>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of VM wear Explorer, 2022 formerly VM world. The Cube's 12th year covering the annual conference. I'm Jennifer Daveon. We got Jason Bloomberg here. Who's a Silicon angle contributor guest author, president of inte analyst firm. Great to see you, Jason. Thanks for coming on the queue. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks a lot. >>And thanks for contributing to Silicon angle. We really appreciate your articles and, and so does the audience, so thanks for that. >>Very good. We're happy >>To help. All right. So I gotta ask you, okay. We've been here on the desk. We haven't had a chance to really scour the landscape here at Moscone. What's going, what's your take on what's going on with VMware Explorer, not world. Yeah. Gotta see the name change. You got the overhang of the, the cloud Broadcom, which from us, it seems like it's energized people like, like shocked to the system something's gonna happen. What's your take. >>Yeah, something's definitely going to happen. Well, I've been struggling with VMware's messaging, you know, how they're messaging to the market. They seem to be downplaying cloud native computing in favor of multi-cloud, which is really quite different from the Tansu centric messaging from a year or two ago. So Tansu is still obviously part of the story, but it's really, they're relegating the cloud native story to an architectural pattern, which it is, but I believe it's much more than that. It's really more of a paradigm shift in how organizations implement it. Broadly speaking, where virtualization is part of the cloud native story, but VMware is making cloud native part of the virtualization story. Do so >>Do you think that's the, the mischaracterization of cloud native or a bad strategy or both? >>Well, I think they're missing an opportunity, right? I think they're missing an opportunity to be a cloud native leader. They're well positioned to do that with Tansu and where the technology was going and the technology is still there. Right? It's not that that >>They're just downplaying it. >>They're just downplaying it. Right. So >>As, as they were security too, they didn't really pump up security at >>All. Yeah. And you know, vSphere is still gonna be based on Kubernetes. So it's, they're going to be cloud native in terms of Kubernetes support across their product line. Anyway. So, but they're, they're really focusing on multi-cloud and betting the farm on multi-cloud and that ties to the change of the name of the conference. Although it's hard to see really how they're connecting the dots. Right. >>It's a bridge you can't cross, you can't see that bridge crossing what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was a clever way of saying, oh, we're exploring new frontiers, which is kinda like, we don't really know what it is >>Yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the term Explorer was probably concocted by a committee where, you know, they eliminated all the more interesting names and that was the one that was left. But, you know, Raghu explained that that Explorer is supposed to expand the audience for the conference beyond the VMware customer to this broader multi-cloud audience. But it's hard to say whether you >>Think it worked. Was there people that you recognize here or identified as a new audience? >>I don't think so. Not, not at this show, but over time, they're hoping to have this broader audience now where it's a multi-cloud audience where it's more than just VMware. It's more than just individual clouds, you know, we'll see if that works. >>You heard the cl the cloud chaos. Right. Do you, do you think they're, multi-cloud cross cloud services is a solution looking for a problem or is the problem real? Is there a market there? >>Oh, oh, the cloud chaos. That's a real problem. Right? Multi-cloud is, is a reality. Many organizations are leveraging different clouds for different reasons. And as a result, you have management security, other issues, which lead to this chaos challenge. So the, the problem is real aria. If they can get it up and running and, you know, straightened out, it's gonna be a great solution, but there are other products on the market that are more mature and more well integrated than aria. So they're going to, you know, have to compete, but VMware is very good at that. So, you know, I don't, I don't count the outing. Who >>Do you see as the competition lay out the horses on the track from your perspective? >>Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of different companies. I, I don't wanna mention any particular ones cuz, cuz I don't want to, you know, favor certain ones over others cuz then I get into trouble. But there's a, a lot of companies that >>Okay, I will. So you got a red hat with, you got obvious ones, Cisco, Cisco, I guess is Ashi Corp plays a role? Well, >>Cisco's been talking about this, >>Anybody we missed. >>Well, there's a number of smaller players, including