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

>>Hey guys. Good morning. And welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with John furrier. This is the Cube's third day of Wal Dal coverage of VMware Explorer. We're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. Chris Wolf joins us chief research and innovation officer at VMware. Chris, welcome back to the >>Cube. Yeah. Thanks Lisa. It's always a pleasure. >>This has been a great event. We, we, the key note was standing room only on Tuesday morning. We've had great conversations with VMware's ecosystem and VMware of course, what are some of the, the hot things going on from an R and D perspective? >>Yeah, there's, there's a lot. I mean, we're, we have about four or five different priorities. And these look at this is looking at sovereign clouds and multi-cloud edge computing, modern applications and data services. We're doing quite a bit of work in machine learning as well as insecurity. So we're, we're relatively large organization, but at the same time, we really look to pick our bets. So when we're doing something in ML or security, then we wanna make sure that it's high quality and it's differentiated and adds value for VMware, our partners and our customers. >>Where are our customers in the mix in terms of being influential in the roadmap? >>Very, very much in the mix. What we, what we like to do is in early stage R and D, we want to have five to 10 customers as design partners. And that really helps. And in addition to that, as we get closer to go to market, we look to a lineup between one and three of our SI partners as well, to really help us, you know, in a large company, sometimes your organic innovations can get lost in the shuffle. Yeah. And when we have passionate SI that are like, yes, we want to take this forward with you together. That's just awesome. And it also helps us to understand at a very early stage, what are the integration requirements? So we're not just thinking about the, the core product itself, but how would it play in the ecosystem equally important? >>We had hit Culbert on CTO, great work. He's dealing with the white paper and cross cloud, obviously vSphere, big release, lot of this stuff. Dave ante had mentioned that in the analyst session, you had a lot of good stuff you were talking about. That's coming around the corner. That's shipping coming outta the oven and a big theme this year is multi-cloud cloud native. The relationship what's one's ahead. Bleed dog. No one, you kinda get a feel for multi-cloud. It's kind of out front right now, but now cloud native's got the most history what's coming out of the oven right now in terms of hitting the market. That's not yet in this, in the, in the, in the numbers, in terms of sales, like there's, there's some key cloud native stuff coming out. Where's the action. Can you share what you've shared at the analyst meeting? >>Yeah. So at the analyst meeting, what I was going through was a number of our new innovation projects or projects. And, and these are things that are typically close to being product or service at VMware, you know, somewhere in the year out timeframe. Some, some of these are just a few months out. So let me just go through some of them, I'll start with project keek. So keek is super exciting because when you think about edge, what we're hearing from customers is the, the notion of a single platform, a single piece of hardware that can run their cloud services, their containers, their VMs, their network, and security functions. Doing all of this on one platform, gives them the flexibility that as changes happen, it's a software update. They don't have to buy another piece of hardware, but if we step back, what's the management experience you want, right? >>Simple get ops oriented, simple life cycle and configuration management, very low touch. I don't need technical skills to deploy these types of devices. So this is where keek comes in. So what keek is doing is exposing a Kubernetes API above the ESXi hypervisor and taking a complete, get op style of management. So imagine now, when you need to do an update for infrastructure, you're logging into GitHub, you're editing a YAML file and pushing the update. We're doing the same thing for the applications that reside. I can do all of this through GitHub. So this is very, I would say, even internally disruptive to VMware, but super exciting for our customers and partners that we've shared this with. >>What else is happening? What else on the cloud native side Tansu Monterey those lot areas. >>Oh, there's so much. So if we look at project Monterey, I had a presentation within Invidia yesterday. We're really talking through this. And what I'm seeing now is there's a couple of really interesting inflection points with DPU. The first thing is the performance that you're getting and the number of cores that you can save on an X 86 host is actually providing a very strong business case now to bring DPU into the servers, into the data center. So that's one. So now you have a positive ROI. Number two, you start to decouple core services now from the X 86 host itself. So think about a distributed firewall that I can run on a PCI adapter. Now that's DEC coupled, physically from the server, and it really allows me to scale out east west security in a way that I could not do before. So again, I think that's really exciting and that's where we're seeing a lot of buzz from customers. >>So that DPU, which got a lot of buzz, by the way, Lisa, I never, you had trouble interviews on this. I had to the Dell folks too, V X RS taking the advantage of it, the performances, I see the performance angle on that and deep user hot. Can you talk about that security east west thing? Cuz Tom Gillis was on yesterday talking about that's a killer advantage for the security side. Can you touch on that real >>Quick? Yeah. A hundred percent. So what I can now do is take a, a firewall and run it isolated from the X 86 host that it's trying to protect. So it's right next to the host. I can get line rate speeds in terms of analytics and processing of my network and security traffic. So that's also huge. So I'm running line rate on the host and I'm able to run one of these firewall instances on every host in my data center, you cannot do that. You can never afford it with physical appliances. So to me, this is an inflection point because this is the start of network and security functions moving off of hardware appliances and onto DPU. And if you're the ecosystem vendors, this is how they're going to be able to scale some of their services and offerings into the public >>Cloud. So a lot of good stuff happening within the VMware kind of the hardware, low level atoms and the bits as well as the software. The other thing I wanna get your thoughts on relative to the next question is that takes to the next level is the super cloud world we're living in is about cloud native developers, which is DevOps dev security ops and data ops are now big parts of the, the challenges that the people are reigning in the chaos that that's being reigned in. How does VMware look at the relationship to the cloud providers? Cause we heard cloud universal. We had the cloud. If you believe in multi-cloud, which you guys are saying, people are agreeing with, then you gotta have good tight couple coupled relationships with the cloud services, >>A hundred percent. >>We can be decoupled, but highly cohesive, but you gotta connect in via APIs. What's the vision for the VMware customers who want to connect say AWS, for instance, is that seamless? What makes that happen? What's that roadmap look like for taking that VMware on premises hybrid and making it like turbo charging it to be like public cloud hybrid together? >>Yeah, I think there's some lessons that can be learned here. You know, an analogy I've been using lately is look at the early days of virtualization when VMware had vCenter, right? What was happening was you saw the enterprise management vendors try to do this overlay above virtualization management and say, we can manage all hypervisors. And at the end of the day, these multi hypervisor managers, no one bought 'em because they can do 20% of the functionality of a tool from VMware or Microsoft. And that's the lesson that we have to take to multi-cloud. We don't have to overlay every functionality. There's really good capabilities that the cloud providers are offering through their own tooling and APIs. Right? But you, you, if you step back, you say, well, what do I wanna centralize? I wanna have a centralized, secure software supply chain and I can get that through VMware tan zoo and, and where we're going with Kubernetes. When you're going with native cloud services, you might say, you know what, I wanna have a central view of, of visibility for compliance. So that's what we're doing with secure state or a central view of cost management. And we're doing that with cloud health. So you can have some brokering and governance, but then you also have to look from a surgical perspective as to what are the things that I really need to centralize versus what do I not need to centralize? >>One of the themes that we heard on the keynote on Tuesday was the, the different phases and that a lot of customers are still in the cloud chaos phase. We talked a lot about that in the last couple days with VMware, with its partner ecosystem. And, but the goal of getting to cloud smart, how does the R and D organization, how do, how are you helping customers really navigate that journey from the chaos that they're in, maybe they've inherited multi-cloud environment to getting to cloud smart. And what does cloud smart mean from your perspective >>Cloud? Smartt from my perspective means pragmatism. It means really thinking about what should I do here first, right? I don't want to just go somewhere because I can, right. I want to be really mindful of the steps I'm going to take. So one ex one example of this is I've met with a customer this morning and we were talking about using our vRealize network insight tool, because what that allows 'em to do is get a map of all of their application dependencies in their data center. And they can learn like, well, I can move this to the cloud or maybe I can't move this cuz it has all these other dependencies and it would be really difficult. So that's that's one example. It also means really thinking through issues around data sovereignty, you know, what do I wanna hold onto a customer? I just met with yesterday. They were talking about how valuable their data is and their services that they want to use via SA in the cloud. But then there's also services, which is their core research. They wanna make sure that they can maintain that in their data centers and maintain full control because they see researchers will leave. And now all of a sudden, so that intellectual property has actually gone with the person and they need to, they need to have, you know, better accountability there. >>Yeah. One of the things about that we discovered at our super cloud event was is that, you know, we kind didn't really kind of put too much structure on other than our, our vision. It's, it's not just SaaS on cloud and it's not just, multi-cloud, it's a new kind of application end state or reality that if you believe in digital transformation, then technology is everywhere. And like it in the old days, it powered the back office and then terminals and PCs and whatnot, wasn't powering the boardroom obviously or other business. But if, if it happens like that digital transformation, the company is the app, the app is the company. So you're all digital. So that means the operating expenses has to drive an income statement and the CapEx handled by the cloud provides a lot of goodness. So I think everyone's gonna realize that AWS and the hyperscalers are providing great CapEx gifts. They do all the work and you only pay when you've made your success. So that's a great business model. >>Absolutely >>That's and then combine that with open source, which is now growing so fast, going next level, the software industry's open source. That's not even a debate Mo in some circles, maybe like telco, cloud's got the CapEx. The new operating model is this cloud layer. That's going to transform the companies finally in a hundred percent. Okay. That's super cloud. If that's the case, does it really matter who provides the electricity or the power? It's the coders that are in charge. It's the developers that have to make the calls because if the application is the core, the developers are, are not only the front lines, they are the company. This is really kind of where the sea change is. So if, if we believe that, I'm sure you, you agree with that generally? >>Yeah, of >>Course. Okay. So then what's the VMware customer roadmap here. So to me, that's the big story here at the show is that we're at this point in time where the VMware customers are, have to go there >>A hundred percent, >>What's that path. What is the path for the VMware customer to go from here to there? And what's this order of operations or is there a roadmap? Can, can you share your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, I think part of it is, is with these disruptive technologies, you have to start small, you know, whether it's in your data center, into cloud, you have to build the own institutional knowledge of your team members in the organization. It's much easier than trying to attract outside talent, for least for many of our customers. So I think that's important. The other part of this when with the developer and control, like in my organization, I want my innovators to innovate any other noise around them. I don't want them to have to worry about it. And it's the same thing with our customers. So if your developers are building the technologies that is really differentiating your company, then things like security and cryptography shouldn't have to be things they worry about. So we've been doing a lot of work. Like one of the projects we announced this week was around being able to decouple cryptography from the applications themselves. And we can expose that through a proxy through service mesh. And that's really exciting because now it ops can make these changes. Our SecOps teams can make these changes without having to impact the application. So that's really key is focusing the developers on innovation and then really being mindful about how you can build the right automation around everything else. And certainly open source is key to all >>That. So that's so, so then if you, if that's happening, which I'm, I'm not gonna debate that then in essence, what's really going on here is that the companies are decomposing their entire businesses down to levels that are manageable completely different than the way they did them 20, 30 years ago. >>Absolutely. You, you, you could take a modular approach to how you're solving business problems. And we do the same thing with technology, where there might be a ML algorithms that we've developed that we're exposing as SA service, but then all of the interconnects around that service are open source and very flexible so that the businesses and the customers and the VMware partners can decide what's the right way to build a puzzle for a given problem. >>We were talking on day one, I was riffing with an executives. It was Ragu and Victoria. And the concept around cross cloud was if you get to this Nirvana state, which is we, people want to get to this or composability mode, you're not coding, you're composing cuz coding's kinda happening open source and not the old classic, write some code and write that app. It's more orchestrate, compose and orchestrate. Do you, what's your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And it's it's I would add one more part to it too, which is scope. You know, I think sometimes we see projects fail because the, the initial scope is just too big. You know, what is the problem that you need to solve, scope it properly and then continuously calibrate. So even like our customers have to listen to their customers and we have to be thinking about our customers' customers, right? Because that's really how we innovate because then we can really be mindful of a holistic solution for them. >>You know, Lisa, when we had a super cloud event, you know, one of the panels was called the innovators dilemma with a question mark. And of course everyone kinds of quotes that book innovators dilemma, but one of the panelists, Chris ho beaker on Twitter said, let's change the name from the innovator's dilemma to the integrator's dilemma. And we all kind of got chuckled. We all kind of paused and said, Hey, that's actually a good point. Yeah. If you're now in a cloud and you're seeing some of the ecosystem floor vendors out there talking in this game too, they're all kind of fitting in snapping in almost like modular, like you said, so this is a Lego game. Now it feels like, it feels like, you know, let's compose, let's orchestrate, let's integrate. Now I integrations API driven. Now you're seeing a lot more about API security in the news and we've been covering at least I've probably interviewed six companies in the past, you know, six months that are doing API security, who would've thought API, that's the link, frankly, with the web. Now that's now a target area for hackers. >>Oh. And that's such an innovation area for VMware, John. Okay. >>There it is. So, I mean, this is, again, this means the connected tissue is being attacked yet. We need it to grow. No one's debating that is wrong, but it's under siege. >>Yes. Yes. So something else we introduced this week was a project. We called project Trinidad. And the way, the way you can think about it is a lot of the anomaly detection software today is looking at point based anomalies. Like this API header looks funny where we, where we've gone further is we can look at full sequence based anomalies so we can learn the sequences of transactions at an application takes and really understand what is expected behavior within those API calls within the headers, within the payloads. And we can model legitimate application behavior based on what those expectations are. So like a, like a common sequence might be doing an e-commerce checkout, right? There's lots of operations that happen logging into the site, searching, finding a product, going through the cart. Right. All of those things. Right. So if something's out of sequence, like all of a sudden somebody's just trying to do a checkout, but they haven't actually added to the cart. Right. This just seems odd. Right. So we can start to, and that's a simplistic example, but we're able now to use our algorithms to model legitimate application behavior through the entire sequence of how applications behave and then we can start to trap on anomalies. That's very differentiating IP and, and we think it's gonna be really important for the industry. Yeah. >>Because a lot of the hacks, sometimes on the API side, even as a example, are not necessarily on the API, it's the business logic in them. That's what you're getting at here. Yes. The APIs are hard. Oh our APIs are secure. Right. Well, yeah, but you're not actually securing the business logic internally. That's what you're getting at. If I read >>That right. Or exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's the thing it's right. It's great that you can, you can look at a header, but what's the payload, right? What is what's, what's the actual data flow, right. That's associated with the call and that's what we want to really hone in on. And that's just a, it's, it's a, it's a far different level of sophistication in being able to understand east west vulnerabilities, you know, log for JX voice and these kind of things. So we have some real, it's interesting technology >>There. Security conversations now are not about security there about defense ability because security's a state of time, your secure here, you're not secure or someone might be in the network or in the app, but can you defend yourself from, and in >>That's it, you know, our, our, our malware software, right. That we're building to prevent and respond has to be more dynamic than the threats we face. Right. And this is why machine learning is so essential in, in these types of applications. >>Let me ask you a question. So just now zooming out riffing here since day, three's our conversational day where we debate and just riff more like a podcast style. If you had to do a super cloud or build a NextGen cloud multi-cloud with abstraction layer, that's, you know, all singing and dancing and open everyone's happy hardware below it's working ISAs and then apps are killed. Can ass what's in that. What does it look like to you if you had to architect the, the ultimate super cloud enabler, that something that would disrupt the next 10 years, what would it look like and how does, and assuming, and trying to do where everybody wins go, you have 10 seconds. No, >>Yeah, yeah. So the, you know, first of all, there has to be open source at all of the intersections. I think that's really important. And, and this is, this goes from networking constructs to our database, as a service layers, you know, everything in between, you know, the, the, the participants should be able to win on merit there. The other part of super cloud though, that hasn't happened that I probably is the most important area of innovation is going to be decoupled control planes. We have a number of organizations building sovereign cloud initiatives. They wanna have flexibility in where their services physically run. And you're not going to have that with a limited number of control planes that live in very specific public cloud data centers. So that's an area, give >>An example of what a, a, a, a narrowly defined control plane is. >>Yeah, sure. So my database as a service layer, so the, the, the actual portal that the customer is going into to provision databases, right. Rep managed replication, et cetera. Right. I should be able to run that in a colo. I should be able to run that somewhere in region that is guaranteed, that I'm going to have data stay physically in region. You know, we still have some of these challenges in networking in terms of being able to constrain traffic flows and be able to predict and audit them within a particular region as well. >>It's interesting. You bring up region again, more complexity. You know, you got catalogs here, catalogs different. I mean, this is where the chaos really comes down. I mean, it's, it's advancing, but it's advancing the state of functionality, but making it hella complex, I mean, come on. Don't you think it's like pretty amazingly hard to reign in that? Well, or is it maybe you guys making it easier? I just think I just, my mind just went, oh my God, I gotta, I gotta provision to that region, but then it's gotta be the same over there. And >>When you go back to modular architecture constructs, it gets far easier. This has been really key for how VMware is even building our own clouds internally is so that we have a, a shared services platform for the different apps and services that we're building, so that you do have that modularized approach. Like I said, the, the examples of innovation projects I've shared have been really driven by the fact that, you know, what, I don't know how customers are gonna consume it, and I don't have to know. And if you have the right modular architecture, the right APIs around it, you don't have to limit a particular project or technology's future at the time you build >>It. Okay. So your super would have multiple control planes that you can move, manage with that within one place. I get that. What about the data control plane? That seems to be something that used to be the land grab in, in conversations from vendors. But that seems to be much more of a customer side, cuz if I'm a customer, I want my control plane data plane to be, you know, mine. Like I don't want to have anyone cuz data's gotta move around, gotta be secure. >>Oh exactly. >>And that's gonna be complicated. How does, how do you see the data planes emerging? >>Yeah. Yeah. We, we see an opportunity really around having a, a centralized view that can give me consistent indexing and consistent awareness of data, no matter where it resides. And then being able to have that level of integration now between my data services and my applications, because you're right, you know, right now we have data in different places, but we could have a future where data's more perpetually in motion. You know, we're already looking at time sensitive fabrics where we're expecting microservices to sometimes run in different cell towers depending on the SLA that they need to achieve. So then you have data parts that's going to follow, right? That may not always be in the same cloud data center. So there's, this is enormously complicated, not just in terms of meeting application SLAs, but auditing and security. Right. That makes it even further. So having these types of data layers that can give me a consistent purview of data, regardless of where it is, allow me to manage and life cycle data globally, that's going to be super important, I believe going forward. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well, my one last question, Lisa, gonna get a question in here. It's hard. Went for her. I'm getting all the, all the questions in, sorry, Lisa that's okay. What's your favorite, most exciting thing that you think's going on right now that people should pay attention to of all the things you're looking at, the most important thing that that's happening and maybe something that's super important that people aren't talking about or it could be the same thing. So the, the most important thing that you think that's happening in the industry for cloud next today and, and maybe something that you think people should look at and pay more attention to. >>Okay. Yeah, those are good questions. And that's hard to answer because there's, there's probably so much happening. I I've been on here before I've talked about edge. I still think that's really important. I think the value of edge soft of edge velocity being defined by software updates, I think is quite powerful. And that's, that's what we're building towards. And I would say the industry is as well. If you look at AWS and Azure, when they're packaging a service to go out to the edge it's package as a container. So it's already quite flexible and being able to think about how can I have a single platform that can give me all of this flexibility, I think is really, really essential. We're building these capabilities into cars. We have a version of our Velo cloud edge device. That's able to run on a ruggedized hardware in a police car today. We're piloting that with a customer. So there is a shift happening where you can have a core platform that can now allow you to layer on applications that you're not thinking about in the future. So I think that's probably obvious. A lot of people are like, yeah. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about edge, big deal. >>Oh it's, it's, it's big. Yes. It's >>Exploding, but >>It's complicated too. It's not easy. It's not obvious. Right. And it's merging >>There's new things coming every day. Yeah. Yeah. And related to that though, there is this kind of tension that's existing between machine learning and privacy and that's really important. So an area of investment that I don't think enough people are paying attention to today is federated machine learning. There's really good projects in open source that are having tangible impact on, in a lot of industries in VMware. We are, we're investing in a, in a couple of those projects, namely fate in the Linux foundation and open FFL. And in these use cases like the security product I mentioned to you that is looking at analyzing API sequence API call sequences. We architected that originally so that it can run in public cloud, but we're also leveraging now federated machine learning so that we can ensure that those API calls and metadata associated with that is staying on premises for the customers to ensure privacy. So I think those intersections are really important. Federated learning, I think is a, an area not getting enough attention. All right. All >>Right, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. Unfortunately we are out of time. I know you guys could keep going. Yeah. Good stuff. But thank you for sharing. What's going on in R and D the customer impact the outcomes that you're enabling customers to achieve. We appreciate your >>Insights. We're just getting started >>In, in early innings, right? Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff for guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily. >>Okay.

(soft music) >> Welcome back, everyone. theCube's live coverage. Day two here at VMware Explore. Our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference formally called Vmworld, now it's VMware Explore. Exploring new frontiers multi-cloud and also bearing some of the fruit from all the investments in cloud native Tanzu and others. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We have the man who's in charge of a lot of that business and a lot of stuff coming out of the oven and hitting the market. Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager of the modern applications and management group at VMware, basically the modern apps. >> Absolutely. >> That's Tanzu. All the good stuff. >> And Aria now. >> And Aria, the management platform, which got social graph and all kinds of graph databases. Welcome back. >> Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you in person, been since 2019 when you were on. So, a lot's happened since 2019 in your area. Again, things get, the way VMware does it as we all know, they announce something and then you build it and then you ship it and then you announce it. >> I don't think that's true, but okay. (laughs) >> You guys had announced a lot of cool stuff. You bought Heptio, we saw that Kubernetes investment and all the cloud native goodness around it. Bearing fruit now, what's the status? Give us the update on the modern applications of the management, obviously the areas, the big announcement here on the management side, but in general holistically, what's the update? >> I think the first update is just the speed and momentum that containers and Kubernetes are getting in the marketplace. So if you take the market context, over 70% of organizations now have Kubernetes in production, not one or two clusters, but hundreds of clusters, sometimes tens of clusters. So, to me, that is a market opportunity that's coming to fruition. Sometimes people will come and say, Ajay, aren't you late to the market? I say, no, I'm just perfectly timing it. 'Cause where does our value come in? It's enterprise readiness. We're the company that people look to when you have complexity, you have scale, you need performance, you need security, you need the robustness. And so, Tanzu is really about making modern applications real, helping you design, develop, build and run these applications. And with Aria, we're fundamentally changing the game around multicloud management. So the one-two punch of Tanzu and Aria is I'm most excited about. >> Isn't it true that most of the Kubernetes, you know, today is people pulling down open source and banging away. And now, they're looking for, you know, like you say, more of a robust management capability. >> You know, last two years when I would go to many of the largest customers, like, you know, we're doing good. We've got a DIY platform, we're building this. And then you go to the customer a year later, he's got knocked 30, 40 teams and he has Log4j happen. And all of a sudden he is like, oh, I don't want to be in the business of patching this thing or updating it. And, you know, when's the next shoe going to fall? So, that maturity curve is what I was talking about. >> Yeah. Free like a puppy. >> Ajay, you know, mentioned readiness, enterprise readiness and the timing's perfect. You kind of included, not your exact words, but I'm paraphrasing. That's a lot to do with what's going on. I mean, I'll say Cloud Native, IWS, think of the hyper scale partner, big partner and Google and even Google said it today. You know, the market world's spinning in their direction. Especially with respect to VMware. You get the relationship with the hyperscalers. Cloud's been on everyone's agenda for a long time. So, it's always been ready. But enterprise, you are customer base at VMware, very cloud savvy in the sense they know it's there, there's some dabbling, there's some endeavors in the cloud, no problem. But from a business perspective and truly transforming the VMware value proposition, is already, they're ready and it's already time now for them, like, you can see the movement. And so, can you explain the timing of that? I mean, I get enterprise readiness, so we're ready to scale all that good stuff. But the timing of product market fit is important here. >> I think when Raghu talks about that cloud first to cloud chaos, to cloud smart, that's the transition we're seeing. And what I mean by that is, they're hitting that inflection point where it's not just about a single team. One of the guys, basically I talked to the CIO, he was like, look, let's assume hypothetically I have thousand developers. Hundred can talk about microservices, maybe 50 has built a microservice and three are really good at it. So how do I get my thousand developers productive? Right? And the other CIO says, this team comes to me and says, I should be able develop directly to the public cloud. And he goes, absolutely you can do that. You don't have to come through IT. But here's the book of security and compliance that you need to enforce to get that thing in production. >> Go for it. >> Go for it. >> Good luck with that. >> So that reality of how do I scale my dev developers is turning into a developer experience problem. We now have titles which says, head of developer experience. Imagine that two years ago. We didn't talk about it. People start, hey, containers Kubernetes. I'm good to go. I can go get all the open source technology you talked about. And now they're saying no. >> And also software supply chains, another board that you're think. This is a symptom of the growth. I mean, open source is the software industry. That is, I don't think debatable. >> Right. >> Okay. That's cool. But now integration becomes vetting, trust, trusting codes. It's very interesting software time right now. >> That's right. >> And how is that impacting the cloud native momentum in your mind? Accelerating it? What inning are we in? How would you peg the progress? >> You know, on that scale of 1 to 10, I think we're halfway marked now. And that moved pretty quickly. >> It really did. >> And if you sit back today, the kinds of applications we're involved in, I have a Chicago wealth management company. We're building the next generation wealth management application. It's a fundamental refactoring of the legacy application. If you go to a prescription company, they're building a brand new prescription platform. These are not just trivial. What they're learning is the lift and shift. Doesn't work for these major applications. They're having to refactor them which is the modernization. >> So how specifically, are they putting some kind of abstraction layer on that? Are they actually gutting it and rewriting it? >> There's always going to be brownfield. Remember the old days of SOA? >> Yeah, yeah. >> They are putting APIs in front of their main systems. They're not rewriting the core banking or the core platform, but the user experience, the business logic, the AIML capability to bring intelligence in the platform. It's surrounding the capability to make it much more intuitive, much more usable, much more declarative. That's where things are going. And so I'm seeing this mix of integration all over again. Showing my age now. But, you know, the new EAI so is now microservices and messaging and events with the same patterns. But again, being much more accelerated with cloud native services. >> And it is to the point, it's accelerated today. They're not having to freeze the code for six months or nine months and that which would kill the whole recipe for failure. So they're able to now to fast track their modernization. They have to prioritize 'cause they got limited resources. But how are you guys coming up to that? >> But the practice is changing as well, right? Well, the old days, it was 12, 18 months cycle or anything software. If you heard the CVS CIO, Rohan. >> Yeah. >> Three months where they started to engage with us in getting an app in production, right? If you look at the COVID, 10 days to get kind of a new application for getting small loans going with Pfizer, right? These are dramatically short term, but it's not rewriting the entire app. It's just putting these newer experiences, newer capability in front with newer modern developer practices. And they're saying, I need to do it not just once, but for 100, 200, 5,000 members. JPMC has 50,000 developers. Fifty thousand. They're not a bank anymore. >> We just have thousands of apps. >> Exactly. >> Ajay, I want to get your thoughts on something that we've been talking about on our super cloud event. I know we had an event a couple weeks ago, you guys were one of our sponsors, VMware was. It was called super cloud where we're defining that this next gen environment's a super cloud and every company will have a super cloud capability. And underneath that is cross cloud capabilities. So, super cloud is like a super set on top of a multi-cloud. And little word play or play on words is, ecosystem partners versus partners in the ecosystem. Because if you're coming down to the integration side of things, it's about knowing what goes what, it's almost like building an OS if you're a coder or an operating systems person. You got to put the pieces together right, not just go to the directory and say, okay, who's got the cheapest price in DR or air gaping or something or some solution. So ecosystem partners are truly partners. Partners in the ecosystem are a bunch of people out on a list. How do you see that? Because the trend we're seeing is, the development process includes partners at day one. >> That's right. Not bolt-on. >> Completely agree. >> Share your thoughts on that. >> So let's look at that. The first thing I'm hearing from my customers is, they're trying to use all the public clouds as a new IS. That's the first API or contract infrastructures code IS. From then on they're saying, I want more and more portable services. And if you see the success of some of the data vendors and the messaging vendors, you're starting to see best of breed becoming part of the platform. So you are to identify which of these are truly, you know, getting market momentum and are becoming kind of defacto leaders. So, Kafka goes hand in hand with streaming. RabbitMQ from my portfolio goes with messaging. Postgres for database. So these are the, in your definition, ecosystem partners, they're foundational. In the security space, you know, Snyk is a common player in terms of scanning or Aqua and Prisma even though we have Carbon Black. Those become partners from a container security perspective. So, what's happening is the industry stabilizing a handful of critical players that are becoming multi-cloud preference of choice in this. And our job is to bring it all together in a all coordinated, orchestrated manner to give them a platform. >> I mean, you guys always had ecosystem, but I think that priority more than ever. It wasn't really your job at VMware, even, Dave, 10 years ago to say, hey, this is the strategic role that you might play one partner. It was pretty much the partners all kind of fed off the momentum of VMware. Virtualization. And there's not a lot of nuance there. There's pretty much they plug in and you got. >> So what we're doing here is, since we're not the center of the universe, unfortunately, for the application world, things like Backstage is a developer portal from Spotify that became open source. That's becoming the place where everyone wants to provide a plugin. And so we took Backstage, we said, let's provide enterprise support for Backstage. If you take a technology like, you know, what we have with Spring. Every job where developer uses Spring, how do we make it modern with Spring cloud. We work with Microsoft to launch a service with Azure Spring Enterprise for Spring. So you're starting to see us taking communities where they have momentum and bringing the ecosystem around those technologies. Cluster API for Kubernetes, for have you managed stuff. >> Yeah. >> So it's about standard. >> Because the developers are voting with their clicks and their code repos. And so you're identifying the patterns that they like. >> That's right. >> And aligning with them and connecting with them rather than trying to sell against it. >> Exactly. It's the end story with everyone. I say stop competing. So people used to think Tanzu is Kubernetes. It's really Tanzu is the modern application platform that runs on any Kubernetes. So I've changed the narrative. When Heptio was here, we were trying to be a Kubernetes player. I'm like, Kubernetes is just another dial tone. You can use mine, you can use OpenShift. So this week we announced support for OpenShift by Tanzu application platform. The values moving up, it's around outcomes. So industry standards, taking lead and solving the problem. >> You know, we had a panel at super cloud. Dave, I know you got a question. I'll get to you in a second. But the panel was the innovator's dilemma. And then during the event, one of the panelists, Chris Hoff knows VMware very well, Beaker on Twitter, said it should be called the integrators dilemma. Because the innovations here, >> How do you put it all together? >> But the integration of the, putting the piece parts together, building the thing is the innovation. >> And we come back and say, it's a secure software supply chain. It starts with great content. Did you know, I published most of the open source content on every hyperscaler through my Bitnami acquisition. So I start with great content that's curated. Then I allow you to create your own golden images. Then I have a build service that secures and so on and so forth and we bring the part. So, that opinionated solution, but batteries included but you can change it is been one of our key differentiator. We recognize the roles is going to be modular, come back and solve for it. >> So I want to understand sort of relationship Tanzu and Aria, John was talking about, you know, super cloud before we had our event. We had an earlier session where we help people understand that Aria was not, you know, vRealize renamed. >> It's rebranded. >> And reason I bring that up is because we had said it around super cloud, that one of the defining characteristics was, sorry, super PaaS, which is a specific purpose built PaaS layer designed to support your objective for multi-cloud. And speaking to a lot of people this week, there's a federated architecture, there's graph relationships, there's real time ability to ingest and analyze. That's unique. And that's IP that is purpose built for what you're doing. >> Absolutely. When I think what came out of all that learning is after 20 years of Pivotal and BA and what we learned that you still need some abstraction layer. Kubernetes is too low level. So what are the developer problems? What are the delivery problems? What are the operations and management problems? Aria solves all the operations and management problem. Tanzu solves a super PaaS problems. >> Yes. Right. >> Of providing a consistent way to build great software and the secure software supply chain to run on any infrastructure. So the combination of Tanzu and Aria complete the value chain. >> And it's different. Again, we get a lot of heat for this, but we're saying, look, we're trying to describe, it's not just IAS, PaaS, and SaaS of last decade. There's something new that's happening. And we chose the name super cloud. >> And what's the difference? It's modular. It's pluggable. It fits into the way you operate. >> Whereas PaaS was very prescriptive. If you couldn't fit, you couldn't jump down to the next level. This is very much, you can stay at the abstraction level or go lower level. >> Oh, we got to add that to the attribute. >> We're recruiting him right now. (laughs) >> We'll give you credit. >> I mean, funny all the web service's background. Look at an app server. You well knew all about app servers. Basically the company is an app. So, if you believe that, say, Capital One is an application as a company and Amazon's providing all the CapEx, >> That's it. >> Okay. And they run all their quote, old IT spend millions, billions of dollars on operating expenses that's going to translate to the top line called the income statement. So, Dave always says, oh, it's on the balance sheet, but now they're going to go to the top line. So we're seeing dynamic. Ajay, I want to get your reaction to this where the business model shift if everything's tech enabled, the company is like an app server. >> Correct. >> So therefore, the revenue that's generated from the technology, making the app work has to get recognized in the income. Okay. But Amazon's doing all, or the cloud hyperscale is doing all the heavy lifting on the CapEx. So technically it's the cloud on top of a cloud. >> Yes and no. The way I look at it, >> I call that a super cloud. >> So I like the idea of super cloud, but I think we're mixing two different constructs. One is, the cloud is a new hardware, right? In terms of dynamic, elastic, always available, et cetera. And I believe when more and more customer I talk about, there's a service catalog of infrastructure services. That's emerging. This super cloud is the next set of PaaS super PaaS services. And the management service is to use the cloud. We spend so much time as VMware building clouds, the problem seems, how do you effectively use the cloud? What problems do we solve around digital where every company is a digital company and the product is this application, as you said. So everything starts with an application. And you look at from the lens of how you run the application, what it costs the application, what impact it's driving. And I think that's the change. So I agree with you in some way. That is a digital strategy. >> And that's the company. >> That's the company. The application is the company. >> That's the t-shirt. >> And API is the currency. >> So, Ajay, first of all, we love having you in theCube 'cause you're like a masterclass in multiple dimensions. So, I want to get your thoughts on the abstraction layer. 