufacturing, I think I know a few places where that makes a lot of sense for VMware, but tell us a little bit about the history of the partnership and your role there. >> Sure, so we've been partners with VMware since 2010. So it's been a long, long time partnership. And we've been bringing virtualization into the manufacturing industry, because we're typically quite conservative as a company, in terms of adopting technology, so it really takes an automation leader like Honeywell to go through and drive a new technology into the industry. So we've been doing that since, yeah, 2010. And yeah, this week we've been going through and talking about our new HDI hyperconversion infrastructure sort of solution that we've been doing, sort of, with VMware, and along with Dell EMC, that goes through and takes that a step further into our industry. >> Wow, so that's pretty interesting, I've worked in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing organization, and automation of IT is pretty difficult because of regulatory issues, et cetera, safety. What are some of the challenges that Honeywell is addressing in automation and specifically around VMware products? >> Sure, sure. I think the number one thing for our industry is purely simplicity, the people in our industry, they're not IT geeks, they don't have all of this knowledge, they don't have a storage administrator out there, so we have to go through and do all of that for them and take all of the complexity sort of out of the product. So it needs to be simple, but it just needs to be reliable, as well. I mean we're dealing with your refineries and pharmaceutical plants and things like that so the things just cannot stop. So you need simplicity with the reliability and availability and have both of them in sort of a package that's ready to go. And the other complexity is that we need to be able to deliver this anywhere around the world, and that's the other reason why it needs to be simple because it's not just going to North America, it's going to Europe, it's going to the Middle East, it's going to all different places. >> All right, well you say simplicity, and any time we've been talking about hyperconversion infrastructure, simplicity's usually at the top of the list. >> Paul: Absolutely, it's one of the big benefits. >> It seems like a natural fit there. Maybe, what is the solution, what made up with it, you said Dell EMC is part of it, of course VMware is part of it, how's it different from, say, the VxRail that Dell's been offering, you know, vSAN to hit ten thousand customers. What differentiates this compared to everything else that's available? >> Sure, so we're taking the vSAN, which is absolutely as you were saying, ten thousand customers out there very mature, very reliable, and we're taking it and sort of marrying it with the Dell EMC FX2 solution there which is an extremely powerful platform and flexible platform for going through and writing sort of, vSAN on top of it. So we've taken those two best in breed products there and we've gone through and built a reference configuration that's customized and optimized for the manufacturing industry. >> Yeah it's interesting. Keith, I remember when the FX2 launched, everybody was like, wait is this an HCI solution? Will it be there, will this be a platform for it? I don't know, is there anybody else leveraging that for this type of solution yet? >> vSAN is a very very popular sort of platform for, >> Stu: On the FX2. >> Yes, sorry, FX2, thank you. >> Yeah, I know vSAN is, but the marrying of those two together, is that a standard offering that was out there, or is that something that you've optimized? >> Certainly, I think there might be a vSAN ready version of that as well, but the reason why it's quite popular is because I can go through and have four vSAN nodes in the one FX2. So I can have a vSAN in a box with the FX2 solution, which makes it quite a nice fit. But it's really, the hardware platform aside, the value that Honeywell's providing is just really, the integration of those products. Building a reference design that's optimized for our industry and testing out all of the stack and delivering that for a market. >> So talking about building up a stack specifically for manufacturing, can you talk about, who's the end customer? Who's actually buying the solution? You say you don't, may not have a storage administrator. Are you guys selling to IT, or manufacturing operations? >> Mainly to the manufacturing part of the business, which is why it needs to be so simple is because those IT resources that you would normally have on the IT side of the business, they're just not there. And so we go through and sell to our customers there, refiners, pharmaceutical plants and things like that. And typically Honeywell is the one that's then engineering the overall solution to solve the manufacturing problems, so we deliver it to our own engineers, and our own engineers then customize that to go through and solve a manufacturing problem. But in our industry there's typically quite a big separation between the IT part of the organization and the OT, if you will, part, which is why the simplicity is such a big part of what we do. >> Paul, can you expand on that at all? Something we, from the research side have been looking at, kind of the IT, OT, what you're hearing from customers. >> Sure. So I think the main reason, traditionally, why that separation has been there is just on the OT side, there's a very, very different need in terms of reliability and availability and criticality and what happens if certain things just go wrong. And traditionally, those skills have been in a separate part of the organization to the IT part of the organization. So in some companies, those two worlds are absolutely converging and IoT is certainly a big thing that is driving that convergence. But in other organizations, they are still remaining separate, it's just the cultural way that a company has gone through and run itself. So I think, whether they are merging, those worlds, or whether they're staying separate is really, changes on a corporation by corporation basis. >> Paul, let's talk a little bit more about that OT customer. One of the things that's been my experience, you walk into a manufacturing floor, you see a system there that's 15 years old easy. This is a tool and that tool is just there to do a function within the manufacturing process, but with all of the malware, and the encrypted, and shutting down an entire operation's perspective, how are you helping OT get to a point where they accept, I guess the flexibility that this needed in an operation to support, something like a FX2 on their data center floor, with running vSAN? >> Sure, well, first of all, I think it is that simplicity. I mean if it's too complicated, then it just will not be accepted for somebody like that. So that simplicity and the reliability as where I've already spoken about there, but I think Honeywell there is there as well, helping that OT side of the business to be able to go through and deploy a system of that level of complexity, because as you're saying there, it is very different in terms of the 15 year old thing that they might be upgrading from. But it delivers just so many benefits from them. I mean going from 100 servers, which is what, say, some plants typically might go through and have, and you're just going to maybe two FX2 base clusters of our systems there, it's just a massive reduction in terms of hardware, and with each piece of hardware we remove, that's space and power and cooling and maintenance and everything like that goes away with it. >> Alright Paul, talking about different architectures, you mentioned IoT, so I have to imagine that's having significant impact on your industry. >> It is. >> Walk us through that. What are you seeing, what is Honeywell's role there, what are your customers doing? >> It's actually an interesting area for Honeywell Process Solutions because first of all, we've been doing IoT for 30 years, in terms of really, from Honeywell Process Solutions. >> You were the hipster IoT company. >> Really, oh that's good, that's a compliment. >> Is that what you were saying, you were IoT before it was cool, is what I understand. (laughter) >> We've been out there doing it, I mean, our job in Honeywell Process Solutions is to take field data, marry it with an inch device, create value there and sometimes just make that available on the internet, but getting back to your question, though, is the IoT way of life is changing how we go through and do things. First of all, there's data that's out there that previously, people wouldn't have considered valuable, okay, so that data, they're trying to extract that data out there, so we're, I guess there's a wave if you will of people trying to get that previously non-valuable data out of the field, so that's one part there. Sometimes as well, projects are very, very geographically dispersed. Traditionally you would have had like a plant infrastructure and it would've been in a self-contained area but now it can be in over a very wide geographical area. So you've got to have a controller, which potentially is on the internet, and have that be highly secure all the way back to then, the sources that need to go through and consume that. So that's a difference in how it's going through and impacting us. But I think as well, there's I guess, building an awareness out there in the market of trying to go through and extract more information and more intelligence out of the data that people are already getting, and driving new waves there as well. >> What are some of the lessons you're helping customers, especially OT, understand when they move from this isolated manufacturing network to this distributed network, that they're extracting value from, but they're also exposing security risks, and just you know, control risks. They're not used to operating at this multi, manufacturing facility perspective, from an IT perspective. They're in essence becoming IT. What are some of the pitfalls you're helping them to avoid? >> Sure, well I think security is a great one that you've just gone through and mentioned there. Anything that we're, data that's running the plant, first and foremost, needs to be secure in terms of going through and doing that. So I think that's one of the first things is how you go through and design that system and make it secure. And so I think that's one of the areas there. But also, to extract data and value out of it requires infrastructure to be able to store the