some of the exhibitors at the, at the show that are putting together this, you know, I guess cloud native control plane that covers more than just a single cloud or cover on premises of virtualization as well as multiple clouds. And that's sort of the big challenge, right? This control plane. How do we come up with a way of managing all of this, heterogeneous it in a unified way that meets the business need and allows the technology organization, both it and the application development folks to move quickly and to do what they need to do to meet business needs. Right? So difficult for large organizations to get out of their own way and achieve that, you know, level of speed and scalability that, that, that technology promises. But they're organizationally challenged to, >>To accomplish. I think I've always looked at multi-cloud as a reality. I do see that as a situational analysis on the landscape. Yeah, I got Azure because I got Microsoft in my enterprise and they converted everything to the cloud. And so I didn't really change that. I got Amazon cause that's from almost my action is, and I gotta use Google cloud for some AI stuff. Right. All good. Right. I mean that's not really spanning anything. There's no ring. It's not really, it's like point solutions within the ecosystem, but it's interesting to see how people are globbing onto multi-cloud because to me it feels like a broken strategy trying to get straightened out. Right. Like, you know, multi-cloud groping from multi-cloud it feels that way. And, and that makes a lot of sense cuz if you're not on the right side of this historic shift right now, you're gonna be dead. >>So which side of the street do you wanna be on? I think it's becoming clear. I think the good news is this year. It's like, if you're on this side of the street, you're gonna be, be alive. Yeah. And this side of the street, not so much. So, you know, that's cloud native obviously hybrid steady state mul how multi-cloud shakes out. I don't think the market's ready personally in terms of true multi-cloud I think it's, it's an opportunity to have the conversation. That's why we're having the super cloud narrative. Cause it's a lit more attention getting, but it focuses on, it has to do something specific. Right? It can't be vaporware. The market won't tolerate vaporware and the new cloud architecture, at least that's my opinion. What's your reaction? Yeah. >>Well the, well you're quite right that a lot of the multiple cloud scenarios involve, you know, picking and choosing the various capabilities each of the cloud provider pro offers. Right? So you want TensorFlow, you have a little bit of Google and you want Amazon for something, but then Amazon's too expensive for something else. So you go with a Azure for that or you have Microsoft 365 as well as Amazon. Right? So you're, that's sort of a multi-cloud right there. But I think the more strategic question is organizations who are combining clouds for more architectural reasons. So for example, you know, back backup or failover or data sovereignty issues, right, where you, you can go into a single cloud and say, well, I want, you know, different data and different regions, but they may a, a particular cloud might not have all the answers for you. So you may say, okay, well I want, I may one of the big clouds or there's specialty cloud providers that focus on data sovereignty solutions for particular markets. And, and that might be part of the mix, right? Isn't necessarily all the big clouds. >>I think that's an interesting observation. Cause when you look at, you know, hybrid, right. When you really dig into a lot of the hybrid was Dr. Right? Yeah. Well, we got, we're gonna use the cloud for backup. And that, and that, what you're saying is multi-cloud could be sort of a similar dynamic, >>The low-head fruit, >>Which is fine, which is not that interesting. >>It's the low hanging fruit though. It's the easy, it's that risk free? I won't say risk free, but it's the easiest way not to get killed, >>But there's a translate into just sort of more interesting and lucrative and monetizable opportunities. You know, it's kind of a big leap to go from Dr. To actually building new applications that cross clouds and delivering new monetization value on top of data and you know, this nerve. >>Yeah. Whether that would be the best way to build such applications, the jury's still out. Why would you actually want to do well? >>I was gonna ask you, is there an advantage? We talked to Mariana, Tess, who's, you know, she's CTO of into it now of course, into it's a, you know, different kind of application, but she's like, yeah, we kinda looked hard at that multiple cloud thing. We found it too complex. And so we just picked one cloud, you know, in, for kind of the same thing. So, you know, is there an advantage now, the one advantage John, you pointed this out is if I run on Microsoft, I'll make more money. If I run on Amazon and you know, they'll, they'll help me sell. So, so