'Cause we were also talking earlier in theCube here as well as before. But abstraction layers happen when you have major movements in markets that are game changing or major inflection points because you've reached a complexity point where it's working so great, this new thing, that's too complex to reign it in. And we were quoting Andy Grove by saying, "let chaos reign then reign in the chaos". So, all major industry moments go back 30, 40 years happen with abstractions. So the question is is that, you can't be a vendor, we've observed you can't be a vendor and be the abstraction. Like, if Cisco's running routers, they can't be the abstraction layer. They have to be the benefit of the abstraction layer. And if you're on the other side of the abstraction layer, you can't be running that either. >> I like the way you're thinking about it. Yeah. Do you agree? >> I completely agree. And, you know, I'm an old middleware guy. And when I used to say this to my CEO, he's like, no, it's not middleware, it's just a new middleware. And what's middleware, right? It's a thing between app and infrastructure. You could define it whatever we want, right? And so this is the new distributed middleware. >> It's a metaphor and it's a good one because it does a purpose. >> It's a purpose. >> It creates a separation but then you have, it's like a DMZ zone or whatever you want to call it. It's an area that things happen. >> But the difference before last time was, you could always deploy it to a thing. The thing is now the cloud. The thing is a set of services. So now it's as much of a networking problem at the application layer is as much as security problem. It's how you build software, how we design. So APIs, become part of your development. You can't think of APIs after the fact, right? When you build an API, you got to publish API because the minute you publish it and if you change it, the API's out of. So you can't have it as a documentation process. So, the way you build software, you use software consume is all about it. So to me, digital product with an API as a currency is where we're headed towards. >> Yeah, that's a great observation. Want to make a mental note of that and make that a clip. I want to get your thoughts on software development. You mentioned that, obviously software development life cycles are changing. I'll say open sources now. I mean, it's unlimited codes, supply chain issue. What's in the code, I get that verified codes going to happen. Is software development coding as much or is coding changing the notion of writing code? Or is it more glue layer you're writing. >> I think you're onto something. I call software developments composition now. My son's at Facebook or Google. They have so many libraries. So you don't no longer start with the very similar primitive, you start with building blocks, components, services, libraries, open source technology. What are you really doing? You're composing these things from multiple artifacts. And how do you make sure those artifacts are good artifacts? So someone's not sticking in security in a vulnerability into it. So, the world is moving towards composition and there are few experts who build the core components. Most of the time we're just using those to build solutions. And so, the art here is, how do you provide that set of best practices? We call them patterns or building blocks or services that you can compose to build these next generation (indistinct) >> It's interesting. >> Cooking meals. >> I agree with you a hundred percent what you're thinking. I agree about that worldview. Here's a dilemma that I'm seeing. In the security world, you've got zero trust. You know, Which is, I don't know you, I don't trust you at all. And if you're going to go down this composed, we're going to have an orchestra of players with instruments, say to speak, Dave, metaphor. That's trust involved. >> Yes. >> So you have two spectrums of issues. >> Yes. >> If software's going trust and you're seeing Docker containers getting more verifications, software supply chain, and then you got hardware I call network guys, love zero trust. Where's the balance? How do you reconcile that? Is it just decoupled? Nuance? I mean, what's the point? >> No, no. I think it all comes together. And what I mean by that is, it starts with left shifting it all the way to hands of the developers, right? So, are you starting with good content? You have providence of the stuff you're using. Are you building it correctly? So you're not introducing bad things like solar winds along the process. Are you testing it along the way of the development process? And then once in production, do you know, half the time it's configurations of where you're running the stuff versus the software itself. So you can think of the two coming together. And the network security is protecting people from going laterally once they've got in there. So, a whole security solution requires all of the above, a secure software supply chain, the way to kind of monitor and look at configuration, we call posture management or workload management and the network security of SaaS-e for zero trust. That's a hard thing. And the boundary is the application. >> All right. >> So is it earned trust model sort of over time? >> No, it's designed in, it's been a thing. >> Okay. So it's not a, >> Because it developed. >> You can bolt in afterwards. >> Because the developers are driving it. They got to know what they're doing. >> And it's changing every week. If I'm putting a new code out every week. You can't, it can be changed to something else. >> Well, you guys got guardrails. The guardrails constant is a good example. >> It stops on the configuration side, but I also need the software. So, Tanzu is all about, the secure chain is about the development side of the house. Guardrails are on the operational side of the house. >> To make sure the developers don't stop. >> That's right. >> Things will always get out there. And I find out there's a CV that I use a library, I found after the fact. >> Okay. So again, while I got here again, this is great. I want to get test this thesis. So, we've been saying on theCube, talking about the new ops, the new kind of ops that emerging. DevOps, which we believe is cloud native. So DevOps moving infrastructure's code, that's happened, it's all good. Open source is growing. DevOps is done deal. It's done deal. Developers are doing that. That ops was IT. Then don't need the server, clouds my hardware. Check. That balances. The new ops is data and security which has to match up to the velocity of the developers. Do you believe that? >> Completely. That's why we call it DevSecOps. And the Sec is where all the action is. >> And data. And data too. >> And data is about making the data available where the app meets. So the problem was, you know, we had to move the logic to where the data is or you're going to move the data where the logic is. So data fabrics are going to become more and more interesting. I'll give you a simple example. I publish content today in a service catalog. My customer's saying, but my content catalog needs to be in 300 locations. How do I get the content to each of the repos that are running in 300 location? So I have a content distribution problem. So you call it a data problem. Yes, it's about getting the right data. Whether it's simple as even content, images available for use for deployment. >> So you think when I think about the application development stack and the analytics stack, the data stack, if I can call it that, they're separate, right? Are those worlds, I mean, people say, I want to inject data and AI intelligence into apps. Those worlds have deployment? I think about the insight from the historical being projected in the operational versus they all coming together. I have a Greenplum platform, it's a great analytics platform. I have a transactional platform. Do my customers buy the same? No, they're different buyers, they're different users. But the insight from that is being now plugged in so that at real time I can ask the question. So even this information is being made available on demand. So that's where I see it. And that's most coming together, but the insight is being incorporated in the operational use. So I can say, do I give the risk score? Do I give you credit? It's based on a whole bunch of historical analytics done. And at the real time, processing is happening, but the intelligence is behind it. >> It's a mind shift for sure because the old model was, I have a database, we're good. Now you have time series database, you got graphs. Each one has a role in the overall construct of the new thing. >> But it's about at the end. How do I make use of it? Someone built a smart AI model. I don't know how it was built, but I want to apply it for that particular purpose. >> Okay. So the final question for you, at least from my standpoint is, here at VMware Explore, you have a lot of the customers and so new people coming in that we've heard about, what's their core order of operations right now? Get on the bandwagon for modern apps. How do you see their world unfolding as they go back to the ranch, their places, and go back to their boss? Okay. We got the modern application. We're on the right track boss, full steam ahead. Or what change do they make? >> I think the biggest thing I saw was with some of the branding changes well and some of the new offerings. The same leader had two teams, the VMware team and the public cloud team. And they're saying, hey, maybe VMware's going to be the answer for both. And that's the world model. That's the biggest change I'm seeing. They were only thinking of us on the left column. Now they see us as a unifying player to play across cloud native and VMware, the uniquely set up to bring it all together. That's been really exciting this week. >> All right, Ajay, great to have you on. Great perspective. Worthy of great stuff. Congratulations on the success of all that investment coming to bear. >> Thank you. >> And on the new management platform. >> Yeah. Thank you. And thanks always for giving us all the support we need. It's always great. >> All right Cube coverage here. Getting all the data, getting inside the heads, getting all the specifics and all the new trends and actually connecting the dots here on theCube. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more coverage from day two. Two sets, three days, Cube at VMware Explore. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 from the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand convention center in Las Vegas, Dave ante, with John furrier. We're here with Brad parks. Who's the chief product officer at morphia data and Brian Thompson. Who's the vice president of GreenLake cloud product management at Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Great to see you first time on the queue first time. Wow. I just assumed we've known each other for, so >>We've been around a long time now. I'm happy to be here and thanks for, thanks for making the >>Time. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on the queue, but Morpheus data, when we, you know, we first met, I mean, with your new role here several years ago, tell, give us the update what's Morpheus do, why are you, so why does people, why do people need Morpheus? Think >>People need Morpheus, cuz it is messy, right? Technology promise, you know, simple, better, faster, but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the, the messy labyrinth that is enterprise. It kind of simpler to navigate primary use case. Self-service for developers who wanna push a button, get a database and an abstract deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on it. >>So you've, you've, you've been through the hyper-converged world. You've seen all that hardware come together. The VMware Nutanix of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you've got AI, you got all kinds of ops AI ops dev ops data ops ops machine, >>You >>Know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments. It's just getting more complicated at scale. Yep. This is a huge challenge. You guys are tackling this and then by the way, throw in automation in there too. Right? So, so all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work put all that complication? >>Well, so I was just talking about Robert Christiansen. I know he's probably think he's been on the Q he's on S team and the ven diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers, to hit a button, get their database, run an I API line, you know, get their app stack deployed. They also wanna do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Micro clusters deployed, you know, at a service, same thing with Terraform and Ansible. And they're just there aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack. So you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and, and make it easy. >>Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake is, and as a service is data and we see a change in the way data is data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end, all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay. So you guys are building out, I think, consistent with that principle self-service infrastructure. That's right. So where does Morpheus fit in, in terms of that objective, what's your relationship like and, and help us understand >>That. Yeah. Within GreenLake, specifically think of this as a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an it admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granular of control all the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services, really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to, to bring in and, and work with those services? This is key in, in some of those cloud services, we're delivering more of VSC is a key component that we work as we bring to again, provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a gooey experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? >>What, what options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it, you know, a little bit of VMware here, a little bit of, you know, other tooling there, what, what do you see out there in the marketplace? >>I'll give kinda my perspective kind of yeah. Outside the, the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise, you've got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little Nutanix, we've got some AWS, they wanna use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform Ansible, and they got service now. And there's a, there's a poor it ops team in the middle, trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill, right. VMware's done with vRealize automation, you know? Yeah. OpenShift will say no where the way, and you use cube vert to >>Do your virtual service now will say the same thing. Right? >>So our goal is, you know, we started in the middle right. Middle out, right. We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right. We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP, you have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So >>You're not trying to be the cloud operating system per se. I mean, right. The way, the way a VMware wants to be, or you could even argue, well, I guess open, you >>Got, you got the hyperscalers coming down, you got VMware moving up. But again, they all at the end of the day are trying to control their cash cow, right. Their hardcore business. We wanna make them all transparent. So >>Your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. Yeah. That's not gonna change. Right. That's the complexity is, is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? >>No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough. Disparate. Technology's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples in the past, like private cloud is we announced yesterday private cloud for enterprise. It's not a new term. People are doing that for quite a while now, but they are typically fairly brittle hand rolled disparate technologies, some poor it team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability. And in that experience across what will be interchangeable parts at times, I think that's really that direction in, >>Yeah. You guys talk about this whole starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well. Right. Not only is there for a challenge on it that transforms, there's not enough. People actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster spin one up. Yeah. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come outta the woodwork almost in all areas where it's complex. Yeah. How does that fit into the makeup of as customers, engineer or rearchitect or, or just evolve to edge on premises and public cloud? Yeah. In a cloud operating way, because if I got managed service, do they just plug in, I mean, new orchestrating services, managed services all the above, take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just gimme the service. Yeah. >>I, I know manage perspective. This, this kinda goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that, that have that expertise in house they're opinionated. They just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I gonna focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure? Or am I gonna try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right? >>Talk about the trust aspect, because if I'm gonna go manage service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verified, but you're seeing the software supply chain is a big discussion point. Developers don't wanna have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. Yeah. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does what's the status of this now? Is it real? >>I think one of the, one of the pieces we see in terms of trust organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And, and a lot of the trust is just internal. You get, you know, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody, you know, finance doesn't trust, you know, who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups, the ability to get their core needs met without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective where we partner with HPE is we are, you know, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider we're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work their GMs team, the manage services team. If they wanna take on more of that operational concern, right. They use us or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we we're all about enabling them at the end of the day. And, and HP brings >>And how hard bread is it to unify? UN unification is a great word. I love let's unify everybody. Right. So how, how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? >>I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space that do it yourself, you mention right. Scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud a to cloud B, you're set back six months, like why we exist is we wanna very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right? That's a, self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia. You know, that's, that takes time, weeks, months. And that's where people are like Accenture GreenLake, other SI other channel partners bring that together to, to help make that change happen. >>How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you, are you scaling at this point? >>Well, the, the great part about our origin story, right? We got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming it at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case product market fit happened, cuz a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been an outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're their product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are. Right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation platform engineering. So it it's a fun time. >>It's it's operational. Yeah. It's they're operationalizing it. >>What's your go to market model. Maybe you could double click on those through >>Partners. So honestly through HP is a big one. We're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go to market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally. So, so yeah. It's >>So then you've got kind of a tiger team overly. Yep. Salesforce is that, that >>Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world. About 70% of those are OnPrem VMware Nutanix. The rest are up in the public cloud. So we work with partners, solution providers, services, engines to, to help deliver that to >>Customers. What do you make of the 61 billion acquisition of VMware from Broadcom? >>We're, you know, I think your analysis was spot on. It is gonna be a, a war of, you know, what is the, the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like vRealize automation, some of these fringe products that are core at a customer use cases, but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for VMware, I think are gonna be gonna be on the bubble. And we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets. Right. They want to be able to switch from hypervisor a to hypervisor B or cloud a to cloud B without being locked into anyone's stack. And that is, that is why we exist. Mm. >>You wanna comment on that? >>I mean, it's, you know, for HP and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right. It's about customer choice. Mm. We have a strong relationship with VMware. Sure. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running VMware that we, we support with. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. Yeah. >>Thank >>You. Brian. Talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems create value. What is the pitch that green lakes making to the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the >>Platform? Yeah. I mean, GreenLake started with a, a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing more and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from, how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third party ISV software building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions you're seeing. And hopefully you'll solve just from announcement more and more of that, where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners, how do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not gonna build it all ourselves, right. We wanna make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. >>So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product, early days of GreenLake. It was really a, you know, financial model. Sure. Right. Where do, where do you see GreenLake today? How far is it matured? We saw some of the, the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? >>Yeah. So this actually, I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio refer to as that journey to one each of our different businesses within green or within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Alma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now, integrable interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of, of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private public on-prem colo and a, and a full solution set within there. So it that's, that's the exciting part >>For me and Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it, is it more just certify that you work inside a GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot >>Of what they've done is actually written into, into our APIs. Like we've normalized hybrid it. We have a, a database model of every load balance or a cloud endpoint automation tool. So we are, we're all about making it easier to consume it. And the vision that Alma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our, you know, from our API, we know who provisioned what, where how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to, to build on. It's >>Great for that console that you guys have. Yeah. >>You got the, you got the open APIs, you publish those, you guys take advantage of 'em and then sure. Boom. Then you can consume. Got it. All right, guys. Hey, great to see you again, red. Thanks for, for >>Coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having us on >>Our pleasure. Great stuff. Congratulations. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Valante for John furrier. Are you watching the cubes coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas? We'll be right back.