data, to be able to go through and allow third parties to do analytics and other types of things; on top of that, infrastructure. So Honeywell's doing a lot to provide that back-end infrastructure that people can go through and do data mining and do analytics, and solving those new problems on that infrastructure. >> So, this power of FX2, the Dell EMC reference architecture, the VMare vSAN, gives an awful lot of computer. I think competitors like AWS will come in and say, you know what, AWS Snowball Edge is designed for this big data use case where we can ingest IoT data at the edge, do some light processing on it. What are you running from a practical perspective that you're seeing users say you know that just isn't enough, we need this power of the FX2, this Dell EMC reference architecture and vSAN. >> Sure, sure. So I think it's serving a different market segment. So absolutely there's a market segment out there that says, I'm prepared to take my data and put it into an Edge device and send it to a cloud, into AWS, or wherever, okay and that's absolutely a market segment that's out there. But there's another segment of market and it is quite large, for manufacturing, that says, no, the data that I'm ingesting needs to stay within my corporate control, within the boundaries of the corporation, okay. And it's those types of customers there that need that on-premise compute capacity to be able to ingest that data, to be able to display it to operators, to be able to go through and solve other problems with that data; it needs to be local. And that could just be because they don't trust it, because remember, we lag in terms of our, our adoption. We're lagging as an industry in general. So I think it's a lot of those types of reasons, yeah. >> So I'm kind of curious about a practical self process. Again, these OT folks don't look at their traditional 100 racks and say, we need to do something with this. We need to change it. If it works, why change it? Especially in manufacturing. What's the catalyst for change? >> Sure, absolutely, well I think in a lot of these industries there, they're losing people in terms of the people that run those types of plants there. So I think the first catalyst for change is, I had all of this equipment that was taking me all of these people to go through and maintain. I just don't have those people anymore. I need to do more with less. So by removing those pieces of equipment there, I make myself sort of more efficient. Not only in terms of the maintenance of those pieces of equipment there, but there's always on-going changes that need to be made to these environments as well, so you need to be able to go through and deploy new virtual machines, you know, far more agile environment. And when you're dealing with, say, physical pieces of equipment, if I wanted to deploy a new node, I would need to order that node from a supplier. I would then need to go through and commission it, install the software, and rack it, and then do all that, I mean that's months and months and months of work and effort. With a virtual machine, I just go through and deploy it, and I'm done. Yeah. >> Paul, just want to get your final take. VMworld, the show itself, kind of the experience as a partner, what's your takeaway from that? >> It's been fantastic, for me, VMworld is always about the relationships and the conversations that go through and take place, whether that be with partners like VMware, or whether it be with other supplies that I go through and do business with, and everyone's here. It's just one of the events where it's just, you're only limited by your ability to get your calendar organized and see all of the people that you want to do. That's the only limit of what you can achieve here. But it's just been a fantastic event this year and Honeywell's been glad to be here. >> Paul Hodge, Honeywell Process Solutions. Really appreciate you joining us, and absolutely agree a thousand percent, I'm sure Keith would attest to this also, if you're not at this show, you need to be here next year. If you're in the European one, you should go over there. So many conversations, we're happy to bring you a number of them, give you just a taste or a flavor of what's been happening at VMworld 2017. Thank you for joining us for three days of program. We're going to be wrapping up shortly, but all of it goes on the website and check it all out. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering The VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. (techno music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live in Las Vegas, day three of VMworld 2017. We also have our voices, which is pretty good. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for this segment is Peter Burris. Peter and I are joined by a couple of guests. We have Geoff Waters, Vice President of Global Cloud Sales from VMware, first time on theCUBE? >> Yes, yes. >> Good to have you here. >> You know, I'm a big fan, first time here, I'm excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. >> Awesome. >> And we have Cube alumni, Roger Frey, VP of Alliances and Business Development from Skytap, welcome back. >> Thank you very much, great to be here. >> So day three, both of you still smiling, that's good, you know, we're kind of close to that happy hour time, almost. So, Geoff, you've been with VMworld 11 years. What is your takeaway from the announcements that VMworld made at the show this year, and what you're hearing from your partners and your customers. >> So, I mean clearly, there's a buzz, there's a buzz again, right? I saw some articles saying there was a lacking of a buzz, but it is here, it's strong. Clearly, Pat knocked it out of the park on the opening keynote, great to see all the logos, customers, and I think our overall cloud strategy. I think it's really come on, and I think it's resonating with customers and partners. >> So, tell us how VMware works with Skytap, Roger, I guess I'll throw that to you. What are you guys doing together, and what's the story there? >> So, Skytap, we're a public cloud provider, and we're focused on enterprise applications, and basically, what we do, is we enable customers to take their on-prem legacy applications, move them to the cloud, modernize them, do parallel processing, add value-added service to them in the cloud, and for us to do that, we rely on VMware technologies that underpin our solutions. >> And what are the key things, just really quickly, that you're hearing from your customers who are using VMware in terms of the value that they're getting from this collaboration? >> I think the biggest thing that we hear from customers is that they need to be more agile, they need to be faster, they need to get to market more quickly. With the framework of VMware and using VMware underneath us, people are comfortable with our solution, they understand how we're going to interact with their application stacks, and it provides for a better solution for our customers. >> Roger, the statement that we are a public cloud provider for traditional applications-- >> Roger: Yes. >> Is a huge statement, there's a lot of implications. Take us through a little bit, how does a customer think through this process, working with you, and then we'll get to the technology choices that make it easier or more difficult? >> Sure. >> So, how does this process work? >> That's a great question, so, when we talk to customers, we're really leading with a business discussion, talking about how are we going to make them more effective? How are we going to make them more agile? How are we going to help them drive revenue or reduce cost? And typically, what we'll see with a customer, is we'll do an inventory of their application environment, so with Skytap, basically, we'll look at your customer's entire application environment from the applications all the way down to the networking, and they'll say, you know what? "Based on our understanding, these are the applications we think that we can migrate to the Cloud, these other applications we think we have to keep on-prem. And we actually come in and say, you know what? These legacy applications that you have that may have been written five, 10, 15 years ago based on networking requirements or hardware requirements. We can actually take that, we can lift it, put it into the Skytap cloud, so we can bring a more complete vision to our customers on their cloud journey, so things that they thought were going to have to stay on-prem, they can actually now take to the cloud and enjoy those efficiencies. >> So identify, do some pattern recognition for us, so identify what are those attributes when you look at a couple of applications, or a set of workloads. What are some of the characteristics that determine whether it's ready for public cloud, or whether it should stay where it is? >> That's a great question, so most public clouds today, they're really geared for net new development, born in the cloud applications, mobile, things like that that we're all very familiar with. Again, if you're a bank, or an insurance company, or a hospital, you've written applications that maybe at one time were specifically dependent on physical MAC addresses, maybe you're putting multiple IP Addresses on physical NICs, maybe you're doing some interesting VPN or tunneling things that you had to develop five, 10, 15 years ago because that's what you had to do, then. A lot of our customers have applications that they don't want to touch, they're running, they're mission critical, and they're absolutely scared to break it, so with Skytap, basically, we can draw a circle around their complete application stack, down to the level two networking layer, take that, put it into a public cloud, and enable those developers to self-service, to make clones, to self-provision, to do whatever work that they need, and then, if they want, integrate that back into their on-prem production environment, or take it to a cloud-based production environment, as well. >> So it sounds as though, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds as though, in many respects, the first thing you're looking at is, okay, you've got these workloads working really well, but you've done things at various hardware levels that could benefit from virtualization. >> Absolutely. >> So in many respects, the first thing you're doing is identifying what about these workloads can be virtualized, and that's part of the lift, which is where VMware comes in, have I got that right? >> Exactly, and that's why VMware is such a great partner of ours, because again, most enterprises today, virtually all enterprises today use VMware, so they're very comfortable with the solution, they understand how we're leveraging the technology, and we can focus on the business discussion, versus spending a lot of time in the technical discussions, trying to see if this is going to work or not. And that's really where we want to focus our energies. >> From a VMware perspective, there's hundreds of thousands of customers out there that have invested in, and everything from vSphere, NSX, vSAN, giving them the opportunity for another incredible cloud partner, you know, it was fantastic for us. We're seeing things like burstability, I mean, our hearts and thoughts are in Houston, with the big storm, but things like that will have a big impact on companies, on insurance companies, for instance, there's going to be a huge burst. So things like that, data center extensibility, consolidation, DR, these are the sort of things that they want to be able to tap into their VMware invest. >> Or emergency services is getting a whole bunch of work right now. One of the nice things is it sounds as though a lot of that infrastructure hasn't gone down despite the flooding and I've got to believe there's a whole bunch of IT guys that are doing a lot of God's work right now, to try to make sure that people stay alive. >> Yep. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So talk to us about the innovation in terms of how VMware and Skytap are sort of working together. Did you see customers bringing you guys together, wanting more flexibility, wanting more advice and guidance on what should we move, what should we virtualize, what should we keep, or what should we move. How have your customers facilitated the innovations that you're achieving together? >> Yeah, maybe, I'll take a first shot at it, and then give it to Roger. So first of all, Skytap's a premier partner of ours in the VMware Cloud Provider Program. So, we're really excited about that, we just announced that today. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And on-- >> Like getting a scholarship on a football team. (laughing) >> Oh, I thought we said we weren't going to talk sports. >> Peter: Oh, that's right. >> No sports, right. >> No sports. >> Go Patriots. Anyway, you know what this does it allows us from a field level, it allows us to collaborate deeper from a partnership with our core sales team working with Skytap's. The second thing is around joint go-to-market, and messaging, it allows us to do a lot more in the market together. And then thirdly, around innovation, it's not just about the VMware install base, but it's also working with them on different cloud tools, leveraging that, integrated it in all the different technologies across the board. So, that's sort of a three-prong approach when you are one of our top premier partners. >> That's exactly right, it's a technology, it's a marketing, and it's a go-to-market and sales partnership that we have, so we're very happy with it. We're excited about being a premier partner. We've really boned up on our own technical capabilities within Skytap, to be more expert in VMware technologies, and now we want to be able to roll that out into the field with our joint customers. And getting back to your question, from a joint sales perspective, a joint go-to-market perspective, VMware is doing a great job of motivating its own sales force to become more cloud-ready and cloud-friendly, and it's a great fit for what we do. Their sales reps get compensated on Skytap, so it makes for a very good and smooth motion out in the field, which is where we're really all, it's where it matters. >> So Roger, I'm going to admit that I'm a little bit on edge about the word innovation. I've always believed that there's a difference between inventing something, which is an engineering act, and innovating, which is a social act, getting people to do things differently. And partnerships have always been a crucial feature of the computing industry in that innovation front, how you go to market, and especially, how you get businesses to adopt new things faster, more completely, so that they can be more successful. And as we go through this significant transformation, partners have to play another role, and that is they have to feed back to some core technology companies what they're hearing, what is working, what isn't working. How is that part of the relationship working? You as an advocate for customers as VMware evolves its platforms? >> That's a great question. Again, our customers, when we talk to them, they're really looking to get more agile, to be more innovative, to get to revenue sooner. And the things they they're asking from us as a public Cloud provider is self-service, is the ability to set up resources of their own without having to wait for central IT. They're looking to enable their team members across the globe. With Skytap and using VMware technology, we can clone images of our customers' environments, we can ship them globally. So, you may have a team in San Francisco, you may have a team in Seattle, you may have a team in Tokyo. With Skytap, you can send these images or these clones all over. They can be shared, they can be put back together, and a lot of that capability was feedback directly, that we see from our own customers. So, that's how we keep that feedback loop going, and that's the feedback that we give back to VMware. >> Yeah. If I could add to that, VMware is an incredible enterprise software company, we all know that. The last few years, we've been pivoting to develop a products and services for service providers. Part of being in our premier program as a VMware Cloud provider is you're getting access into some of those feedbacks and loops, and giving direct feedback and things, whether it's DR, us productizing products just for these guys for DR, or replication, like VCD. There's other multi-tenant, self-service portals that we're working in collaboration with our top partners. So, those are some of the other sorts of innovation that we're trying to also, beyond just the enterprise, in a service way where they can service the enterprise in the commercial space. >> Excellent, well guys, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE today, and talking with Peter and me about what's going on with VMware and Skytap together. We wish you continued success in your partnership. >> Great, thanks for being here, Lisa. >> Thank you so much. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Alright, for Geoff, and Roger, and my co-host Peter Burris, I am Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE, we are again live at Vmworld 2017, continuing coverage day three. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by vmware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost, Keith Townsend, and you're watching theCUBE broadcast VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. Happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest to theCUBE, but someone I've actually known for many years, and super excited to dig in with, Bob Madaio, vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Marketing and Hitachi, Bob, thanks for joining us. >> Stu, glad to be here. It's taken a little while but... >> Yeah, you know, it's funny. We get together at Vmworld sometimes and it's like, Bob lives a town over from me. >> We should be able to figure this out >> You know, back home, he goes to a Thai restaurant that I used to go to all the time, when I lived even closer to him, but we come out to Las Vegas and we get together. >> Finally get together. >> So, for those that haven't known you for more than a decade, why don't you tell us a little bit about your role at Hitachi. >> Sure, yeah. So at Hitachi my team drives the Infrastructure Solutions Marketing. So, fundamentally, the core idea of the Infrastructure products. Here at Vmworld, the big focus things of converge infrastructure, how our storage supports the vmware environment, and vevolve, and all that, and just in general we're really focusing in on data as part of Hitachi. How do we help the customers' data strategy, whether it's going virtualized, cloud, so that's what my team does, core product marketing in those products, work very closely with teams focused on our IOT initiatives and other solution initiatives within Hitachi. >> So, Bob, for a lot of your career you've worked on partnerships >> Yeah >> And we always say, it was interesting, what was the Michael Dell thing in the keynote, some partnerships are, "We're just talking", and some things are real. So, a lot of partners here, everybody is the best partner with vmware, but talk about the Hitachi-vmware relationship. >> Sure, of course. And as you know, we've spent some time at a prior vendor who's obviously very close to vmware, EMC, and I was there with you for many years, but it's a very different partnership, as obviously that is, but if we look at very tactically, just this hyper converge space and vsan, which is a lot of what we've been focusing on at the show, anyway, fundamentally that is our offering in that space. So we have a unified compute platform product. Our platform is, for at least the virtualized environment, based on vsan. And so from that regard, we are a very clean partner for vmware in general terms. Now, I know a lot of my vsan buddies have been on and we still see a lot of value in centralized, well-protected, modernizing those core environments, and we're going to continue to find that blend, but really we're pretty all-in with vmware. In fact, shameless plug, we were the last year's global OEM innovation partner for vmware. So there's been a lot of good work going on. >> Just one piece. In addition to vsan, my understanding, the cloud foundation suite, you're also a partner for that. >> Exactly right. So end of last week, getting ready for the event, we announced two solutions. One was an update to the hyper converge solution, what we call our unified compute platform, or UCPHC, and we introduced a brand new solution that we call unified compute platform RS, for rack scale. And that takes our building blocks of the hyper converge and brings it your, you're exactly right, all the vmware cloud foundation tools, and the SDC wrapped up, ready to go for a customer. >> So Bob, let's blow out this infrastructure a little bit. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Hitachi very well known for data, data protection, incredible Fortune 500 reference customer, mission critical data. The compute side of it, little bit not as familiar with. Help us understand the chops >> Where we are there. >> Yeah, we're you're at and >> Absolutely. >> And the story behind it. >> I think there's a couple ways to go, and frankly, right now, at Hitachi, we think of compute in terms of converge or hyper conversion infrastructure. We're not really in the compute to sell server business. We did have a history of building, well, if we go even well further back than my Hitachi tenure, well known for mainframes, computing, they've been doing those and actually manufacturing those in Japan, until now we've just had new deal with IBM to do some work with them, but that culture has always been there, and we also had, and still have in the market, Hitachi manufactured blade servers. But, what our strategy really is looking like going forward, is we see more than 2/3 the revenue in the server market is going rack mount servers, people looking to do more scale-out, more flexible, and that's really what our new solutions are focused on, especially the ones we're highlighting here. We will still do some larger-scale up-servers, focused on things like SAP HANA, large oracle data bases, to your point, from the vendors you speak with, we're not unique here, but we are going to skew to those higher-end customers, but we want to make sure, even those higher-end customers are looking for more flexible compute infrastructure. The way we're going to go to market with that is either in the context of a solution, so think of a data blending solution, a oracle, a pentaho is a Hitachi company, how can we blend that with other data, we're going to sell that solution that will include servers or we'll sell it as a converge infrastructure solution. We're not really going to go and, I don't want to take on, some of our Chinese friends and others to say, "I'm going to beat you in one new server cost." Like that's not a value ad solution for me. >> So, extending that brand of rock-solid data servers, is that core, you know I've been in plenty environments where they've run SAP on Hitachi systems, and they'll buy two of them, because hey, why not? But, let's talk about that strategy when talking to those customers and expanding beyond that core theme. Do you lead with services, what's the ideal, what's the wrapper around? >> Yeah that's a great question and it's changing, and I'll even admit it's more advanced in certain geographies than others and what we've found is our American counterparts, they were so well known for storage and with such large forms they've taken a different path, they've begun to introduce converge as sort of an upgrade path, and a solution. If you look at what we're doing in Europe, we actually are very advanced in as a service. So, we've even brought companies in like Oxya, who was out of the French region, they run SAP as a service. A lot more of our conversation are actually buy by the drink, buy as a service, and it depends on where the customer is. Oftentimes, it'll just be, "How can we help you run SAP?", in that example, others, you know, we still do the occasional, "Alright, you need an upgrade," and "Hey, did you think of moving to converge?" So it kind of depends, but we are definitely moving to some large customers "Why don't we just run it all "for you, and then you just pay by the drink?" So it's a whole mix, but it's definitely moving more toward an outcome-based conversation, we're really trying to have the conversation of, "Great, we can sell you whatever system we want, "we have hyper converge, converge storage, "what are you trying to do with your data, "and can we help you with that?" So that's where we're getting closer to, anyway. It's a growth path, certainly. >> Bob, what again, your view on what you're hearing from customers. >> Okay. >> So traditionally, I think Hitachi, you know, large enterprise, very reliable, trusted brand, you bought out service providers, very different, how they think of it, they're, you know, if you can save them pennies, that makes their services, you know, >> Yeah, yeah. >> You do, the impact of cloud, the vmware and Amazon is something that's been discussed here, what are they key challenges you're hearing from customers, what's changed over the last couple of years? >> You know, it's clearly confidence in their data. We're seeing big impacts from GDPR, and other type concerns, and just speed of IT services. I mean, those are the two biggest things, it's interesting, you mention the Amazon-vmware relationship and everything, and we're seeing this sort of weird dichotomy, lots of interest in that, and we're seeing some cloud services migrate back to the data center. So we're seeing this funny thing where the customers, I think have trialed a lot, and they're now beginning to get a better of sense of what data types, and what applications really can be in the cloud, and certainly a lot of them are going there, far be it from me to argue that, but we are seeing some of them, they go, "You know what? This doesn't belong there, "we're bringing it back in," and then we're seeing new applications that we want to get to that hybrid model, that's one of the reasons we think this rack-scale solution is going to be so interesting for customers. >> You bring up an interesting point when you look at data, you mention GDPR, and customers, and how do I leverage my data, how do I manage the government interest compliance, and now new regulations, which are a little bit fuzzy, >> They are very. >> even today, how are you helping customers through that all, you know, data is the new loyal, how do I tap it? >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the things is customers want to leverage multiple types of infrastructure, be it in their data center or elsewhere, that's going to only continue and probably we'll see multi-cloud, like we saw multi-vendor, storage vendors, you know, 10 years ago. But if we can help, and one of the things that we do with what we call our concept platform, is have that object storage where regardless of where that data is sitting, the policy can be maintained in your site, that meta-data that really runs where everything is, and how you get to that data, we can help them keep control of, regardless of if some of it's sitting in whatever S3 compatible or an Azure. We can give them that centralized control of disparate cloud sources. >> I love to say, conferences like Vmworld moves at the speed of the CIO. >> Okay. >> The speed of the CIO is not necessarily the speed of the business >> Fair. >> So there's a opportunity for Hitachi to vendor, to not only talk to the CIO, but talk to the business, talk to me about the nuance of that balancing that relationship and needing to, you know what, we need to service our traditional customer, but there's this other customer that's really needing our capabilities. >> I think you've hit a little bit on our corporate strategy, to some degree, in the sense that we kind of have a bifurcated focus. We need to be a value added IT solutions vendor, and it has to be solutions, right. I think the world of saying, "I'm going to win because my VSP is better," which of course it is, but that's beside the point, we'll come back to that with all my EMC friends, but that day is passing us by, we all know that. So we need to be relevant in, like I said, data blending, and SAP, how are we going to integrate that, that's our IT side, but this whole other side of the business, and we are reasonably unique, so my part at Hitachi, this IT business that we're in, is a relatively small piece of a nearly hundred billion dollar global conglomerate technology company. And one of the things a global technology company does is very deep vertical market industrial solutions. And I don't know if you've noticed, but vmware mentioned IOT a lot more than we've heard them mention in the past, and I think there's a play where the business is looking for how to use technology to modernize, I don't know if I want to use the phrase digital transformation, I think someone comes out and slaps someone now if you use it too much, >> Yeah, there's someone right behind you. >> Yeah, I'm a little nervous. But if you think about that, how can we leverage technology if I have maintenance on trucks and I have 16 thousand trucks as one of our customers does, how do I do predictive maintenance to save me a couple million dollars a year, or just as a starting point. We can bring expertise to that that maybe some others can't. One of the things that we're trying to do is have the business conversation about how technology can help operations, be them within a factory, within some sort of vertical market, and then develop that core, general purpose IT solution that is, you know, we can put different applications on it, but understand the data flow within the enterprise. We're trying to do both of those. What I am seeing, though, is more and more CIOs are being linked with the business, because they know there's no other way. And increasingly some of the customers I see, the CIO came out of the business, and that's a really interesting trend. >> Alright, Bob, we've got to dig into this IOT stuff. IOT's a big, big, big discussion. Last interview you were talking about from a security standpoint, it's the biggest challenge we have, they're just orders of magnitude more service area, Hitachi, as a global company, I think about the devices and sensors, you live there where many of the legacy infrastructure companies there, and then architecturally, if I put my storage and infrastructure hat on, it's like, "Well, I want containers, or server-lists," or something like that. >> Yeah. >> Do you play everywhere? Where are the pieces that Hitachi has set up to win, and has strength? >> Good question. I think there's two key things that we're focused on. One is, first, Hitachi builds lots of machines. I mean, I still, I've been there almost five years, in a week or so, and I still learn, you know, Clarion car stereos, so that's actually OEM in lots of vehicles out there, is that play for us? The medical field, all the devices and scanners, the obviously, the big earth-moving equipment, all of those things. We have a pretty good understanding of, cause I think one of your thoughts here is going to lead us to, a lot of that data is going to be dealt with locally. And we have a pretty good sense of what data might we get value out of. Cause one of the biggest problems, I, as someone who still cares very deeply about storage, I'd like to save every bit that ever came out of a machine, but that's just not going to make