that's a business justification, but is there a technical reason to do it? You know, global presence, there >>Could be technical reason not to do it either too. So >>There's more because of complexity. >>You mean? Well, and or technical debt on some services might not be there at this point. I mean the puzzle pieces gotta be there, assume that all clouds have have the pieces. Right. Then it's a matter of composability. I think E AJ who came on AJ Patel who runs modern applications development would agree with your assessment of cloud native being probably the driving front car on this messaging, because that's the issue like once you have the, everything there, then you're composing, it's the orchestra model, Dave. It's like, okay, we got everything here. How do I stitch it together? Not so much coding, writing code, cuz you got everything in building blocks and patterns and, and recipes. >>Yeah. And that's really what VMware has in mind when they talk about multi-cloud right? From VMware's perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud. So if you, if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have, you know, this common, familiar environment, right. It's VMware everywhere. Doesn't really matter which cloud it's in because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff. And so now you have, you know, the workload portability across clouds, which can give you added benefits. But one of the straw men of this argument is that price arbitrage, right. I'm gonna, you know, put workloads in Amazon if it's cheaper. But if then if Amazon, you know, Azure has a different pricing structure for something I'm doing, then maybe I'll, I'll move a workload over there to get better pricing. That's difficult to implement in practice. Right. That's so that's that while people like to talk about that, yeah. I'm gonna optimize my cost by moving workloads across clouds, the practicalities at this point, make it difficult. Yeah. But with, if you have VMware, any your clouds, it may be more straightforward, but you still might not do it in order to save money on a particular cloud bill. >>It still, people don't want data. They really, really don't want to move >>Data. This audience does not want do it. I mean, if you look at the evolution, this customer base, even their, their affinity towards cloud native that's years in the making just to good put it perspective. Yeah. So I like how VMware's reality is on crawl, walk, run their clients, no matter what they want 'em to do, you can't make 'em run. And when they're still in diapers right. Or instill in the crib. Right. So you gotta get the customers in a mode of saying, I can see how VMware could operate that. I know and know how to run in an environment because the people who come through this show, they're like teams, it's like an offsite meeting, meets a conference and it's institutionalized for 15 plus years of main enterprise workload management. So I like, that's just not going away. So okay. Given that, how do you connect to the next thing? >>Well, I think the, the missing piece of the puzzle is, is the edge, right? Because it's not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even to on-premises or a private cloud, it's also the edge, the edge computing and the edge computing data center requirements. Right. Because you have, you could have an edge data center in a, a phone tower or a point of presence, a telco point of presence, which are those nondescript buildings, every town has. Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, we have that >>Little colo that no one knows about, >>Right, exactly. That, you know, used to be your DSL end point. And now it's just a mini data center for the cloud, or it could be the, you know, the factory computer room or computer room in a retailer. You know, every retailer has that computer room in the modern retails target home Depot. They will have thousands of these little mini cloud data centers they're handling their, their point of sale systems, their, you know, local wifi and all these other local systems. That's, that's where the interesting part of this cloud story is going because that is inherently heterogeneous inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements and how you're going to build applications to support that, including AI based applications, which are sort of the, one of the areas of major innovation today is how are we going to do AI on the edge and why would we do it? And there's huge, huge opportunity to >>Well, real time referencing at the edge. Exactly. Absolutely. With all the data. My, my question is, is, is, is the cloud gonna be part of that? Or is the edge gonna actually bring new architectures and new economics that completely disrupt the, the economics that we've known in the cloud and in the data center? >>Well, this for hardware matters. If form factor matters, you can put a data center, the size of four, you know, four U boxes and then you're done >>Nice. I, >>I think it's