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. 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(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alum with me next. Ajay Patel is here, the SVP and GM of Modern Apps and Management at VMware. Ajay, welcome back to the program, it's great to see you. >> Well thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> Glad that you're doing well. I want to dig into your role as SVP and GM with Modern Apps and Management. Talk to me about some of the dynamics of your role and then we'll get into the vision and the strategy that VMware has. >> Makes sense. VMware has created a business group called Modern Apps and Management, with the single mission of helping our customers accelerate their digital transformation through software. And we're finding them leveraging both the edge and the multiple clouds they deploy on. So our mission here is helping, them be the cloud diagnostic manager for application development and management through our portfolio of Tazu and VRealize solutions allowing customers to both build and operate applications at speed across these edge data center and cloud deployments And the big thing we hear is all the day two challenges, right of managing costs, risks, security, performance. That's really the essence of what the business group is about. How do we speed idea to production and allow you to operate at scale. >> When we think of speed, we can't help, but think of the acceleration that we've seen in the last 18 months, businesses transforming digitally to first survive the dynamics of the market. But talk to me about how the, the pandemic has influenced catalyzed VMware's vision here. >> You can see in every industry, this need for speed has really accelerated. What used to be weeks and months of planning and execution has materialized into getting something out in production in days. One of great example I can remember is one of my financial services customer that was responsible for getting all the COVID payments out to the small businesses and being able to get that application from idea to production matter of 10 days, it was just truly impressive to see the teams come together, to come up with the idea, put the software together and getting production so that we could start delivering the financial funds the companies needed, to keep them viable. So great social impact and great results in matter of days. >> And again, that acceleration that we've seen there, there's been a lot of silver linings, I think, but I want to get in next to some of the industry trends that are influencing app modernization. What are you seeing in the customer environment? What are some of those key trends that are driving adoption? >> I mean, this move to cloud is here to stay and most of customers have a cloud first strategy, and we rebranded this from VMware the cloud smart strategy, but it's not just about one particular flavor of cloud. We're putting the best workload on the best cloud. But the reality is when I speak to many of the customers is they're way behind on the bar of digital plats. And it's, that's because the simple idea of, you know, lift and shift or completely rewrite. So there's no one fits all and they're struggling with hardware capability, their the development teams, their IT assets, the applications are modernized across these three things. So we see modernization kind of fall in three categories, infrastructure modernization, the practice of development or devops modernization, and the application transform itself. And we are starting to find out that customers are struggling with all three. Well, they want to leverage the best of cloud. They just don't have the skills or the expertise to do that effectively. >> And how does VMware help address that skills gap. >> Yeah, so the way we've looked at it is we put a lot of effort around education. So on the everyone knows containers and Kubernetes is the future. They're looking to build these modern microservices, architectures and applications. A lot of investment in just kind of putting the effort to help customers learn these new tools, techniques, and create best practices. So theCUBE academy and the effort and the investment putting in just enabling the ecosystem now with the skills and capabilities is one big effort that VMware is putting. But more importantly, on the product side, we're delivering solutions that help customers both build design, deliver and operate these applications on Kubernetes across the cloud of choice. I'm most excited about our announcement around this product. We're just launching called Tanzu application platform. It is what we call an application aware platform. It's about making it easy for developers to take the ideas and get into production. It kind of bridging that gap that exists between development and operations. We hear a lot about dev ops, as you know, how do you bring that to life? How do you make that real? That's what Tanzu application platform is about. >> I'm curious of your customer conversations, how they've changed in the last year or so in terms of, app modernization, things like security being board level conversations, are you noticing that that is rising up the chain that app modernization is now a business critical initiative for our businesses? >> So it's what I'm finding is it's the means. It's not that if you think about the board level conversations about digital transformation you know, I'm a financial services company. I need to provide mobile FinTech. I'm competing with this new age application and you're delivering the same service that they offered digitally now, right. Like from a retail bank. I can't go to the store, the retail branch anymore, right. I need to provide the same capability for payments processing all online through my mobile phone. So it's really the digitalization of the traditional processes that we're finding most exciting. In order to do that, we're finding that no applications are in cloud right. They had to take the existing financial applications and put a mobile frontend to it, or put some new business logic or drive some transformation there. So it's really a transformation around existing application to deliver a business outcome. And we're focusing it through our Tanzu lab services, our capabilities of Tanzu application platform, all the way to the operations and management of getting these products in production or these applications in production. So it's the full life cycle from idea to production is what customers are looking for. They're looking to compress the cycle time as you and I spoke about, through this agility they're looking for. >> Right, definitely a compressed cycle time. Talk to me about some of the other announcements that are being made at VMworld with respect to Tanzu and helping customers on the app modernization front, and that aligned to the vision and mission that you talked about. >> Wonderful, I would say they're kind of, I put them in three buckets. One is what are we doing to help developers get access to the new technology. Back to the skills learning part of it, most excited about Tanzu of community edition and Tanzu mission control starter pack. This is really about getting Kubernetes stood up in your favorite deployment of choice and get started building your application very quickly. We're also announcing Tanzu application platform that I spoke about, we're going to beta 2 for that platform, which makes it really easy for developers to get access to Kubernetes capability. It makes development easy. We're also announcing marketplace enhancements, allowing us to take the best of breed IC solutions and making them available to help you build applications faster. So one set of announcements around building applications, delivering value, getting them down to market very quickly. On the management side, we're really excited about the broad portfolio management we've assembled. We're probably in the customer's a way to build a cloud operating model. And in the cloud operating model, it's about how do I do VMs and containers? How do I provide a consistent management control plane so I can deliver applications on the cloud of my choice? How do I provide intrinsic observability, intrinsic security so I can operate at scale. So this combination of development tooling, platform operations, and day two operations, along with enhancements in our cost management solution with CloudHealth or being able to take our universal capabilities for consumption, driving insight and observity that really makes it a powerful story for customers, either on the build or develop or deploy side of the equation. >> You mentioned a couple of things are interesting. Consistency being key from a management perspective, especially given this accelerated time in which we're living, but also you mentioned security. We've seen so much movement on the security front in the last year and a half with the massive rise in ransomware attacks, ransomware now becoming a household word. Talk to me about the security factor and how you're helping customers from a risk mitigation perspective, because now it's not, if we get attacked, it's when. >> And I think it's really starts with, we have this notion of a secure software supply chain. We think of software as a production factory from idea to production. And if you don't start with known good hard attacks to start with, trying to wire in security after attack is just too difficult. So we started with secure content, curated images content catalogs that customers are setting up as best practices. We started with application accelerators. These are best practice that codifies with the right guard rails in place. And then we automate that supply chain so that you have checks in every process, every step of the way, whether it's in the build process and the deploy process or in runtime production. And you had to do this at the application layer because there is no kind of firewall or edge you can protect the application is highly distributed. So things like application security and API security, another area we announced a new offering at VM world around API security, but everything starts with an API endpoint when you have a security. So security is kind of woven in into the design build, deploy and in the runtime operation. And we're kind of wire this in intrinsically to the platform with best of breed security partners now extending in evolving their solution on top of us. >> What's been some of the customer feedback from some of the new technologies that you announced. I'm curious, I imagine knowing how VMware is very customer centric, customers were essential in the development and iteration of the technologies, but just give me some of the idea on customer feedback of this direction that you're going. >> Yeah, there's a great, exciting example where we're working with the army to create a software factory. you would've never imagined right, The US army being a software digital enterprise, we're partnering with what we call the US army futures command in a joint effort to help them build the first ever software development factory where army personnel are actually becoming true cloud native developers, where you're putting the soldiers to do cloud native development, everything in the terms of practice of building software, but also using the Tanzu portfolio in delivering best-in-class capability. This is going to rival some of the top tech companies in Silicon valley. This is a five-year prototype project in which we're picking cohorts of soldiers, making them software developers and helping them build great capability through both combination of classroom based training, but also strong technical foundation and expertise provided by our lab. So this is an example where, you know, the industry is working with the customer to co-innovate, how we build software, but also driving the expertise of these personnel hierarchs. As a soldier, you know, what you need, what if you could start delivering solutions for rest of your members in a productive way. So very exciting, It's an example where we've leapfrogging and delivering the kind of the Silicon valley type innovation to our standard practice. It's traditionally been a procurement driven model. We're trying to speed that and drive it into a more agile delivery factory concept as well. So one of the most exciting projects that I've run into the last six months. >> The army software factory, I love that my dad was an army medic and combat medic in Vietnam. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have been apt to become a software developer. But tell me a little bit about, it's a very cool project and so essential. Talk to me a little bit about the impetus of the army software factory. How did that come about? >> You know, this came back with strong sponsorship from the top. I had an opportunity to be at the opening of the campus in partnership with the local Austin college. And as General Milley and team spoke about it, they just said the next battleground is going to be a digital backup power hub. It's something we're going to have to put our troops in place and have modernized, not just the army, but modernize the way we deliver it through software. It's it speaks so much to the digital transformation we're talking about right. At the very heart of it is about using software to enable whether it's medics, whether it's supplies, either in a real time intelligence on the battlefield to know what's happening. And we're starting to see user technology is going to drive dramatically hopefully the next war, we don't have to fight it more of a defensive mode, but that capability alone is going to be significant. So it's really exciting to see how technology has become pervasive in all aspects, in every format including the US army. And this partnership is a great example of thought leadership from the army command to deliver software as the innovation factory, for the army itself. >> Right, and for the army to rival Silicon valley tech companies, that's pretty impressive. >> Pretty ambitious right. In partnership with one of the local colleges. So that's also starting to show in terms of how to bring new talent out, that shortage of skills we talked about. It's a critical way to kind of invest in the future in our people, right? As we, as we build out this capability. >> That's excellent that investment in the future and helping fill those skills gaps across industries is so needed. Talk to me about some of the things that you're excited about this year's VMworld is again virtual, but what are some of the things that you think are really fantastic for customers and prospects to learn? >> I think as Raghu said, we're in the third act of VM-ware, but more interestingly, but the third act of where the cloud is, the cloud has matured cloud 2.0 was really about shifting and using a public cloud for the IS capabilities. Cloud 3.0 is about to use the cloud of choice for the best application. We are going to increasingly see this distributed nature of application. I asked most customers, where does your application run? It's hard to answer that, right? It's on your mobile device, it's in your storefront, it's in your data center, it's in a particular cloud. And so an application is a collection of services. So what I'm most excited about is all business capables being published as an API, had an opportunity to be part of a company called Sonos and then Apogee. And we talked about API management years ago. I see increasingly this need for being able to expose a business capability as an API, being able to compose these new applications rapidly, being able to secure them, being able to observe what's going on in production and then adjust and automate, you can scale up scale down or deploy the application where it's most needed in minutes. That's a dynamic future that we see, and we're excited that VM was right at the heart of it. Where that in our cloud agnostic software player, that can help you, whether it's your development challenges, your deployment challenges, or your management challenges, in the future of multi-cloud, that's what I'm most excited about, we're set up to help our customers on this cloud journey, regardless of where they're going and what solution they're looking to build. >> Ajay, what are some of the key business outcomes that the cloud is going to deliver across industries as things progress forward? >> I think we're finding the consistent message I hear from our customers is leverage the power of cloud to transform my business. So it's about business outcomes. It's less about technology. It's what outcomes we're driving. Second it's about speed and agility. How do I respond, adjust kind of dynamic contiuness. How do I innovate continuously? How do I adjust to what the business needs? And third thing we're seeing more and more is I need to be able to management costs and I get some predictability and able to optimize how I run my business. what they're finding with the cloud is the costs are running out of control, they need a way, a better way of knowing the value that they're getting and using the best cloud for the right technology. Whether may be a private cloud in some cases, a public cloud or an edge cloud. So they want to able to going to select and move and have that portability. Being able to make those choices optimization is something they're demanding from us. And so we're most excited about this need to have a flexible infrastructure and a cloud agnostic infrastructure that helps them deliver these kinds of business outcomes. >> You mentioned a couple of customer examples and financial services. You mentioned the army software factory. In terms of looking at where we are in 2021. Are there any industries in particular, maybe essential services that you think are really prime targets for the technologies, the new announcements that you're making at VM world. >> You know, what we are trying to see is this is a broad change that's happening. If you're in retail, you know, you're kind of running a hybrid world of digital and physical. So we're seeing this blending of physical and digital reality coming together. You know, FedEx is a great customer of ours and you see them as spoken as example of it, you know, they're continue to both drive operational change in terms of being delivering the packages to you on time at a lower cost, but on the other side, they're also competing with their primary partners and retailers and in some cases, right, from a distribution perspective for Amazon, with Amazon prime. So in every industry, you're starting to see the lines are blurring between traditional partners and competitors. And in doing so, they're looking for a way to innovate, innovate at speed and leverage technology. So I don't think there is a specific industry that's not being disrupted whether it's FinTech, whether it's retail, whether it's transportation logistics, or healthcare telemedicine, right? The way you do pharmaceutical, how you deliver medicine, it's all changing. It's all being driven by data. And so we see a broad application of our technology, but financial services, healthcare, telco, government tend to be a kind of traditional industries that are with us but I think the reaches are pretty broad. >> Yeah, it is all changing. Everything is becoming more and more data-driven and many businesses are becoming data companies or if they're not, they need to otherwise their competition, as you mentioned, is going to be right in the rear view mirror, ready to take their place. But that's something that we see that isn't being talked about. I don't think enough, as some of the great innovations coming as a result of the situation that we're in. We're seeing big transformations in industries where we're all benefiting. I think we need to get that, that word out there a little bit more so we can start showing more of those silver linings. >> Sure. And I think what's happening here is it's about connecting the people to the services at the end of the day, these applications are means for delivering value. And so how do we connect us as consumers or us employees or us as partners to the business to the operator with both digitally and in a physical way. And we bring that in a seamless experience. So we're seeing more and more experience matters, you know, service quality and delivery matter. It's less about the technologies back again to the outcomes. And so very much focused in building that the platform that our customers can use to leverage the best of the cloud, the best of their people, the best of the innovation they have within the organization. >> You're right. It's all about outcomes. Ajay, thank you for joining me today, talking about some of the new things that the mission of your organization, the vision, some of the new products and technologies that are being announced at VM world, we appreciate your time and hopefully next year we'll see you in person. >> Thank you again and look forward to the next VMWorld in person. >> Likewise for Ajay Patel. You're very welcome for Ajay Patel. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBEs coverage of VMWorld of 2021. (soft music)