sense for anyone. So, if we can deal with figuring out what data to keep local to that edge, we are developing a core platform we can send the relevant data back, if you haven't heard it's called Lumada, and I'm under, I think I have a shock collar on, we'll have some big announcements coming out in the near future about that, so I'll pick, but it's out in market and it is something that's been >> Nobody's listening, you can. >> I don't know, we're not live on the internet or anything. So, but, point being, we have this central platform that's really going to scale and ingest all that machine data, but we know we need to deal with it at the edge, and you're right, that's a different type device than we're known for historically. But we build so many devices in the other parts of the business, how do we leverage and combine? But we're not going to only focus on Hitachi, because that's a very difficult path. You need to understand, in every IOT solution, there's lots of partners, and one of the things that we've learned from our Japanese counterparts, and our global counterparts, is the idea of co-creation. And so what we really want to do is learn from some of our lighthouse, like I mentioned that transportation company, that's going to be a unique solution to them, but there has to be core that's reusable. I think the challenge that IOT has had to a certain degree, really getting traction in the market, is if every IOT deployment is a snowflake it's really hard to make a business for anyone, and really get customers on quicker. So, we're also going to look at that core data center level. Can we use the components, think of a converge infrastructure stack, if you're going to run core ingestion components of IOT, could we do some prepackaging to help customers, can we make it easier for IT to make happen what the business wants on the IOT side. That's one place where I think we can add real value. >> So, talking about frictionless business, and frictionless IT, the real challenges are, when you have a Hitachi, huge manufacturing organization, manufacturing operations is very different from IT operations, and a lot of times, IT, or IT providers find themselves at kind of a marriage counselor. What are some of the lessons learned from looking at Hitachi's business from an organizational perspective and then looking at tradition IT that you can give insights to the audience. >> Well, I'll answer in kind of two ways. So the first is, we need to change as much as our customers need to change to take advantage of this opportunity, and we're doing a lot of that change. I'll give one example that I know our CEO's talked about in a bunch of public forms is within all the, what we would call a front-facing business, those vertical businesses, we've put what we call cheap fomata officers, or IOT technology experts, in each of those businesses, to be part of the conversation of the overall manufacturing, or whatever that vertical business may be, so that we can insert thoughts of, "Hey, well what have you done to make it easier "for us to pull information out of those systems? "How can we leverage that?" What are you thinking maybe as a service offering, you're not just selling a system, or a bulldozer, or I'm not going to get the right, I'm closer to converge and storage, I got to tell you. We don't just want to sell that big piece of machinery, how are you going to sell a solution for the customer that either improves the maintenance, makes it easier. So that's what we're doing internally. I will say, what I've seen with customers, and we can explain to them, and I think really that's having the CIO at the seat of the business more frequently, we're embedding a technologist in the business, I was actually down, I had the luck of going down to Sydney and some of our other cities that we're doing really wonderful stuff in, in Australia a few weeks back, and I was in a room, it was tremendous. We thought the meeting was going to go one way, and it went completely down an IOT path, which was a surprise, but the person was talking, and I didn't realize fully who was in the room, they were talking so much about business relevant data they're trying to do to change their operations, it wasn't until after the meeting I realized, when we were really talking about our roles better, she was a technology architect. And so, that distinction, that wall between business and technology for the companies, we're actually going to pull it off as a power generation company, they're dissolving those walls. And I think the only way to really implement a solution that uses data to improve the business, is to dissolve the walls as quickly as possible. >> Last thing I wanted to ask you, Bob. We've come into Vmworld this year, so some people have commented, "You think vmware, they're the "server virtualization company." Now, it's a lot of conversations, right? The cloud, is it, they're doing SaaS, we're going through this, Hitachi's a conglomerate. There's a lot of different things, you're on the infrastructure side there, what do we think of when we think of Hitachi in the next? >> Well it's good that you mentioned next. We'll have an event we're calling next in this very building in a few weeks. And you'll hear a lot more about what we're thinking of ourselves. I would say this, I think what we're hoping, especially on the technology, that digital side of Hitachi, if you will, you think of us as a data solutions company a certain way, I think one of the big learnings for us is, we're one of the top software companies, on a revenue basis in the world, no one thinks of us that way. But all of those machines that we talked about, all of those things, guess what's running them? And if you aggregate, I think it's top 15, I don't want to be, I might be slightly off, apologies, but we're up in that. So I think one of the things we want to help people understand is we can be an outcome-based partner for you. Whether that's on the industrial side to data, whether that's, you have a unique data problem and you need someone to come in with a custom solution, I mean, yes, if you just like to run a bunch of workloads on a virtualized infrastructure, we can sell you hyper converge solutions with vmware, awesome. But if you're trying to figure out something more complex, and you're really concerned about how your data's going to be used in leverage, and how you're going to analyze it and blend it, we can be your partner for that. That's what I'm hoping people are going to start to see about Hitachi. >> Alright, well, Bob, the tagline of Hitachi now, is Inspire the Next, really appreciate you coming on, helping us inspire our audience to dig in to what is next for key talents. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE at Vmworld 2017.

(upbeat electronic. music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE's broadcast of VMworld 2017. One of our guests earlier this week called this set the punk rock set and one of my guests here in a preview said that this is going to be the battle of the baldies (laughter) so I'm really happy to bring two leaders of two of the hottest topics being discussed this week, welcoming back to the program Dom Delfino of course representing NSX and Security at NSBU and Lee Caswell from the vSAN Team. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, how are you, buddy? >> I'm doing phenomenal. Dom, are you making network great again, yet? >> It's fantastic again now. We're making network fantastic again. >> Yeah and I expected you to show up a little more bling because we were talking Silicon Valley. Your group is reaching the three commas of a billion dollars. >> Dom: That's right. >> So let's start there, NSE when it was bought a few years back, over a million dollars. SDN was something that we all in the networking world was talking about and things have changed. I don't hear SDN talked at this show, it's real customers, real deployments, pretty good scale. The interconnected fabric if you will for VM's cloud strategy. >> Yep, absolutely. So Stu, these major transformational shifts in the industry take time, right? You know, you're not going to undo what you've done for the last 25, 30 years in a month or a quarter or a year and I think what you saw initially was adoption of NSX or automation of network provisioning. Then what you saw second to that was microsegmentation as a defense in depth strategy for our customers and now you see the multi data center moving into the hybrid cloud. vRNI is a service, NSX is a service, App Defense, layering additional security capabilities on top of that and as our production customers sort of adopted it in the beachhead methodology operationalized it, you see additional follow on adoptions. We've got one customer running 18 data centers on NSX today so this is becoming more and more mainstream and as you look at our approach moving forward in terms of where we are and the software defines us in our journey, how that connects to our strategy for VMC on AWS or VMC on Blue Mix. You saw Agredo Apenzeller yesterday demonstrate crossed into Microsoft Azure. When was the last time you thought you'd see that at VMworld, huh? >> Hey Lee, I got to bring you in here. (laughter) It's funny, I've lived in the storage world. >> I thought this was a storage show. >> And now we're tech people throwing all these acronyms. >> I know, they're so excited. >> And you know because come on, NSX is not simple. Who's the one that's saving customers money so that they can buy all of these? >> NSX is a great value, but vSAN pays for the ride, right? >> Here we go, right? >> They do. We'll happily accept it. >> I mean, we're consolidating storage in a way that basically brings back the magic of consolidation, right? The first time you consolidated, people called it magic because you consolidated servers, bought shared storage and had money left over, right? Now we're doing the same thing again, right, with now storage, right? What's interesting is is this is a huge career path gain for the virtualization administrator. >> Wow, so talking about being disruptive, vSAN. You know, I've got to rib you guys a little bit at the dodge ball tournament benefiting Unoria, the vSAN team lost to the Dell EMC team, so. >> Can you imagine? And did you see how valiant we were? >> Dom: You guys fall hard. >> You fall hard. (laughter) >> You looked like you could have used a little youth on that team, by the way, Lee. >> So a lot of competition, you walked the show floor. >> Lee: Yeah. >> This, we usually call this storage world. I think