a semantic question. It's something for the marketers to come up with the right jargon for is yeah. Is the edge part of the cloud, is the cloud part of the edge? Are we gonna come up with a new term, super cloud HyperCloud? >>Yeah. >>Wonder woman cloud, who knows? Yeah. But what, what >>Covers everything, but what might not be semantic is the, I, I come back to the Silicon that inside the, you know, apple max, the M one M two M two ultras, the, what Tesla's doing with NPUs, what you're seeing, you know, in, in, in arm based innovations could completely change the economics of computing, the security model. >>As we say, with the AJ >>Power consumption, >>Cloud's the hardware middleware. And then you got the application is the business everything's completely technology. The business is the app. I >>Mean we're 15 years into the cloud. You know, it's like every 15 years something gets blown up. >>We have two minutes left Jason. So I want to get into what you're working on for when your firm, you had a great, great traction, great practice over there. But before that, what's the, what's your scorecard on the event? How would you, what, what would be your constructive analysis? Positive, good, bad, ugly for VMwares team around this event. What'd they get right? What'd they need to work on >>Well as a smaller event, right? So about one third, the size of previous worlds. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a reasonably well run event for a smaller event. I, you know, in terms of the logistics and everything everything's handled well, I think their market messaging, they need to sort of revisit, but in terms of the ecosystem, you know, I think the ecosystem is, is, is, is doing well. You know, met with a number of the exhibitors over the last few days. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of positive things going on there. >>They see a wave coming and that's cloud native in your mind. >>Well, some of them are talking about cloud native. Some of them aren't, it's a variety of different >>Potentially you're talking where they are in this dag are on the hardware. Okay, cool. What's going on with your research? Tell us what you're focused on right now. What are you digging into? What's going on? Well, >>Cloud native, obviously a big part of what we do, but cybersecurity as well, mainframe modernization, believe it or not. It's a hot topic. DevOps continues to be a hot topic. So a variety of different things. And I'll be writing an article for Silicon angle on this conference. So highlights from the show. Great. Focusing on not just the VMware story, but some of the hot spots among the exhibitors. >>And what's your take on the whole crypto defi world. That's emerging. >>It's all a scam hundred >>Percent. All right. We're now back to enterprise. >>Wait a minute. Hold on. >>We're out of time. >>Gotta go. >>We'll make that a virtual, there are >>A lot of scams. >>I'll admit that you gotta, it's a lot of cool stuff. You gotta get through the underbelly that grows the old bolt. >>You hear kit earlier. He's like, yeah. Well, forget about crypto. Let's talk blockchain, but I'm like, no, let's talk crypto. >>Yeah. All good stuff, Jason. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for spending time. I know you've been busy in meetings and thanks for coming back. Yeah. Happy to help. All right. We're wrapping up day two. I'm Jeff David ante cube coverage. Two sets three days live coverage, 12th year covering VMware's user conference called explore now was formerly VM world onto the next level. That's what it's all about. Just the cube signing off for day two. Thanks for watching.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin, back here with you with Dave Nicholson, we have a couple of guests from VMware. Joining us, please. Welcome Jay Workman, senior director, cloud partner, and alliances marketing, and Jeff Thompson, VP cloud provider sales at VMware guys. It's great to have you on the program. >>Ah, good to be here. Thanks for having us on. >>We're gonna be talking about a really interesting topic. Sovereign cloud. What is sovereign cloud? Jeff? Why is it important, but fundamentally, what is >>It? Yeah, well, we were just talking a second ago. Aren't we? And it's not about royalty. So yeah, data sovereignty is really becoming super important. It's about the regulation and control of data. So lots of countries now are being very careful and advising companies around where to place data and the jurisdictional controls mandate that personal data or otherwise has to be secured. We ask, we have to have access controls around it and privacy controls around it. So data sovereign clouds are clouds that have been built by our cloud providers in, in, in VMware that specifically satisfy the requirements of those jurisdictions and regulated industries. So we've built a, a little program around that. We launched it about a year ago and continuing to add cloud providers to that. >>Yeah, and I, I think it's also