(slow music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021, the second year in a row we've done this virtually. My name is Dave Vellante and long-time VMware technologist and new CTO Kit Colbert is here. Kit, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. Super excited to be here. >> So let's talk about your new role. You've been at VMware. You've touched all the bases so to speak (Kit chuckles) and, you know, love the career evolution. You're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. >> Well, I hope so. I don't know. It's definitely a big step up. Been here at VMware for 18 years now, which, if know Silicon Valley, you know that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon Valley lifetime's in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company. I love the culture. I love the technology and I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, previously I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now, as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing all of VMware R&D. In the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right, where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SaaS company. So, you know, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes we got to make internally. Technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that and, I'll be honest, it's big, there's a lot of stuff to go and do, but I am just super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing. Well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center row to see everything that's happening. >> And when I was preparing for the interview with Raghu, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time, and I sort of noted that it's like the fourth, you know, wave of executive management and I sort of went back and said, okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, Workstation. Okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, and server utilization, and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, "Wow, this is going to be completely game-changing." And then thought about the era of the software-defined data center, fine-tuning the cloud strategy, and then this explosion of innovation, whether it was this sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from Multi-Cloud combined with, as you're pointing out, this as a service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint >> Yeah. >> Or a mindset perspective? >> Oh yeah. Both great questions and both sort of key focus areas for me, and by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah, so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on how you count. But I also think that this notion of getting into Multi-Cloud, of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us. And the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make, you know, we did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage with the software-defined data center. But now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So, you know, how are we thinking about it? Well, we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think, as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that, you know, we no longer really have product teams purely, they should be thinking of themselves as service teams and the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really needed to step up our game, and we have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that, to know that, hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability, in addition to things like security, compliance, et cetera. But we have monitoring systems to tell you, hey, like there's a problem. And that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, a normal bug that comes in, oh, I'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift and that's something we've been driving for the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services, but what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that, is a platform, a true, you know, SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. And so it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than, you know, just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are couple of things I'm really focused on. Both driving the mindset shift. You know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and, you know, how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the, I don't know if the keeper is the right word, but the keeper of the engineering culture, right, that you want to really be a steward for that to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that aligned with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one in the SaaS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is, that traditionally CTO is kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations, but here, what we want to do, because the SaaS platform is so important to us. We did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers, from an engineering standpoint, are all the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. >> Well, VMware has always had a superstrong engineering culture, and I liked the way you phrase that, "The steward of the engineering culture," when you think about a product mindset, 'course correct me, if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock-solid, you know, Maritz used to talk about the hardened top. And so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better, whether that's a machine, intelligence service, or a security service or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building, the combination of that innovation has like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece you mentioned, super critical, but I also think it's actually taking a step back and looking at the life cycle more holistically. When you're thinking about a product, you're thinking about, okay, I'ma get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out. But then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it, to, you know, deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator, have to deal with. And so you've got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to debug at runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability, that might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with like a cloud service. The other point, I think that's really important there, is the notion of simplicity and ease of use. Experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody. You, as a user, should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing, right, and swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do, as an application builder, as a solution builder, really aligns well with what customers are looking for. And you can get that feedback very, very rapidly, which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. >> So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Raghu, and I couldn't go deep into it, I did a little bit with Sumit, but I wonder if I get your perspectives as well. I always talk about this abstraction layer across clouds, hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, abstracting, you know, the underlying complexity, and Raghu, it's nuance, but he said, "Okay, but the thing is, we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent." And my takeaway was okay, but the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds. But simplify, to your point, across those estates at the management layer, maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting question. But let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. In that, you know, the abstractions can sometimes find the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Raghu getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it, is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions at different layers. So to your point, Dave, like we have a management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you'll look at things that are like our vRealize suite of products, or CloudHealth, or Tanzu, Tanzu Mission Control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware Cloud. And this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though the core, sort of IIS layer, is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher-level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds, or a messaging system, or streaming service, or, you know, AI, whatever it is, you still got that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. As a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem into the cloud. They want to do that very quickly. So, boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware Cloud, consistent infrastructure. We can VMotion that thing up in the Cloud, great. But for other ones, maybe a modern app they're building, and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that, but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a Tanzu Mission Control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites, or leverage CloudHealth to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer sort of these different levels of abstraction, and it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is, especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all of those use cases. >> You know, I want to stay on optionality for a moment because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud, which I think is appropriate 'cause the cloud is expanding. It's going on-prem, it's going out to the edge, there's hybrid connections, across clouds, et cetera. And when you look at the public cloud players, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes, but certainly they all own, own, databases, but they also offer databases from folks. I go back to something Maritz said with the software mainframe that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and have high reliability, recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. So you're going to run those workloads. Project Monterey is about supporting new workloads, but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to own sort of the database layer, for example, what's your philosophy around that? >> Yeah. Not generally. I mean, we do have some solutions like Greenplum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution, but generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network. And of course, we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places, at the infrastructure level, at the management level, and so forth. But yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone, reinvent the world. And by the way, if I just take a step back, when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call, best of breed cloud services, that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs may be different, right? Maybe on one conference is another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers. They want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud, so we can take advantage of that cloud service, but what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at 2:00 am, and you have to wake up and go fix it. Do you have like the right sort of tooling in place, if it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, you know, which dashboard to look at? It's like, no, that you want kind of a consistent one. When you think about, from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years? Where people insert malicious code into your supply chain and now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, I guess, if we refine the optionality a little bit, that point, it's about getting optionality around cloud services and then like those are the things that really differentiate. And so, you know, we're not trynna compete with that. We're saying, hey, like we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can, irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud, or on-prem, or even at the edge. >> And that's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers. I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? >> Yeah. >> Is it a bolt-on, is it a fundamental component? >> Yeah. Yeah, so ESG is talking about environment, sustainability, and governance. And so, you know, it's not an environment, excuse me, equity, (Kit chuckles) equity, sustainability, and governance. Getting my acronyms wrong, which as the technologist, really a faux pas, but any case, equity, sustainability, and governance. And the idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important. And something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this, really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity, and in many different ways, that we have or continue to increase, for instance, the amount of female representation within our organization, or underrepresented minorities or communities, ensuring that, you know, pay is equal across the company. You know, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. You know, vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical servers you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there. But now, you know, taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net-zero carbon emissions, you know, using 100% renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that, we ourselves, have signed up for, you know, today we are carbon-neutral, but what we want to get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's, by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so, you know, when you look across, you know, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because what I view the office of the CTO as being is really a force multiplier, as I said before, like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering. And in fact, all of VMware. So I think, you know, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent, increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet, that is sustainable. And that is giving back to the community. >> You know, by the way, I don't think that was faux pas. (Kit laughs) 'Cause a lot of times, people use environmental, social, and governance, and your equity piece would fall into the S in that equation, the social responsibility, you know, components. So I think you've just done an interesting twist on the acronym. So no mistake there. (Dave chuckles) Just another way to look at it. >> Yup, yup, yup. >> So you're now deep into the CTO role. What should we look for in the, you know, coming months and years? How should we >> Hmm. >> Kind of evaluate progress? What are those sort of milestones that we should be looking at? >> Yeah, so about a month or so into the job now, and so still getting my arms wrapped around, but, you know, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and in diversity, equity inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me and something we're going to be really pushing hard on, you know, as we all know, you know, women, underrepresented minorities, not very well represented, in general, in Silicon Valley. So something that we all need to step up on. And so we're going to be putting a lot of effort in there, and that will actually help drive, as I said before, all of these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset, I mean, that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone, but the net result of that, so that what you're going to see, is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things (Kit laughs) that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But, you know, as we start making this shift, we're going to be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. >> You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article, I think it was last week, in "The Wall Street Journal," it was an insert section on "Women in the Workforce," and there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by and you see what you think, you know, it was talking about COVID, and post COVID,and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives, and pfft, you know, I'm with them, said, "Hey, work from home. This a beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because, you know, everybody's more productive," but you have this perpetual workday now. It's like we never sleep. It bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, I think it said, "30% of working women said that their mental health has declined since COVID." And that number was only 15% for working men, is still notable, but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week and, you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of previously working moms. And so there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? >> No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to, of course, you know, where we have offices where it's safe to do so, where the government has allowed that, and people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, "Hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week." And then we say, "Okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take." And others are saying, "I want to be fully remote." So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think, to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails. 'Cause like my sort of schedule is, I do tend to like fire off emails late at night after the kids are in bed, I get a little quiet time, some thinking time, but I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response. Don't worry about it. This is my work time. Doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess, boundaries, if you will, explicitly and kind of the expectations maybe is a better term, setting that explicitly, trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're going to have to drop the kids off at school or pick them (indistinct) and to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and really setting those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning. And so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinkings. But I would say that we at VMware are taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. >> Well Kit, congratulations on the new role and it's great to see you again. I hope next year we can be face-to-face, always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Appreciated being here. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more right after this. (slow music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here at the Orange County Convention Center in the middle of the show floor, one of Microsoft's biggest shows, 26,000 people from around the globe. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost, Stu Miniman, and we're joined by a third cohost, but he is also the Principal CTO Advisor, Keith Townsend. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> It's a pleasure to have you. So, you come to a lot of these shows, I'm interested in your thoughts and impressions of Microsoft Ignite 2019. >> So, I'm part of the V community, which is a pretty close knit community, very focused on one part of the whole IT pitch, which is infrastructure. It is amazing coming to a show like Microsoft Ignite where the breadth of content is so wide, and the conversation, so wide and, surprisingly, deep. This is been one of my, I think, favorite shows of the year so far. >> Talk about the content, you're absolutely right, we had so many product announcements, it felt like an Amazon Show, we were saying, because of the number of products that were being announced and demoed here. 87 pages from the Comms Team, so, does this feel like a different era for the company itself? >> You know what, Microsoft announced, I think UiPath has some crazy over billion dollar evaluation. Microsoft wildly announced that they're entering RPA, Robotic Process Automation, they're challenging SAP when it comes to data warehousing and data analytics. And then, they just happen to announce that, oh, yeah, by the way, we're making Kubernetes easier. Then, there's still the Teams announcements. The amount of content and the areas that Microsoft is going in, just to highlight it, Azure Arc replicates data, one of the jobs is replicate data, and they said they'll replicate data to AWS Cloud. Microsoft, great position. >> Keith, as you're alluding to, Microsoft has a large portfolio of applications. If you think business productivity, you're probably using Microsoft. Everything from Teams, that we're hearing a bunch about, to, of course, O365 is the solution that gave everybody the green light to go SaaS-ify as many of your applications as you will, and Arc, very much from what I've seen so far, takes that application specific view of Kubernetes, we know Kubernetes is supposed to help be that platform to build on top of, but, I've tended to hear a very infrastructure view of here's what you'll build in your data center and the compute network and storage that you need to think about, here's the IAS that it might live on. But, when you talk about Arc, they're talking about it's about SQL and databases and how those pieces go together. And this is a view for Microsoft, but, if you want to go do open shift, if you want to do spring with a Pivotal VMware or Tanzu with there, Microsoft, of course, is saying that that's your option but would love your view point so far as your Arc and where Microsoft sits in this broader ecosystem today. >> So, I'm coming off fresh a conversation with David Armor, the PM for Microsoft Arc for Azure stack, and their attention to detail is amazing. You know, I'm not the world's biggest Kubernetes fan, for some of the very reasons that you mentioned. It's too much attention to the details in order to provide a Kubernetes experience that developers will accept. Microsoft, a big developer focused company, so when you look at Arc and what it does for Kubernetes on Azure stack, it makes the provisioning, the storage networking, et cetera, invisible so that you can take Microsoft's cognitive services, deploy them on Azure stack, and just consume those services. Microsoft, again, when you look at it from a different angle, when you're not taking the infrastructure angle added and you're doing the whiz bang features of making sure that Kubernetes can do X, Y, and Z, more importantly, can I use it to build applications is Microsoft's approach, and you can see it in the Arc and how they approach it in the Azure stack. >> Absolutely, and you're talking, right now, about this app development for everyone. We had Satya Nadella, yesterday, talking about democratizing computing, anyone can do it, AI for all, too. What are the most exciting new tools that you're seeing, and what are the kinds of conversations that you're having with developers around these new tools? >> So, I just talked to a professional services architect, or an architect for professional services, one of the global big four's, and he was telling me that they've deployed RPA to the entire organization of over 100,000 consultants and end users, so that they can build robots to power the next phase of productivity increases within their organization. No rules, no constraints, just here's the tool, go out and do. Microsoft talked about 2.5 million non-technology focused developers, it is, I think, a key theory of the CTO advisors that their future of enterprise IT is that companies, like Microsoft, then, will push AI, machine learning, these robotic automation processes down to the end users so that they're creating the content. There's just not enough of Keiths and Stus in the world to do this by hand. So, great vision. >> And Keith, you brought up the SIs, and you've worked for some of the big SIs in the past. How is Microsoft doing out there? We've seen with Cloud and AI, the biggest guys, rolling out armies of people to help integrate this, to help customers adopt this. Cloud and AI, Cloud, specifically, was supposed to be cheap and easy and we know it's neither of those two things. So, if you look at Cloud and AI, how is Microsoft to be a partner with and I would love a little compare and contrast to the Vmwares and AWSs of the world. >> So, if you look, let's take a look at VMware, I'm a big VMware fan, but one of the things that if you're a VMware VAR, or you're in VMware period, if you go outside of your lane, that infrastructure lane, you go to have conversations, the technology is there. You can use VMware, vRealize, automation suites, the CloudHealth, the Heptio, they have the individual components, technology components, but they absolutely need the Pivotals of the world to go in and add credence to their talking points around these products because they don't have that reputation to come in and have the conversation with the CMOs or the application developers. Microsoft on the other hand, developers, developers, developers. And then, they also have Microsoft Dynamics, we ran into a customer, who was desperately just searching out, she came to the conference expecting to see Dynamic experts, and I'm sure she found them. Microsoft has the ecosystem to support their vision. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE this week, at Ignite, is that it seems like a different kind of Microsoft, it seems like one that is, not only embracing customers who choose Microsoft in addition to other companies, but championing them and supporting them and saying, "whatever you want, "we're meeting you where you are." Have you found that, and is that striking to you, based on the Microsoft of Yore, which was more proprietary about where it's customers went for it's technology. >> So, we mainly cover enterprise tech, but, I think today or tomorrow, the Surface Pro X gets released, which is an arm based device, that runs full version of Windows. I was in one of the Lightning talks, Microsoft Lightning talk, on a completely different topic, and at the bottom, they had a logo for UiPath, Automate Anywhere and Blue Prism, three of the, I think, leaders in a space of RPA. And they were talking about the integrations that Microsoft has gone on with these companies, and their own power automate was not even mentioned as part of that session. So, Microsoft is meeting customers where they're at. I think the AWS, the example for Arc, replicating to AWS, customers have AWS, they're the biggest Cloud provider, Microsoft isn't closing their eyes to it. >> Yeah, well, we noticed the biggest thing repeated over and over again in the key note yesterday was trust. And while the Microsoft of old days was you're going to buy my OS, and my apps, and everything Microsoft on top of it, and we're going to maximize our licensing, the Microsoft today is those choices. We talked to UiPath yesterday, they're not worried about their relationship with Microsoft. When I talked to the ecosystem of partners here, they trust that they can work with Microsoft. Compare that to some others out there in the industry, and the big Hyperscalers, there might not be as much trust. What I'm curious about, from you Keith, is do customers see that? Do they understand that today is a different Microsoft than the one that we grew up with? >> So, some of the conversation on Twitter, just remotely, people not here, this is the best Ignite I've ever seen. People who are not even here, this is from the keynote yesterday. I think customers are starting to embrace Microsoft and trust Microsoft. I think there's still some hold out, some people who remember this sting of forced to use Microsoft management suites on products that probably didn't integrate well with those suites. But, as that sting starts to subside, you have to look at it objectively and say, "Microsoft is a different company." This is not a show I think I would have enjoyed three years ago. >> What's driving it though? This is something we're seeing in the technology industry at large, this understanding of customers needing different things and wanting best in breed. But are there other elements that we're not privy to, would you say? >> I think it's the democratization of technology via Cloud. I talked to a just regular, small business owner. She runs a trucking business, she uses her computer as a tool, it was a five year old device, she really didn't care, did the job that she needed to do. We talked a business challenge that she was having, and I described Cloud in general and she never even considered Cloud as a thing. She just said, "you know what, "I want this solution and if it's Microsoft AWS or Google that provides it, or even VM Works." She didn't care, she wanted to buy it. And that relationship wasn't a traditional ISV, MSP, these are, I think, business owners and business leaders are being approached with, whether it's ISVs or consultants and business advisors, and they're being advised to adopt these technologies, regardless of the source. There's no loyalty anymore to just Microsoft. Remember when you bled blue? Whether it was IBM blue or Microsoft blue. I read an unfortunate article on one of the big ERP providers had a 100 million dollar failure, and the company just decided, you know what, we're not going to go with just one provider anymore, we're just going to go with best of breed across these business processes. >> So what does that mean for the competitive landscape? I mean, we talked a lot about this. Does Microsoft really have a shot at taking on AWS or will it always be number two. Well, Microsoft won a 10 billion dollar JEDI contract from the US. I wrote about this in my newsletter last week, is that one billion dollars over 10 years will make Microsoft Azure better. You can't help but to have that type of discipline that comes from a contract like that impact Azure. Will they catch up with Microsoft, I mean, with AWS? AWS is still a very, very small fraction of the overall IT landscape. That business owner I talked to never heard of AWS. 50,000 person conference in a month, she only knew Amazon as a book seller. So, to say that Microsoft won't catch up with AWS is a very, very short view of the landscape. >> We're just scratching the surface when it comes to Cloud. >> Keith, what other thing have you seen at the show jumping out at you? You said you might not have enjoyed the show three years ago so what are some of things that make this show enjoyable? I know for me, it is a different community than the V community out there, there are a lot of overlaps, a lot of friendly faces that I know here, but community, diversity, inclusion, super strong here, would love your comment on that and any other takeaways. >> So, someone pointed out to me that I didn't notice and I'm happy I didn't notice it, was that there is a lot of women at this show, and I looked up and I'm like wow, the lines for men's bathroom aren't as long. And that's a nice thing because I don't think it's just facilities. It is a massively diverse show, not just from a ethnicity and gender perspective, but from career levels and age groups. There's Millennials all the way up to Boomers, and the conversations, the conversations that I've had, I'm really surprised with. Straight on business conversations, to deep and dirty, you know what these are the Cloud providers Azure provides for Kubernetes. That's super geeky, and that conversation's all around best. Infrastructure, application, business, and then even social, I had that social conversation about diversity, and for a change, I wasn't the one that brought up the conversation. >> You know, that's a really good point, and even just even here, I mean, I know you made the schedule, which I salute you, because we are having many more women, many more people of color on our stage, which is reflective of who's here. >> And it's easier at this show than it is at most, as opposed to please find me some more underrepresented or diversity there. And luckily, there is a lot of options at a show like this. >> Yeah, the pool just hasn't, and other shows, the pool just isn't very big. Normally, I can usually say at a show, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and hey, I'm the tall black guy with the beard, and this show is not that case. >> No, there's more, there's more, exactly. >> Well, Keith Townsend, thank you so much for coming on, a pleasure having you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman and Keith Townsend, you are watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat fast paced techno music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you buy VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Cube, the coverage here VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Dave 10 years covering The Cube. Lots changed. The game is still the same when it comes to storage back in recovery. Got some new stuff too, some great news. Two great guests. Cube Alumni Shay Mowlem who's the Senior Vice President of Product Strategy Rubrik. Chris Wahl, Chief Technologist at Rubrik. Guys, welcome back to The Cube. >> Thanks. >> Good to be here. >> The game always is getting better in terms of modernization, that's the big trend. Digital transformation their are talks about that, but cloud impact has been something that you guys been riding the wave like I said, great success. I don't think you guys have been classified as a startup anymore, you're more in high growth mode. Let's cover the news. What's happening with the announcements here at Vmworld? What's the big news? >> We announced our new release of Andy's 5.1 and really breaking new ground and expanding our position into new markets around data governance, disaster recovery and we're also bringing in continuous data protection as a core capability of our product. Really excited about it. These are areas that have generally been addressed through sort of separate siloed approaches, and we see a lot of synergy with backup recovery and brought it all together as part of this offering. >> How's the news going over? >> Oh it's been great. I mean if you look at data governance, everyone is struggling today with privacy. How do you discover personally identifiable information in your backup archives? Very hard problem to solve. Generally people do spot audits and checks. We've just made that really easy. Streamline with a backup process. It sort of naturally fits there in some ways 'cause I'm backing it up, why not process that data to discover? Sends that information and classify it and our customers are really excited about that. >> Chris, talk about the architectural shift. 'Cause one of the things that we were observing in our opening day analysis is storage is still a hot startup sector. I mean, storage is not storage anymore. It's evolved. We were even joking this morning with Nvidia and Dalium C guy around H, VDI. That's not VDI anymore, it's user experience. Storage specifically with cloud has certainly changed on premises. Everyone now recognizes hybrid finally as standard, not going away. But the operating model is requiring a new architect, 'cause you can't just take the old and recycle it into the new. We'll talk about what that is specifically and why it's important. >> Yeah and I'll kind of tie that back to what we're talking here with cloud data management. It's kind of this acknowledgement that the way we did IT back in the day, where the storage food group was completely isolated, things went into it, things came out of it, but it wasn't part of that kind of overall architecture. Especially when you start talking public cloud and whatnot, that was just to kind of acknowledge that this model of IT just isn't going to carry us forward, and that's similar to the process of let's take all this backup data with Rubrik, let's index it, inventory it, really start to understand what's going on and use that as like the jet fuel that actually powers our Polaris platform and all of our data management applications. I think that all starts with storage. We had to have that data, add a primary into some secondary location, keep it very efficient, figure out how it's going to get from one place to the next. That used to be data centers, now it's clouds and back and forth. >> It's funny, these sacred cloud categories, backup recovery idea. It's data. I mean, this is a data problem. It's data, it's value is in data. You're seeing platform kind of thinking coming in. We talked about this in Palo Alto in our studio when you came in. >> Yes we did. It's a platform thing, it's not just this tool or siloed approach. >> Absolutely. That was when we spoke last, I had recently joined Rubrik back then. Our vision had always been, this is high value data. Yes, we're going to build back up in a way that is quite revolutionary, but how do we create more leverage out of that data? We're starting to see actual execution to that, both with our radar product ransom where recovery, sonar for data governance, orchestrated DR, exposing more and more value out of that data and it's really connecting. >> I'd love to come back to the announcement, the Andys announcement. >> Shay: Yes. >> You talk about governance, DR, and CDP. You're right, these often times would be point products, but explain to people sort of the before and the after. >> Shay: Sure. >> That you try to, when you walk into an account, you might see like I say, different point products. How are they transitioning? Maybe you could add some color there. >> Yeah absolutely. With data governance, everybody's, everyone's got deal with it today at some level. I use privacy as an example, but truly we all are impacted if you're in health care you've got HIPPA. If you're dealing with financial data, you've got PCI. Generally, the backup data has been somewhat of a black box. The only way to really check it, is to do sort of a spot audit check. It's labor intensive and hard. We're streamlining that process for our customers and incorporating it as a value add on top of what they're doing with backup and I think that's solving a major pain point. On DR, same thing. Separate silo today, generally different product lines, but backing up core objects, VM's, databases and application stacks, which is what you're really trying to do with a DR solution, you know there's a lot of synergy there. We're helping to just bring that synergy together into this integrated platform approach. >> You guys are doing some machine learning. I saw in the news around classification you mentioned it, index. It sounds like a search engine, but again to my point about these categories kind of being broken down, this platform, you guys are using machine learning to do some classification around protecting against breach. Is that right? Could you guys just drill down on that a little bit? What's that all about? >> Yes, so we use machine learning in a variety of ways. In our radar product, our ransomware recovery product, we us it for not only detection of changed patterns in the data. Ransomware techs generally involve people coming in, updating, deleting, encrypting your data. We look at the changing profile of the data, and alert allonomous behavior, and then recover it back to the last stable state. With our data governance product, we're also learning machine learning to discover that PII information and trying to really help find a very rich accurate way of detecting that data. >> So, to killer apps, one Ransomware which, big problem. I mean, you just, you can't look a day without seeing major ransomware. The Texas thing to me jumps out. Coordinated attacks. I even speculate, that's cybersecurity related. Some would say there's some stayed actors on that or sanctioned groups doing that, but that's, again I'm with conspiracy theory on this one, but that's Ransomware. Killer app. Compliance, kind of a boring category, but super important because of the penalties. I mean, compliance is an issue. Huge. >> Absolutely. I mean, you look at GDPR in Europe, compliance bossies here in this country across various verticals. Everyone's dealing with it in some form or another, and there's no reason why that should be a separate sort of process. Why not leverage the data management, like what is being provided by Rubrik to deliver on that? >> Here's another question on DR. One of the complaints that you hear, maybe not complaints, but observations when you talk to practitioners, is they can't test their DR. They can test the fair load, but they can't test the fail back 'cause it's too risky. >> Shay: That's spot on, yes. How do you address that problem? You're all about your modern data management, simplicity cloud. Describe how you solve that problem. >> That's a very, very powerful question Dave and it's so true. Traditionally, customers that are using on prem DR systems need to set up the infrastructure, the people, the processes. It's very labor intensive and expensive, so you can only do it a few times a year max and that's how you know that your DR system is operational. You don't want to discover that there's a problem when there's an actual DR happening. Our approach basically takes the full application stack that you want to protect, we convert it for you into a cloud native format and we can instantiate any one of those snapshots that we're taking that full application at any point in time, in the cloud for you to verify and test and we streamline that process, fully orchestrated. If you choose to keep it in the cloud, we have a cloud native approach to protect it and then you can fail back to your on prem system. We've just streamlined this process in a way that really helps our customers do DR test in a much more frequent basis without that operation burden and challenge that they're dealing with today. >> Talk about, Chris, this Rubrik build open source initiative. Because I want, it's interesting. First explain what is Rubrik build, what's it all about. What's the philosophy behind it? >> I'll take you back a few years, when I was interested in joining Rubrik. The one major defining characteristic of the product that really tugged my heart strings, was a restful set of API end points for everything. Doesn't matter what the product does. Anything you click it's always calling a restful API. That goes to a pain point that I had a a customer, was automating, we'll say any kind of backup product, but a lot of things in the infrastructure space was like smashing my face against a hot iron. (chuckles) >> Chris: You know, it's just not pleasant. >> Bad visual too. >> Chris: Exactly, so I'm thinking- >> I've never tried that. (laughs) >> Do not do that at home. >> The analogies, that's my one gift to the world. >> You need restful API is what you need. (laughs) >> Cute. So, finding a product that not only had them, but wanted you to consume them, made them available across every feature, click whatever existed, was very, very powerful for me and a lot of other people that I work with. Fast forward a few years, we developed quite the library of different source projects for integrating with things like ServiceNow and vRealize and anything that does things from configuration management, all the way to infrastructures code, and we would go talk to customers about these things. You had two camps of people. Either, I need the 100 level stuff. I've