it's fair to say it's HCI world now. >> Lee: It's amazing, right? >> How is vSAN fitting into the larger ecosystem? >> You know, we announced, Pat said we have over 10,000 customers now, right? And yet VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers right? So we're just getting started here and what you're finding is the two assets to bring to this party are a hypervisor or a server. >> Keith: Right. >> Right, you don't have either one of those, it's going to be very difficult because if you go back and you'll appreciate this, right? You remember a Type 2 hypervisor? >> Yep, vaguely. I almost wrote about it, like wait, they don't even exist anymore, do they? >> Well, Workstation still, right? If you start thinking, right, that was a hypervisor on a guest, right? And so what happened though, as soon as these XI came out, right, integrated the compelling performance advantages, the resource utilization and then the idea that hey, I got a common management through vCenter, right? That's what's playing right now is users are trying to find leverage and scale, how do I do that and that's where we've just seen a massive adoption of ECM. >> Alright, one of the reasons we brought the two of you together though is because while peanut butter and chocolate are great on their own, the cloud foundation. >> Dom: I have the whole sandwich now, Stu. >> Yes, yes, so you know Cloud Foundation, NSX might be the interconnective fabric between all of them. Cloud Foundation is that solution, there's a whole business unit, put that together and drive that, so talk about how you feed that solution, how that changes the way you think about it. >> Probably the most interesting thing and I've only had the vSAN team for six months but I think the most interesting thing for me and vSAN is it scales downmarket very well as well, so we have massive enterprise customers, right, who have large global deployments of vSAN but you can take vSAN, put it on three nodes and see value out of that, right? And I think when you look at, you know, this is the year of cloud reality I'm calling it now, Stu, right? That's what's happened here this weekend at VMworld. When you look at that I think the most fundamental thing the customers are taking out of this week is my private cloud has to be as good as the public cloud offering, okay? Now if you're a Fortune 1,000 customer you certainly have a lot of resources, a lot of talent, a lot of expertise, a lot of history, and potentially a lot of budget to throw at that problem. But if you're a mid-market customer, right? And you look at I need to build a private cloud that's fast and easy, right? Which was the two primary reasons to adopt public cloud, you have a good place to start with Cloud Foundation and I think it's just the beginning so you get vSphere, you get NSX, you get vSAN, and you get SDDC Manager to do life cycle management, certainly you could layer vRealize on top of that for automation, orchestration, provisioning and self service as well and it really allows everybody to start to take advantage of the capabilities that only existed in the major cloud providers before on-prem and their own data center so I think as you look at Cloud Foundation and I'm working very closely with John Gilmartin on this, moving forward, it is going to become the basic foundational element, pun intended, right, for many of the VMware offerings moving forward as we turn into next year, that we'd look at this very closely and we have a lot of plans as that being the base to build off of in terms of how we help our customers get to this private cloud. >> Lee, I need to hear your perspective because some of this Cloud Foundation, there's got to be some differences when you talk about some of the deployment models whether where I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, VMC, the VMware managed cloud I guess on AWS, VMware on AWS something getting a lot of buzz. You know, everybody's digging into to it. What's it do today, what's it going to do in the future? >> Well, you know I thought it was really impressive when Andy Jassy got up and basically said, "We've been faced with a minor choice." Customers want these to be integrated, right? And the second day was Google, right? Talking about how we're taking developer tools, right, and making them common, so that element. Now storage people think that the strategic engagement with the cloud is about data, right? >> Stu: Right. >> Putting a VM in the cloud, I mean that's a credit card transaction, but once you put your first byte of data into the cloud, now you take on sovereignty issues, you think about performance and where you're going to get guaranteed ihovs out of it. You start thinking about how am I going to move that data? It's not fast or free or as anyone who has emailed a video knows, right, so you start thinking that it's the data elements and now what's really powerful and we saw some of this in the demos in general session. Once you have a common data structure, we call it dSAN, right, all the way from the edge into the data center of virtual private cloud then into the public cloud, now I've got the opportunity to have this really flexible fluid system, right? All virtualized, it's so powerful, right? About how I can manage that and we think, it'll be interesting, does the virtualization administrator then become the cloud administrator, right? >> So then, let's expand that one, vSAN everywhere. vSAN in the AWS, vSAN in vCAN, vSAN in my own data center. How do I protect that data? That seems just, is this where NSX comes in? How do I protect that data? >> Can we let Lee talk the security first? >> Where's the security, is the security in vSAN? >> Cause I know Dom >> We'll let Lee go first and then I'll correct him, okay? (laughter) >> Well, I mean you start with a security like encryption on the data, right? I mean one of the things why vSAN's so portable is because there is no hardware dependency. I mean, we're using like all, we support all different servers, there's no proprietary cards or anything, right, to stick in these servers so we can go run that software wherever. Now, we're also then as a result doing software encryption with our latest release on 6.6 software encryption allows us to use common key management partners, right, and so we use those partners including iTrust, Vales, FlowMetric, and others and now you can have key management regardless of where your data resides, so we start there but then what customers say really quickly, right, is if I start moving something, they say, "NSX help me out, right?" >> So I think Lee took to a very critical part of it, the ability to encrypt that data at rest and you know, as it transits, there's really three elements to this, it's the data itself, which we say that 6.6 introduced, right, the ability to encrypt that data, microsegmentation and upcoming DNE to both protect and encrypt that data while it's in flight and now if you look at that App Defense strategy, right, it's to secure that data while it's being processed as well at the host level up at the application layer, so I think Stu this just continues to be a huge challenge for our customers. Particularly with the breeches, we saw what happened with Wannacry, with Pedia, with non-Pedia, the different versions of that, Electric Blue and all. >> Stop, you know, your boss who's on theCUBE on the other set right now said, "As an industry, we have failed you." Pat Gelson gave the keynote, so when we're solving it, you know we're going to have like next year I expect both of you to have this all fixed. >> One of these, you asked like with all the HCI enthusiasts that are out there in many companies, you know, how do we differentiate? Well, part of it is this is not just a drop in a little box, right, someplace, right? This is how do you go and modernize your data center, basically tie into the complete software stack and regardless of the timing in which you're going to go and deploy that, right, if you're going to deploy the full stack today, that's a VMware cloud foundation, awesome, if you want to go start with vSAN, great, and then add in other pieces, or you can start with NSX. In any event, the common management is the piece that we really think is going to go and set us apart, right, as a part of it's an infrastructure play, not just a point component. >> So? >> Hold on I want to let Don finish. >> Stu, I think three years ago if we sat down here and told you you're going to encrypt your software defined storage, in software, no hardware requirements, I probably would have said I was nuts for saying that and you definitely would have said I was nuts for saying that so this is critical and we are hyper-focused on solving this problem and what customers have to recognize is that you have to make some foundational architectural changes in order to fix this problem and if you don't it's not going away, it's only going to get worse. >> So, I took a peep in at FUTURE:NET. First off, VMware does an awesome job of this conference within a conference. >> Isn't it fun? >> It is fun, a little bit over my head at times, which we have to be getting that same reaction from the CIOs that this stuff even when we're taking stuff that we know very well, Vmware or vSphere, starting with that, adding on vSAN, again the conversation, Dom, we can encrypt at both network and compute and storage? That's a little deep, but now we're talking about this crosscloud conversation that FUTURE:NET is most definitely addressing. How is that conversation going with customers? Are they finally starting to get their arms around the complexity of the situation? >> Absolutely Keith, because when you look at our multi-data center functions of NSX that we introduced back in NSX 6.2 at VMworld two years ago, three years ago, I'm getting long in the tooth here, so I can't remember times anymore. Those were the foundational elements for the components of crosscloud today so many customers who started the NSX journey with one use case and one data center and expanded it horizontally and then down through a number of use cases and then across to another data center are already taking advantage of those crosscloud functionalities from private data center to private data center. Now we've just taken them and extended them into Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS as well. So the customers who've been on this journey with us from the beginning have seen this step by step and it doesn't really seem like a big leap to them already. Now obviously if you haven't been on that