important just to build on what Jeff said is, is who can access that data is becoming increasingly important data is, is almost in it's. It is becoming a bit of a currency. There's a lot of value in data and securing that data is, is becoming over the years increasingly important. So it's, it's not like we built a problem or we created a solution for problem that didn't exist. It's gotten it's, it's been a problem for a while. It's getting exponentially bigger data is expanding and growing exponentially, and it's becoming increasingly important for organizations and companies to realize where my data sits, who can access it, what types of data needs to go and what type of clouds. And it's very, very aligned with multi-cloud because some data can sit in a, in a public cloud, which is fine, but some data needs to be secure. It needs to be resident within country. And so this is, this is what we're addressing through our partners. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I was just gonna add to that. I think there's a classification there there's data residency, and then there's data sovereignty. So residency is just about where is the data, which country is it in sovereignty is around who can access that data. And that's the critical aspect of, of data sovereignty who's got control and access to that data. And how do we make sure that all the controls are in place to make sure that only the right people can get access to that data? Yeah. >>So let's, let's sort of build from the ground up an example, and let's use Western Europe as an example, just because state to state in the United States, although California is about to adopt European standards for privacy in a, in a unique, in a unique, unique way, pick a country in, in Europe, I'm a service provider. I have an offering and that offering includes a stack of hardware and I'm running what we frequently refer to as the STDC or software defined data center stack. So I've got NEX and I've got vs N and I've got vSphere and I'm running and I have a cloud and you have all of the operational tools around that, and you can spin up VMs and render under applications there. And here we are within the borders of this country, what makes it a sovereign cloud at that? So at that point, is that a sovereign cloud or? >>No, not yet. Not it's close. I mean, you nailed, >>What's >>A secret sauce. You nailed the technology underpinning. So we've got 4,500 plus cloud provider partners around the world. Less than 10% of those partners are running the full STDC stack, which we've branded as VMware cloud verified. So the technology underpinning from our perspective is the starting point. Okay. For sovereignty. So they, they, they need that right. Technology. Okay. >>Verified is required for sovereign. Yes. >>Okay. Cloud verified is the required technology stack for sovereign. So they've got vSphere vs. A NSX in there. Okay. A lot of these partners are also offering a multitenant cloud with VMware cloud director on top of that, which is great. That's the starting point. But then we've, we've set a list of standards above and beyond that, in addition to the technology, they've gotta meet certain jurisdiction requirements, certain local compliance requirements and certifications. They've gotta be able to address the data re data residency requirements of their particular jurisdiction. So it's going above and beyond. But to your point, it does vary by country. >>Okay. So, so in this hypothetical example, this is this country. You a stand, I love it. When people talk about Stan, people talk about EMIA and you know, I, I love AMEA food. Isn't AIAN food. One. There's no such thing as a European until you have an Italian, a Britain, a German yep. In Florida arguing about how our beer and our coffee is terrible. Right. Right. Then they're all European. They go home and they don't like each other. Yeah. So, but let's just pretend that there's a thing called Europe. So this, so there's this, so we've got a border, we know residency, right. Because it physically is here. Yep. But what are the things in terms of sovereignty? So you're talking about a lot of kind of certification and validation, making sure that, that everything maps to those existing rules. So is, this is, this is a lot of this administrative and I mean, administrative in the, in the sort of state administrative terminology, >>I I'm let's build on your example. Yeah. So we were talking about food and obviously we know the best food in the world comes from England. >>Of course it does. Yeah. I, no doubt. I agree. I Don not get that. I do. I do do agree. Yeah. >>So UK cloud, fantastic partner for us. Okay. Whether they're one of our first sovereign cloud providers in the program. So UK cloud, they satisfied the requirements with the local UK government. They built out their cloud verified. They built out a stack specifically that enables them to satisfy the requirements of being a sovereign cloud provider. They have local data centers