never dealt with CIDC Pipelines, automation, unit tests, pull requests, what is GitHub? All the way through, I know all that stuff, give me the use cases. What can I do with your API? We wanted to develop Rubrik Build as kind of a teach you how to make the champagne, and teach you how to drink the champagne. The idea is, all of our software development kits, our eco integrations and our use cases, are bundled into this very friendly ecosystem where it's all open source, we have quick start guides, educational materials, and a number of folks that are on the engineering and marketing teams that are engaging with people that either don't care much about cloud data management and just want to learn kind of the automation dev ops world of things, or are very keep to learn more about CDP >>and stuff like that. So Rubrik employees donating the code for open source. Did you guys create the project? Was it community driven or how was that structured? >> It was kind of three slices. It could be from Rubrik. We built this thing like an SDK. We obviously own and support that. It could be someone found our SDK, and wanted to write a third party integration. Heck, even Microsoft wrote a system center ops manager plugin and hosted on their GitHub site. Or it kind of something in the middle where working with like a red hat on their Ansible integrations is an example. >> What other kind of innovations have come out of that? You mentioned Microsoft doing the GitHub. Are there sort of things that have come out of it, or things that you're hoping to come out of it? It's hard to predict, I know. >> We've had the predecessor of the DR product that we released or announced, was actually born in open source. Many years ago, I had a customer saying, I'd really like to automatically do DR tests like every night, for the se five critical apps. We have the API's, we have the ability to live mount work loads, we tie into the cloud, I was like, there's no reason we can't do this. We had that kind of bit more, manual process, but it does the job years ago that we developed as a use case doing Helper Different Languages, fast forward now it's a product. You can kind of get to see that evolution from idea to sort of hacking on things to get them to work, to now it's a full product and you can just push the button and everyone's going to love that. That's one example. >> Very cool. >> Talk about the Vmware relationship. What's the status? How long have you guys been working with VMware and the ecosystem, and what are some of the new things that are developing in the relationship? >> Yeah I mean, this is a deep relationship. It's been a critical one from the beginning of the company. We integrate and support, and are certified across a variety of solutions. Obviously V Center and in this latest release with our continuous data protection, we've done that in a way that is a certified, approved approach and I think that helps us really build a confidence and deliver this sort of excellent overall experience that our customers are looking for. >> They got that open source aspect too, that's pretty hot right now with the cloud native stuff going on, that's pretty relevant. >> Shay: Absolutely. (chuckles) >> All right well we got to ask, with multi-cloud everything here. What's your guys point of view on multi-cloud? Real? BS? Somewhere in the middle? Time will tell? What's your thoughts? >> Definitely real. I'll add color. I mean, I think- >> Dave: Yeah, thank you. >> Absolutely. (laughs) we used to talk about hybrid just a few years ago and that's still real too, but we see a lot of customer looking at leveraging best in class for different work loads and different services across multiple clouds, and our vision it to be the data management platform of choice across all of that. Enabling that choice, and giving the excellent sort of cloud native experience that they're looking for as they deploy different work loads in these different environments. >> Just share with us. We've been talking at The Cube a lot. There's a lot of us who believe this, that certain parts of the multi-cloud are on the BS side. Now there's that vision that any app can run anywhere without recompiling, without retesting. That's aspirational. Then you're going to need a lot of homogenous infrastructure to do that. The one area that I do think that you can standardize on, is what you guys call a data management, or backup, that you can actually say, okay we're going to mandate that this is the platform that we're going to use across all clouds, and that actually will work technically. >> Chris: Yes. Some of this other stuff, I'm not so sure. >> If you have a control plane, if you will, with data management entities that live on prem as well as localities that are available across public cloud, then it's really just a choice of why do you want to put the data there. We're driving that through our serviceable agreement domains or isolated domains where you can say, this data needs to live in Germany. It needs to be in this particular data center forever, where this one needs to replicate to between France and London, something like that. You can make those choices based on what you're trying to achieve, more around non technical decision making, than actual technical decision making. Which I think has really been kind of, you call the BS versus no BS. It's like, are we trying to do this because we can or because we need to do something? That's to me, the decision between BS or not. >> Well, it's customer driven too. The use cases will drive it. For instance, a security requirement might be build our own stack, I want to be on this cloud, have a backup cloud or the work load might have certain requirements, but again I think the data question's a good one. That's going to be independent of- >> I want to test it with the technologist because if you have, let's say you have outposts and you got Azure Stack, Cloud Customer, whatever, and you think you're going to run apps anywhere and that's not going to happen anytime soon anyway. However, if I want a data management solution across all those, actually that can work. Right? There's not reason it can't because you'll write to their API's, you'll take care of that. >> You're saying that today with like Kubernetes deployments. They're not all the same, but they, everybody's got an offering in there and everyone has a full suite of API's that you can plug into. I do agree that things like data management not only can, but should be ubiquitous across localities. It shouldn't matter where you're at, the experience should be roughly the same. >> It's not that disruptive to say, okay rogue division, we're going to swap out and you're going to go standardize that. >> That's usually where the multi-cloud comes from. (chuckles) it's kind of involuntary. You got two teams, just chose different things. >> Right, right. >> While we got the brain trust on the key here, I want to pose another question for you that I mean, we're going to relive the video tape five years from now when we're going to see it, how it all turns out. (laughs) one of the things we've been kind of talking about here on The Cube, but also leading up to Vmworld this year is Cloud 2.0. Mainly around the following premise. Cloud 1.0 with being defined as AWS, DevOps, Agile, Lean Startup, all that stuff that was we all love in DevOps, compute, storage, scale, all the goodness that came from that. Cloud 2.0 is more of an enterprise cloud kind of configurations, so with that kind of, where networking and security and data are now kind of in the architecture. I want to ask you guys, if that's the premise of Cloud 1.0 was DevOps pure cloud native, born in the cloud, what's your definition of Cloud 2.0? Because a lot of people are looking at it from that simple lens, just trying to simplify that the requirements are changing, the architectures are different, the backup can work multi-cloud but this can't, so there's a lot of moving parts now in this enterprise hybrid world, so what's your definition guys on Cloud 2.0? >> I think increasingly you're seeing the landscape of the infrastructures you pointed out evolving the use of different services across clouds evolving. What's really important is that solutions like data protection don't limit your ability to capitalize on that in our minds, and so we want to build this ubiquitous sort of policy, engine and governance around how to protect my assets and enable whether it's containerized, application stacks that are being delivered or new private cloud deployments that we are not getting in the way of that in any way at all and allowing our customers to sort of broaden and leverage best in class services. >> Chris, what's your definition of Cloud 2.0? >> I'll take us back I mean, we saw this with virtualization. We saw everybody go, oh my gosh! I can get all this capacity used, and all these new services and just going bonkers, and that's where we had like zombie virtual machines and all these other terms that we don't really throw about anymore, but it was the Wild West. Everyone was just land and expand, and we kind of did that with cloud in a lot of cases. You're like, oh look at these new shiny's that I can play with, and now you're absolutely right. It's what about rollback status control and user security? My S3 bucket got hijacked. Ransomware is tearing through. You can now ransomware video cameras and things like that. It's a pretty terrifying world and I think this is that moment, where we take a look back and say, well is it highly available? Is it secure? How do I know that? How am I able to recover from availability or even external threat issues? To me, that's where most of the conversations we have are hard. >> Yeah it's the transformative opportunities is all intoxicating. Oh, this is great, but the reality is, it's not as clean as going to the cloud. >> Chris: Give me something that you know will work. >> I got to build the system out. It's an operating environment. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> Totally agree. You guys are doing great. Thanks for the commentary and insight on Cloud 2.0 and multi-cloud, >> Pleasure guys. and congratulation on your success at Rubrik. Thanks for coming on sharing the insight. It's Cube coverage here at Vmworld 2019. More after this short break. (light techno music)

>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> From Tavern On The Green, in Central Park, New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Hello everybody welcome back to the Tavern On The Green. We're here in the heart of Central Park in New York City you're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, big events, small events. We're here at the Veritas Solution Days, #VtasVision. Veritas Vision used to be a very large, big tent conference. They've changed the format now and they go out, they're going out to 20 cities this year belly to belly with the customers and we've got one here. Vishal Kadakia who is the data protection manager at NBC Universal. Vishal thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> No problem thank you for having me. >> So as I say we love to get the customer perspectives, but let me start with this event. Why, you're a busy person, you're managing a lot of data, why do you take time out to come to event like this? What do you learn? >> You always get to learn new stuff, new products that you don't necessarily get to learn, 'cause you're always just zoned into your day-to-day work that you're doing so you don't always get to see what the new features may be or you miss it. These type of events are generally good to come see that. >> So what's the day in the life like these days for data protection manager and really I'm interested in how it's changed over the last five or six years, as you see things like, the buzzwords, digital transformation, big data, cloud, multi cloud, all the vendor buzzwords, but you actually have to live that. So how has that changed the role of data protection and data protection managers specifically? >> It's definitely a lot more complicated. Before you were just backing up om prem, you had tape, pretty much made it simple. Now you have all these different workloads, you're sending out to clouds, multi tenant as they keep calling it, the hybrid, which is another buzzword. Trying to manage the different workloads is a lot more complex than it was five years ago. You have various cloud vendors, you have various storage vendors, so managing all of that, obviously the data growth from the smaller backups to now, big data which could be terabytes, petabytes, to try to back that up has been a bit of a challenge. >> But that's a challenge for someone like you who's, you know, RPO and RTO is not getting relaxed. >> Right. >> Right. And you know people always talk about getting my weekends back so, but now you have to keep up with all of these other technologies so what is it? Is it a lot of reading, is it just going to sessions like this, having vendors come in, how do you keep up with it all? >> I think it's a big mix of both. It's going out to these events, but also having vendors come to you. Doing your own research, so it's a combination of just constantly keeping up. So, I would say it's a combination of all. >> One of the things that I would be concerned about in your roll is to have just more stove pipes. Are you able to just conceptually, not technical, deep technical anyway, I love tech, but are you to create, let's call it a abstraction layer for your data protection. Is that kind of your vision or where you're headed, so that you don't have to have 10 different formats and methodologies and processes around data protection? >> Yeah, I think that's the goal that I think every company's trying to go to, is consolidate, simplify. Whether that's vendor, whether that's hardware. I think that's really the goal of any organization now. And that's kind of where we're headed also. >> So if it's a baseball game analogy, and you're nine inning game, where are you in terms of that journey? Is it early days, kind of first inning, are you kind of warmin' up in the bullpen, are you sort of well into the game? >> I think we're well into the game. We're probably into the middle innings I would say. >> Okay. So you can see sort of that vision becoming a reality. And what are the priorities then in terms of getting to that point? Is it skill sets, is it technology, is it people? >> I would say it's technology. I would say that consolidation is probably the big word. We're all trying to consolidate while trying back up the large data sets. And I think that's where we are right now. That's where we're starting to get to, and see the plan forming, seeing where our methodologies, our strategies on how we're going to go forward. >> As you move toward the cloud, Vishal, whether or not it's even pushing data to the cloud, a lot of times you just can't. But it seems like that cloud operating model is something that's alluring to folks. Simplifying, agility, self service, are those initiatives that you guys have enacted? >> In terms of that, yeah we're I think in that phase, I think we're in our beginning to form that plan, because once you get to a cloud, you have to really have a good plan. Otherwise, your data is going to be all over the place. You're not going to know where it is, and managing that's just going to become that much harder. So I think in terms of that, we're trying to really come out with a good plan of how you migrate to the cloud. 'Cause once you get to the cloud, there's a whole different set of complexities that you have in managing it. >> Like what? Maybe tick off a few, so we can paint a picture. >> So once you get to the cloud, migrating, so you've formulated your plan how to get to, what cloud to use, what vendor you're using. How do you migrate from your on prem to the cloud is I think one of the big complexities, which I think kind of stumps a lot of people. You know you want to go to the cloud, just don't know how to get there. >> Is that just because the volume of data and you got to move data and it just takes so long? I mean to back up your iPhone takes forever and it fails left and right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So okay. It's the amount of data and the time it takes? >> Right, and you also have legacy applications, which may not be cloud ready and how do you deal with that? So you have that hybrid model you still want to keep some stuff om prem but you want to go the cloud. What goes to the cloud, which cloud do you go to? All of that is where I think we're really at and I don't think it's any different than any other organization, so that's kind of where. >> And how about this notion of multi cloud? I mean is that something that is real in your business? >> Yeah, I think it definitely is. I think our end users are trying to take advantage of where to go best? Some places Azure might work best. Some places AWS might work. There's also Google now that's coming up, so I think you have to kind of consider where the workload would be best to go to. >> Is Shadow sort of IT and cloud creep problematic for you and in other words, you know, lines of businesses saying, it's easy, I can swipe a credit card and I'm up and running in minutes. And then, oh I got to protect this data, it's got to be compliant. Has that been a challenge for you, do you feel like you have that under control? >> No, that has definitely been a challenge area. Different groups that have kind of tried to do their own thing and then found out, oh wait, this is way harder than we thought. Let us go back to our central team. But by then it's kind of all over the place, right so that's definitely been interesting. >> Yeah it's hard, because thinking about that you probably might have done it differently. You might have put in processes and procedures in place and now you've got to clean up the mess so to speak. But okay, so I want to get into Veritas, and you're a Veritas customer? >> I am. >> So how does Veritas help you with all these solutions? I mean a lot of the things I've just asked you, I think are part of either their road map or they're making claims that they can currently help solve some of these problems. Can they, what do you do with Veritas, and how legitimate is their ability in terms of being able to solve some of these problems? >> So we've been able to use Veritas to kind of, as a central location, management of everything. One of their tools as such is CloudPoint. So our biggest thing is if you don't have a central management tool like CloudPoint, which can manage your various cloud backups, then you're left with managing each cloud on its own. So as an operations standpoint, that's like a nightmare. So having a tool such as CloudPoint, right, and then that getting integrated back into NetBackup, which now gives us a central location for all my backups, for reporting, for audit purposes, any of that has been great. And I've been using Veritas since 3.1 so I've been a Veritas customer for a long time. I've seen the evolution of when it was 3.1, a lot of it was manually operated, a lot of scripts, where now a lot of it is automated. So that's helped a lot. We're automating VM policies, we're automating SQL backup policies, all of that has been great. >> Where are you today in terms of these. >> I'm sorry? >> Where are you at today in terms of the release? >> We're, I know they just released eight one two, we're on eight one one. >> Okay so close to current. Yeah I've seen some videos on eight one two. It looks like they've really put a lot of time and effort in to refreshing it. It looks like a microservices architecture, they're talking about containers and certainly you know, saying all the right things. From your perspective have you dug into it yet or is it still early? >> It's still early. I did deploy it on a test environment. Haven't fully played around with it but some of the cool concepts obviously are, you're going away from that Java console eventually, getting to that web based, able to access it from anywhere, the manageability, like a central tool to manage all of that. That I think they're finally gearing towards that and. >> And you guys are a VMware shop? >> We are a VMware shop. >> So when we were at VM World last August, this past year, and even the year before. Data protection was one of the hottest topics, you know, on the show floor. Were you there, I don't know if you were there. >> I was not there. >> I mean it was really a lot of buzz there, sort of a lot of new entrance in that space, and would I imagine a lot of people coming after you for your business, because that's a very large install base. So when you look at the vendor landscape, how do you look at it? Where do you position Veritas, relative to some of the other upstarts? Your thoughts on the competitive landscape, why Veritas? >> Well, my point of view has always been, if it's not broke you don't fix it. There may be other that may be doing something better, but at the end of the day if it's not drastically different, it's a lot of work to move away from one product to another. They'll always come to you and say, hey, we do this better, we do this better. But then when you compare it, to me, Veritas is that all encompassing. It doesn't only do virtual, it does physical well also. It doesn't only do big data, it does all the traditional databases as well. They're always constantly evolving and adding new workloads that it can also be compatible with. >> Yeah so, I would imagine it would be a little difficult to go to your CFO and try to justify a huge migration project given the other priorities that you have. Give me some insight there. I mean what kinds of things do you want to focus on, I mean obviously nobody wants to migrate anything, it's like moving a house. >> Yeah. >> You really don't want to do it, I mean sometimes you get a bigger house or a nicer house or a smaller house, but it's, moving is always a pain. So you'd rather put your effort in your shop somewhere else. Where are you putting that effort? What are some of the priorities that you have either personally or professionally? >> I would say in this sense I think it's I don't want to work the weekends, right. So how do we automate? How do we make operations easier for everybody, the engineering, the solution, the operations. I want to make it simple. I think Veritas allows us to do that 'cause they're an open source, they work with many vendors which makes it nice. So you can, such as VMware, it works with vRealize. All those plugins with VMware and you can eventually just automate and make it simple. >> And kind of get rid of a lot of the scripts which tend to be fragile, they take a lot of maintenance, they tend to be error prone, so if you can through a set of APIs automate programmatically move towards sort of infrastructurous code or a DevOps environment. I'm sure you guys do that internally. And what a difference it makes, from the sort of classic waterfall in terms of speed, agility, quality. I presume that you're seeing that in your shop? >> Yeah, we definitely are and something like a flex appliance would allow us to move towards that. It simplifies, gets us to where we are, but also helps us with our goals of simplifying, reducing our footprint, but still being able to be agile enough to go to cloud, to keep a hybrid model. So something like that is I think where we're seeing. >> Well Vishal, we love the customer perspective, Thank you for coming on. We like to hear the truth, Vertias, truth in Latin, of course. And really appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. All right keep it right there everybody. We're here at Vtas Vision, #VtasVision, Veritas Vision Days in New York City, Central Park, Tavern on the Green, beautiful location. My name's Dave Vallante. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas for Vmworld 2018. It's theCUBE's three days of wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host this segment, Alan Cohen, who's an industry legend, retired now, doing a lot of boards, as our guest analyst here for this segment. Our next two guests-- >> Another word for unemployed. (all laugh) >> Bartender in Silicon Valley ??? On boards. Our next two guests, Bruce Shaw, Senior Director of Globalization Solutions, remaking what it means to partner in the cloud, and of course, Keith Norbie, theCUBE alumuni, Manager of bus dev, does the bus dev for NetApp. Guys, thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the time. >> Oh, thanks for having us. >> The first thing I want to get to is, give us an update on the relationship with NetApp and VMware. Obviously, Pat Gelsinger, spring in his step. Go back three years ago, his job was on the line. So much has happened, the relationship with Amazon, the clarity around the cloud, cloud operations, the role of infrastructure in that, with devops driving programmable infrastructure. Kind of the world's spinning in the NetApps front door right now. >> Yeah, we feel pretty good about it. Keith, he runs that relationship, so I'll let him lead the answer. >> I thought it was best said, and we can kind of unite together, VMware and NetApp on moving from data centers to centers of data. NetApp's been on this data visionary, and sort of the data authority track for a couple years now. You guys have known that; you've been to a net admin site. The relationship, really, is complementary from that perspective, and it goes back many years, more than a decade. If you look at our common base, VMware, of course, has 500,000 users in its install base. We've got a couple 100,000, so it's a gigantic opportunity together to move people exactly in the acts that Pat talked about in the keynote, act one through act four, and getting us all to multi cloud. When you look at the relationship, and the base of the ONTAP products that we have VMware and the architecture, all the way to cloud volumes, and then the latest architecture that we've just done with VMware for NetApp HCI, there's a lot to talk about. >> I've been covering NetApp since theCUBE, nine years, This is our ninth VMWorld, but I've been following the company since the late 90s when they went public. Always a culture of learning and adaptability, but to survive in the past 10 years, specifically, it's really been about adaptation, because if you look at that model, a lot of losers are dead, bankrupt, see companies come and go, but the ones that are customer-centric seem to win. Jassy on stage, very customer-centric. VMware, listening to their customers, got a great community. You guys have a very loyal customer base, both on the customer side, going back to the original products and the partners. >> Right. >> So Bruce, as you think about partnering in the cloud era, when you're now looking at all kinds of different relationships, whether it's in the staff from a technology standpoint, or go to market, or whatever the machination of the relationship is, you got to think differently, so I got to ask you the question. How do you partner? 'Cause it's not just about the profit anymore. What is value in this era? Take a minute to explain the vision. >> Yeah, and you hit it right in the head. The value question is no longer the primary driver of what you're going after. When I say value, just pure revenue stream. You want to look at, obviously, the evolution to an ecosystem, and we spent a lot of time with that on the internal side. Not that anybody cares about what we do under the covers. We restructured our business units from one single business unit into three, so we've got a cloud-focused CDS, which is cloud focuses on the hyperscalers, and our cloud volumes business. CIBU, which is our conversion, hyperconversion infrastrcutures, and then of course, the guys that handle ONTAP, and the big stuff on the back end that provides the building blocks to all of that. >> These are dedicated teams, right? >> Dedicated teams. Dedicated business units, and that gives us the potential of three pathways, in terms of which we partner, and my goal since I came in to run the group in January has been, how do we transition from a traditional alliances organization to evolve to one where we're much more focused on production of solutions, designing with our partners solutions that meet in the market. We're a very channel-focused company. We obviously, you look at the success that NetApp's had over the 10 years with Cisco and FlexPod, that's a meet in the market model, focused on validation to provide solutions for customers, for industry problems, and trying to replicate that through key strategic partners that hit the ecosystem to do it, and that's been a very effective approach for us, and we've spent a lot of time kind of recrafting the organization to match up both with our BUs, and then our delivery through what we call pathways, and that pathway begins from everything, from the channels to the GSIs. We have a new G100 account group, and then to our own sales force, of course. >> All right, so what's in it for me as the customer? I'm like, at the end of the day, it's like, okay, you're reorganized, sounds good. Focused teams, highly cohesive, good segmentation, dedicated teams. What's the impact for the customer? >> The impact for you guys, it's easier to implement, lower cost, quicker delivery, and the assurance that you actually have a validated architecture that's using best of ??? For what you want, as opposed to, I've bought a monolithic stack of something and I'm locked in, and maybe it's the a piece of this and the b of that. You can actually choose your Lego bricks to put together, and we'll stand behind it with the validation that this works. >> Maybe to just kind of pull a layer back on that. Obviously today, we have Andy Jassy on stage with VMware a year later. People were extremely cynical a year ago when that announcement went down. Here they are, they're throwing up their hands. Actually, today-- >> Capitulation was the term. >> Yeah, right, it's capitulation now, but if you are now partnering, and you're building alliances in the cloud era. Three or four years ago, people were saying, "The cloud, they're the enemy. "We can't do business with that." That's what they said, that their customers, their partnerships. How has that changed, and how do you think about partnerships with the cloud providers today? >> Three years ago, the smart people out there said the cloud is going to kill NetApp. >> Right. >> Right? We're an on-premise, standalone storage company. The cloud is the end. Well, fast forward to now, the cloud is our best friend. It's our biggest growing area. You look at the business we do with the hyperscalers under Anthony Lye, and that's the fastest-growing piece of the business we got. We've made it very easy, through ONTAP, to work in either a cloud only relationship, or a hybrid, where you're moving things from on-prem to off-prem and vice versa, and that's becoming main focus of our business, and from an alliances standpoint, of course, once you have it in our own key ingredient, then it's what are the partners that we partner with to bring them into that, to make it a more cohesive solution. >> And then ???Senator, if I might have a second question. >> Of course. >> If I am a customer, and on one side you have your alliance with VMware, and the other side I have my growing initiatives with AWS, or Google Cloud, it doesn't matter. Where does NetApp fit between those two environments? 'Cause you have alliances with both sides. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> What do I count on NetApp for, because I'm looking multi cloud, I'm looking at migration. How do I think about you in that-- >> To me, I think it's pretty clear. It's all of it needs data to run, just like software needs hardware to run on. Even though it's in cloud, it's rendered. It is all about the transition of being very hardware-defined to being software-defined, to being really function-defined, and once you start to modernize an architecture that way, or a general organization that's trying to deliver IT services, it's the delivery of those things the start to define where you have to take things that are both on-prem and in the cloud, so the entire thing around multi cloud sort of requires that you have strategies for things that are in current data centers that just have to become more cloud-like in their functions and their functionality. Delivering it as a service is not just the mantra, but it's the time to value, and it's the consumption style. As an example, as we're trying to do things on-prem with our NetApp HCI solution, doing embedded OEM with VMware isn't because we want to sell VMware licenses. It's because we want to make it as fast a possible, and as easy for our customer to be able to turn it on and start using it, similar to your experience buying a new iPhone. We want to have you be able to add software to it, like NSX, like vRealize, or a full VMware private cloud stack is something that will hopefully take minutes, rather than hours, weeks or months, because we want that time to value, that consumption experience to be the king, and that extends to data protection, that extends to security. We're not just a storage company. We're a data company that's really in the game for the full stack, and the advantage we have is that we're in all the hyperscalers, and I think we can help VMware there, ??? >> The piece I'd add, I think that's different than before, is most companies think about alliances is us plus them, and in the cloud environment, it's us plus plus plus plus plus to get a solution, and having a much different approach, where it's, okay, we're going to have to be multi-partnered in a cloud environment to go get this done, and that also requires a different alliance motion. >> Less tennis, more soccer. >> Yeah, exactly (John laughs). Great analogy. >> It's yours. >> Tell them the source was theCUBE. >> This show demonstrates how an ecosystem has really extracted the maximum value out of the partners, because there's a ton of this extension to the partner, the channel partner, the pathway partner, to really go and do, moreso than VMware having to do it all themselves, or NetApp having to do it all themselves. It is about that three-way partnership between the product, the solution, and the delivery partner itself, and what AWS even say to them, they said in the partner keynote yesterday that what they want out of the partners is capabilities, and isn't that awesome? We want competencies and capabilities to understand who can deliver these certain capabilities, security, networking, storage, app refactoring, you can go down the list. >> I want to ask you guys, while I've got you both here. I want to get your reaction to something Pat Gelsinger said. He said two things I want get your comments on. One was, he made a comment that said, "No one should ever have to pay for DR ever again CapEx," and two, he made a comment about how AI's 30 years old, and, "Hello, AI, good to see you. "Welcome to the introduction of AI, 30 years later." >> I think he said it's an overnight 30-year success. >> It's an overnight 30-year success, exactly. So one, never pay for DR CapEx, and then hello AI, so again, that kind of signals what's going on. You got the service model, and then you got AI. It's an enabler, and one is a changeover. Curious what are your thoughts on the reaction to those two comments. >> I think the DR statement, while bold, might not be the solution for everybody (John laughs). I think there's certain folks that would say, based on their requirements, they have to have a traditional DR regardless, whether it's compliance or whatever else, but certainly, you should look at how the cloud infrastructure is targeted. There's a lot of cost savings to be gleaned from that, and we are absolutely investing in how we take the services we offer and make them much more readily available as a consumption model, as you go, as you consume, as opposed to a traditional CapEx type purchase. >> So a little bit over the top, but kind of directionally correct, in your mind? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Never going to go away. It's kind of like storage, it never went away. >> Certainly, I think it will continue to decline and decline and decline, but also to declare it over, people still buy desktops, right? That was declared dead in '97. >> Dave and I were just talking about infrastructures were supposed to be dead 10 years ago. >> Pat's always said he's been a fan of NetApp, so I don't want to project words into his mouth, but I think he's been there for us, in a majority of the NetApp and VMware interactions at Vmworld. >> There's a picture of Pat wearing a NetApp jersey at a CUBE event. >> Yes, that was a big moment for us, obviously. >> So the AI piece too, any thoughts on that comment or the AI comment? >> I'll defer the AI to him, but I would just say that on the DR thing is that, we already have that in cloud volumes, and a lot of the data services we're doing in AWS and the public cloud, so I think we present a clear example of that. AI. >> AI, Pat's exactly right. Something that's been around forever, that's really getting a lot of air time right now, but he's precisely right. We see the growth of AI applications in usage is absolutely huge, and when you combine that with the types of instruments that are collecting data, what's wired today versus what wasn't two, three, five years ago, obviously, as a storage company, there's just an exponential amount of data growth that's being captured out there, based upon these AI type machines that are only getting faster and smarter, so for us, we're welcoming the the 30-year success. It's great that it's here to the party. As we look at that ecosystem, that's where we're heavily investing and expanding our partnerships and our routes to market, because we're all so focused on that. >> Maybe just to follow on that, so the traditional conversation people have about cloud is it's somebody else's data center. >> It's somebody else's, right. >> But now, the cloud discussion is about, we were just talking about AI, self-driving cars, edge clouds, so the nature of where all this data reside is becoming much more dynamic and much more distributed. >> That's the point, it's much more distributed. >> How does that fit in to where you guys are going? >> We think it's great. It fits perfectly with our business model of being able to move your data around in a multi cloud environment, and have it where you need it to be, whether it's on the edge, even further out, kind of the fog of the cloud, or all the way at the center where you want it to be, so we think it fits the model that we have, from data everywhere, the data fabric. That's really what we've been designing for years and pushing to. This is the realization of that strategy. In our minds, is that's what we're arriving at. >> Partner program, quick update as we wrap up. What's the update on any kind of tiering? Do you guys have a strategy? You've obviously got more partners engaged. Sounds like cloud gives more touch points. Give a quick overview of what's going on. >> Jeff McCullough's our channel chief. He has done a great job coming in, and absolutely driving that program more aggressively out in to the field in North America. We've got a bunch of stuff, but I don't want to steal his thunder coming up at Insight, >> (laughs) That's okay. >> Not sure what I can steal at the moment. We are aggressively investing in the channel program. We have been, and will continue to be a channel-driven company. Even myself as the alliances head, we look at always, and Keith mentioned it, that third piece of the three in the box is always who's the delivery partner, and how can we help them, and obviously, the underlying tenet of that always is, let's make it meaningful, and let's be honest, meaningful to a partner is, they make money, they have services that they can absolutely embrace and then deliver. >> What's next for the relationship with AWS, and what other top partners you have. You mentioned NVIDIA before we came on camera. What's next for VMware and some of your top name partners? >> We've got some big announcements coming up with VMware, if you want to tease one of them. >> The reality in the world is that, if you want to buy solutions from VMware, a VMware validated design is kind of the pathway to really getting the mark of validation, and so we're on that path as well. We're looking to get that down the road. We've got some early tracks to it. We announced the first leg of that at this show called the net verified architecture for VMware private cloud. That gives us the first proof points that we're running the entire stack on NetApp HCI. We're going to use this as a way, along with ONTAP over time to be able to have on-prem solutions, as well as cloud volumes. With futures, they showcased it yesterday, with some future previews of VMC with cloud volumes, so look for that to come in the future timeframe. >> ONTAP AI? >> ONTAP AI. >> Back to your AI question, we just announced a joint meet in the market solution with NVIDIA, a conversion architecture, where it's NetApp storage, NVIDIA's GTX CPU servers. We've got some switching in there from Cisco, and you've got a very solid conversion infrastructre that goes specifically and targets the AI market. >> And AI, they're a pretty strategic partner, you guys with NVIDIA. >> They are. >> They've been hot lately, I mean, talk about AI. >> There's a lot of guys smiling in that booth over there. (Bruce and John laugh) They look pretty happy. >> They can't make enough GPUs for all those block chain miners. >> I think the key factor for the new alliance model is that the context shifts depending upon the market you're trying to reach, so if it's the AI market, typically NVIDIA's going to lead that conversation. If you flip it to the EUC market, and you look at GPU acceleration for BDI, they're an ecosystem to VMware driving the Horizon package, so it's a very interesting context that you have to be very savvy on to understand how the technologies fit together in a way that solution partners already today are putting them together for customers, and that AWS and all the hyperscalers know natively. >> You guys get a lot of good props. Congratulations on your success. Notable hallway conversations, certainly here and out in the field, I've talked with customers. You guys are good. With the solid state drives, and the software investment you made, it's paying off, so congratulations. >> Flash has been huge for us. >> Good luck with the new reorganization. Bruce, Keith, good too see you. >> It's great to see a solid player of come through the ACI. >> We're here on theCUBE. We'll be right back. Stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Alan Cohen. We'll be right back; stay with us.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.