journey it seems like you know, hey can you guys really do this and yeah, we've been doing it from private data center to private data center, now we're just bringing that capability to public data center and certainly the partnership with Amazon is a tremendous help to that as well. >> Yeah, when customers are buying into these solutions, and I know you like to look at it as a platform, so let's look out a little bit. I want you to talk a little bit about what we should expect from the future, if it makes edge computing kind of IoT is a big one, I have to expect that both of you have a play there, so? >> I guess I'll touch on that in two pieces so you sort of see us extending this up a little bit initially with PKS with pivotal container services, with Kubernetes on BOSH and the ability to do rolling upgrades and NSX is embedded in that solution, right, it's not a built-on offering, it's natively part of that for all the reasons that we talked about earlier and we see a lot of opportunities as it relates to edge computing, right, and I think this is something that, wasn't it file computing like seven years ago, Stu? >> Your former employer was one that was pushing that. >> Dom: Oh okay, yeah what happened to that? >> Yeah I have heard it come back from data center to cloud. >> I'm just needling you Stu, we didn't need to get into that. >> But you know, terminology does matter, but I hear your point. >> So I think A. IoT is the biggest security challenge that we face, right? >> Stu: Yep. >> That's number one. If you think it's bad now it's about to get a lot worse with the wholesale adoption of IoT. I think that when you look at the remote office, the branch office, what's going on with the transition with wide area networking right now, I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. Clearly we have a play where you can provide sort of a branch in a box with our technology but I think there's a lot of things you'll see coming from us in the near term as far as innovation that we can do there to really enhance edge computing as it relates to IoT and certainly our user computing platform with Horizon Air of the Legacy AirWatch venture, is an important part of securing those edge devices as well. >> Lee? >> On the vSAN side, this week we announced the HDI Acceleration Kit and that's basically a way to take advantage of single socket servers, right? And one of the things we're seeing for bandwidth reasons and economics you don't want to have everything centralized so the ability, particularly in an IoT environment, but also in retail or robo, if you've got hundreds of stores there's no way to put a sandbox and a fiber channel switch in separate storage and scale that, right? So what we're doing is we've got a very cost-effective license, right, incredible where you can get with hardware now, you can go and drop in a three node fully configured vSAN plus vSphere for under 25K. Drop it in, now you've got a virtualized environment, unlimited VMs, this sort of thing where we're helping basically bring the accelerating the adoption using HDI of enterprise modern infrastructure outside the data center. >> So last question around customer adoption and again, assessments of this model. The push, I think 816Z said that the edge is going to eat loud computing. Where do you guys see in the real world, the ground, is it a push towards the cloud or is it this combination of doing? >> In my experience, right and this is like an accordion, right, it goes in, it goes out it goes in, it goes out, why? Well it goes in and out based on economics and bandwidth. Right, so you start looking and saying, now until HDI came out, it just wasn't really feasible to put enterprise infrastructure at the edge, right? >> Keith: Right. >> So things were centralized, right? Well now, right, now we start distributing again, right? The cloud is an example of more centralized, right? But I think we're going to see both, right? And you're going to see this what's particularly interesting right now is right, the new advances in media, CPUS, low-latency networks makes it possible to use these I call it the serverization of storage, but really it's a serverization of the modern data center, right, and which by the way is common to how clouds are built. >> But does that mean the overall IT management or complex, as I build it out that control plane. >> I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with one of the largest banks, right? And they were looking at HDI, they've used a lot of stance ORKS in the past and do you know what he asked at the end? "Could you give me the ORK charts of customers "in my scale who are using HDI?" >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because I want to go figure out how I hyper-converge my team. We'll never be fast until we go and get teams that are working more closely together where they start from the VM level and then they look at the network attributes and the storage attributes and the compute attributes. That's going to speed up everything. >> And I think Lee is 100% spot on there and every customer I've talked to this week, you have to make the transition to an infrastructure team, not a network team, a storage team, a security team, you're an infrastructure team, and this is why the app developers have been going around you, right? And this is why you have Shadow IT, it's because they want fast and simple and they don't want to have to deal with four different people, right? They don't want to have to deal with a serialization of a deployment that they're left waiting for the lag for and I think in terms of the edge computing, I think you related it to one of the conversations by Andreessen Horowitz. I think that might differ a little bit in the consumer space and in the enterprise space as well so it may be the case in the consumer space that it erodes some functionality from the cloud, particularly on the IoT side of things as well, driverless cars and things of that nature where it makes sense that if you get disconnected that you still need to have some computing capacity so you don't crash, right Lee? Crashing is not good. But I think the behavioral change, the people change, the mindset change is much more challenging than the technological change. Everything you haven't done before seems complicated until you actually do it, right? >> Alright well, we talked a lot to customers. Actually some of that organizational change is helping them to tackle things like those new architectures. Security is one that is I've been leaving it for too long and now absolutely front of the table. Don Delfino, Lee Caswell, always a pleasure to catch up with both you. >> Always a pleasure. >> Hope it lived up to your expectations that we brought the heat. Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. Thank you for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube on day three of our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, our cohost for this segment is John Troyer and we're excited to be joined by Rob Young, who is a Cube alumni, and the manager of product and strategy at RedHat. Welcome back to the Cube, Rob. >> Thanks, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So RedHat and VM where you, you get a lot of customers in common. I imagine you've been to many, many Vmworlds. What are you hearing from some of the folks you were talking to on during the show this week? >> So a lot of the interest that we're seeing is how RedHat can help customers, VMware or otherwise, continue to maintain mode one applications, like Z applications while planning for mode two, more cloud based deployments. And we're seeing a large interest in open source technologies and how that model could work for them to lower cost, to innovate more quickly, deliver things in a more agile way. So there's a mixture of messages that we're getting, but we're receiving them loud and clear. >> Excellent. You guys have a big investment in OpenStack. >> Yes we do, and even back in the early days when OpenStack was struggling as a technology, we recognized that it was an enabler for customers, partners, large enterprises that wanted to create, maintain their own private clouds or even to maintain a hybrid cloud environment where they maintained and managed controlled some aspect of it while having some of it, some of the work loads on a public cloud environment as well, so RedHat has invested heavily in OpenStack to this point. We're now in our 11th version of RedHat/OpenStack platform and we continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, animation, and contributions. >> Rob, we were with the Cube at the last Openstack summit in Boston, big Redhat presence there obviously, I was very impressed with the maturity of the Openstack market and community, I mean we're past the hype cycle now, we're down to real people, real uses, real people using it, a lot of varied people with strong business critical investment in Openstack in many different use cases. Can you kind of give us a picture of the state of the Openstack market and the userbase now that we are past that hype cycle. >> So I think what we're witnessing now in the market is a thirst for Openstack, one because it's a very efficient architecture, it's very extensible, there's a tremendous ecosystem around the Redhat distribution of Openstack, and what we're seeing from enterprises, specifically in the telecom industry is that they see Openstack as away to lower their costs, raise their margins in a very competitive environment, so anywhere you see an industry where there's very heavy competition for customers, that type of thing, Openstack is going to play a role, if it's not already doing so, it's going to be there at some point because of the simplification of what was once complex, but also In the cost savings can be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment. >> You mentioned Telco, and specifically Openstack and the value for companies that need to compete for customers, besides Telco, what other industries are really primed for embracing Openstack technologies? >> So we're seeing across many industries, finance and banking, healthcare, public sector, anywhere where there is a emphasis on the move to opensource and to open compute environments, open APIs we're seeing a tremendous growth in traction, and because Redhat has been later than Linux, many of these same customers, who trust for Redhat Enterprise Linux and now looking to us for the very same reason on Openstack platform, because we much like we have done with Enterprise Linux, we