inside the UK. The data from the local government is placed into those data centers. And it's managed by UK people on UK soil so that they know the privacy, they know the security aspects, the compliance, all of that wrapped up on top of a secure SDDC platform. Okay. Satisfies the requirements of the UK government, that they are managing that data in a sovereign way that, that, that aligns to the jurisdictional control that they expect from a company like UK cloud. Well, >>I think to build on that, a UK cloud is an example of certain employees at UK, UK cloud will have certain levels of clearance from the UK government who can access and work on certain databases that are stored within UK cloud. So they're, they're addressing it from multiple fronts, not just with their hardware, software data center framework, but actually at the individual compliance level and individual security clearance level as to who can go in and work on that data. And it's not just a governmental, it's not a public sector thing. I mean, any highly regulated industry, healthcare, financial services, they're all gonna need this type of data protection and data sovereignty. >>Can this work in a hyperscaler? So you've got you, have, you have VMC AVS, right? GC V C >>O >>CVAs O CVS. Thank you. Can it be, can, can a sovereign cloud be created on top of physical infrastructure that is in one of those hyperscalers, >>From our perspective, it's not truly sovereign. If, if it's a United States based company operating in Germany, operating in the UK and a local customer or organization in Germany, or the UK wants to deploy workloads in that cloud, we wouldn't classify that as totally sovereign. Okay. Because by virtue of the cloud act in the United States, that gives the us government rights to request or potentially view some of that data. Yeah. Because it's, it's coming out of a us based operator data center sitting on foreign soil so that the us government has some overreach into that. And some of that data may actually be stored. Some of the metadata may reside back in the us and the customer may not know. So certain workloads would be ideally suited for that. But for something that needs to be truly sovereign and local data residency, that it wouldn't be a good fit. I think that >>Perspectives key thing, going back to residency versus sovereignty. Yeah. It can be, let's go to our UK example. It can be on a hyperscaler in the UK now it's resident in the UK, but some of the metadata, the profiling information could be accessible by the entity in the United States. For example, there now it's not sovereign anymore. So that's the key difference between a, what we view as a pro you know, a pure sovereign cloud play and then maybe a hyperscaler that's got more residency than sovereignty. >>Yeah. We talk a lot about partnerships. This seems to be a unique opportunity for a certain segment of partners yeah. To give that really is an opportunity for them to have a line of business established. That's unique from some of the hyperscale cloud providers. Yeah. Where, where sort of the, the modesty of your size might be an advantage if you're in a local. Yes. You're in Italy and you are a service provider. There sounds like a great fit, >>That's it? Yeah. You've always had the, the beauty of our program. We have 4,500 cloud providers and obviously not, all of them are able to provide a data, a sovereign cloud. We have 20 in the program today in, in the country. You you'd expect them to be in, you know, the UK, Italy, Italy, France, Germany, over in Asia Pacific. We have in Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and, and we have Canada and Latin America to, to dovetail, you know, the United States. But those are the people that have had these long term relationships with the local governments, with these regulated industries and providing those services for many, many years. It's just that now data sovereignty has become more important. And they're able to go that extra mile and say, Hey, we've been doing this pretty much, you know, for decades, but now we're gonna put a wrap and some branding around it and do these extra checks because we absolutely know that we can provide the sovereignty that's required. >>And that's been one of the beautiful things about the entire initiative is we're actually, we're learning a lot from our partners in these countries to Jeff's point have been doing this. They've been long time, VMware partners they've been doing sovereignty. And so collectively together, we're able to really establish a pretty robust framework from, from our perspective, what does data sovereignty mean? Why does it matter? And then that's gonna help us work with the customers, help them decide which workloads need to go and which type of cloud. And it dovetails very, very nicely into a multi-cloud that's a reality. So some of those workloads can sit in the public sector and the hyperscalers and some of 'em need to be sovereign. Yeah. So it's, it's a great