have adopted an upstream community driven project we have made it safe to use within an environment, in an enterprise way, in a supported way as well, via subscription, so many industries, many versicles, we expect to see more, but primary use cases in FE, in Telco, healthcare, banking, public sector are among the top dogs out there. >> IS there a customer story that sort of stands out in you mind as a hallmark that showcases the success of working with Redhat and Openstack? >> Well there are many customers, many partners out there that we work with, if you look at four out of the five large Telcos, Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, others that we've recently done business with, would be really good examples, of not only customer use cases, but how they're using Openstack to allow their customers to have better experience with their cell networks with their billing with their availability, that type of thing, and we had two press announcements that came out in May, one of them is an educational institution of a consortium of very high profile Northeast learning institutions, public institutions that are now standardized on Openstack and are contributing, and we've also got Oakridge, forgive me, it escapes me, but there's a case study out there on the Redhat website that was posted on May 8th that depicts how they're using our product and how others can do the same. >> Rob, switching over a little bit to talking a little bit more about the tech and how the levers get pulled, we're talking about cloud, another term past the hype cycle, it's a reality, but when you're talking about cloud you're talking about scale, we mentioned Linux and Openstack and Redhat, built on a foundation of Linux, super solid super huge community, super rich, super long history, but can you talk about scale up, scale out, data center, public cloud, private, how are you seeing enterprises of various seizes address the scale problem and using technologies like the Redhat cloud stack to address that? >> So there's a couple of things, there's many aspects to that question, but what we have seen from Openstack, is when we first got involved with the project, it was very much bounded by the number of servers that you needed to deploy an Openstack infrastructure on, what we're done as a company is we've looked at the components and we have unshackled them from each other, so that you can scale individual storage, individual network, individual high availability on the number of servers that best for your needs, so if you want to have a very large footprint with many nodes of storage, you can do that, if you want to scale that just when peak season hits you can do that as well, but we have led the community efforts to deshackle the dependencies between components, so from that aspect we have scaled the technology, now scaling operational capabilities and skillsets as well, we've also led the effort to create open APIS for management tools, we've created communities around Openstack and other Opensource technologies. >> Automation a big part of that. >> Automation as well. So if you look at Anserable, Redhat has a major stake in Anserable, and it is predominately the management scripting language of choice, or the management platform of choice, so we have baked that in our products, we have made it very simple for customers to not only deploy things like openstack but Openshift Cloudforms, other management capabilities that we have, but we've also added APIs to these products, so that if you choose not to use a Redhat solution, you can easily plugin a third party solution, or a homegrown solution, into our framework for our stack so that you can use our toolset, single pane of glass to manage it all. >> So with that, can you tell us a little bit about the partner ecosystem that Redhat has, and what you've done to expand that to make your customers successful in Openstack environments? >> Absolutely, as you're aware, Redhat Enterprise Linux, we certified most of the hardware, all of of the hardware OEMs on Redhat Enterprise Linux, we have a tremendous ecosystem around Enterprise Linux for Openstack, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Redhat right now, if you look at the ecosystem and the partners that are around Openstack on its own, we've got an entire catalog of hundreds of partners, some at a deeper level than others, integration wise, business wise whatever, but the ecosystem is growing and it's not because of Redhat's efforts, we have customers and partners that are coming to us, we need a storage solution, we're using Netapp as an example, you need to figure out a way to integrate with these guys, and certify, and make sure that it's something that we've already invested in is going to work with your product as well as it works with our legacy stuff, so the ecosystem around openstack is growing, we're also looking at growing the ecosystem around Openshift, around Rethat virtualization as well, so I think you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap in those ecosystems as well, which his a great thing for us, the synergies are there, and I think it's only going to help us multiply our efforts in the market. >> Go on John. >> So Rob, taking again partnerships, I've always been intrigued at the role of Opensource Upstream, the Opensource community, and the people who then take that Opensource and then package for customers and do the training enablement, so can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the Opensource training partners, and how the role of Redhat in translating all that upstream code into a product that is integrated and has training and is available for consumption for the IT side. >> Sure, so at Redhat we partner not only with opensource community member and providers, but also with proprietary, so I just wanted to make sure everybody understands, we're not exclusive to who we partner with. Upstream, we look for partners that have the opensource spirit in mind, so everything that they're asking us to either consider as a component within our solution or to integrate with we want to make sure that they are to the letter of the law, contributing their code back, and there's no strings attached, really the value comes in, are they providing value to their customers, with the contribution, and also to our combined customers, and what we're seeing in our partnerships, is that many of our partners even proprietary partners such as Microsoft for example, are looking at opensource in a different way, and they're providing opensource options for their customers and consumption based models as well, so we hope that we're having a positive impact in that way, because if you look at our industry, it's really headed towards the opensource openAPI open model and the proprietary model still has a time and place I believe, but I think it's going to diminish over time, and opensource is going to be the way people do business together. >> One of the things that you were talking about reminded me of one of the things that Michael Delft said yesterday, during the keynote with Pat Gelsinger, and that was about innovation, and that you really got companies to be successfully innovating with their customers, and that sounds like that definitely one of the core elements of what you're doing with customers, he said customers and partners are bringing us together to really drive that innovation. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and it's an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Michael Delft by the way, but what we see is because of the opensource model, you can release early and often, and you can fail early, and what that does is it encourages innovation, so its not only corporations like Redhat that are contributing to upstream projects, Openstack as an example, or Linux as an example, or KBM as an example, there's also college students, there's people out there who work for Bank of America, across the plains all over the world, and the one thing that unites us is to recognize the value of our contributions to an opensource community, and we think that really helps with agile development, agile delivery, and if you look a tour project deliveries for Openstack as an example, Openstack releases a major version of its product every six months, and because of contributions that we get from our community, we're able to release our, in testing, it's not just, contributions come in many forms, testing is a huge part of that, because of the testing we get from a world wide community, we're able to release shorty after a major version of upstream Openstack because that innovation in a pure waterfall model, its not even possible, in an opensource model, it's just a way of life. >> So as we're kind of wrapping up VM World day three, what are some of the key takeaways for you personally from the event and that Redhat has observed in the last couple of days here in Las Vegas? >> So there's a couple of observations that have been burned into my brain, one is we believe at Redhat, that virtualization as a model will remain core, not only to legacy application, Mode one, but also to Mode two, and the trend that we see in the model, for mode two virtualization is going to be a commodity feature, people are going to expect it to be baked into the operating system, or into the infrastructure where they're running the operating system where their application's on, so we see that trend, and we suspected, but coming to VMware this week helped confirm that, and I say that because the folks I've talked to after sessions, at dinner, in the partner pavilion, so I really se that as a trend, the other thing I see is that there's a tremendous thirst within the VMware customer base to learn more about opensource and learn more about how they can leverage this, not only to lower their total cost of ownership, and to to replace VMware, but how they can compliment what they've already invested in with faster more agile based Mode two development, and that's where we see the market from a Redhat standpoint. >> Thanks Dan, well there's a great TEI study that you guys did recently, Total Economic Impact on virtualization that you can find on the website, and Rob we thank you for sticking around and sharing some of your insights and innovations that Redhat is pioneering, and we look forward to having you back on the show. >> It's great to be here, thanks. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host John, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube continuing coverage, day three of VMware 2017