solution for our customers >>When you're in customer conversations, especially as, you know, data sovereign to be is becomes a global problem. Where, who are you talking to? Are you talking to CIOs? Are you talking to chief data officers? I imagine this is a pretty senior level conversation. >>Yeah. I it's, I think it's all of the above. Really. It depends. Who's managing the data. What type of customer is it? What vertical market are they in? What compliance regulations are they are they beholden to as a, as an enterprise, depending on which country they're in and do they have a need for a public cloud, they may already be all localized, you know? So it really depends, but it, it could be any of those. It's generally I think a fair, fairly senior level conversation. And it's, it's, it's, it's consultancy, it's us understanding what their needs are working with our partners and figuring out what's the best solution for them. >>And I think going back to, they've probably having those conversations for a long time already. Yeah. Because they probably have had workloads in there for years, maybe even decades. It's just that now sovereignty has become, you know, a more popular, you know, requirements to satisfy. And so they've gone going back to, they've gone the extra mile with those as the trusted advisor with those people. They've all been working with for many, many years to do that work. >>And what sort of any examples you mentioned some of the highly regulated industries, healthcare, financial services, any customer come to mind that you think really articulates the value of what VMware's delivering through its service through its cloud provider program. That makes the obvious why VMware an obvious answer? >>Wow. I, I, I get there's, there's so many it's, it's actually, it's each of our different cloud providers. They bring their win wise to us. And we just have, we have a great library now of assets that are on our sovereign cloud website of those win wires. So it's many industries, many, many countries. So you can really pick, pick your, your choice. There. That's >>A good problem >>To have, >>To the example of UK cloud they're, they're really focused on the UK government. So some of them aren't gonna be referenced. Well, we may have indication of a major financial services company in Australia has deployed with AU cloud, one of our partners. So we we've also got some semi blind references like that. And, and to some degree, a lot of these are maintained as fairly private wins and whatnot for obvious security reasons, but, and we're building it and building that library up, >>You mentioned the number 4,500, a couple of times, you, you referencing VMware cloud provider partners or correct program partners. So VCP P yes. So 45, 4500 is the, kind of, is the, is the number, you know, >>That's the number >>Globally of our okay. >>Partners that are offering a commercial cloud service based at a minimum with vSphere and they're. And many of 'em have many more of our technologies. And we've got little under 10% of those that have the cloud verified designation that are running that full STDC, stack >>Somebody, somebody Talli up, all of that. And the argument has been made that, that rep that, that would mean that VMware cloud. And although some of it's on IAS from hyperscale cloud providers. Sure. But that, that rep, that means that VMware has the third or fourth largest cloud on the planet already right now. >>Right. Yep. >>Which is kind of interesting because yeah. If you go back to when, what 2016 or so when VMC was at least baned about yeah. Is that right? A lot of people were skeptical. I was skeptical very long history with VMware at the time. And I was skeptical. I I'm thinking, nah, it's not gonna work. Yeah. This is desperation. Sorry, pat. I love you. But it's desperation. Right. AWS, their attitude is in this transaction. Sure. Send us some customers we'll them. Yeah. Right. I very, very cynical about it. Completely proved me wrong. Obviously. Where did it go? Went from AWS to Azure to right. Yeah. To GCP, to Oracle, >>Oracle, Alibaba, >>Alibaba. Yep. Globally. >>We've got IBM. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. So along the way, it would be easy to look at that trajectory and say, okay, wow, hyperscale cloud. Yeah. Everything's consolidating great. There's gonna be five or six or 10 of these players. And that's it. And everybody else is out in the cold. Yeah. But it turns out that long tail, if you look at the chart of who the largest VCP P partners are, that long tail of the smaller ones seem to be carving out specialized yes. Niches where you can imagine now, at some point in the future, you sum up this long tail and it becomes larger than maybe one of the hyperscale cloud providers. Right. I don't think a lot of people predicted that. I think, I think people predicted the demise of VMware and frankly, a lot of people in the VMware ecosystem, just like they predicted the demise of the mainframe. Sure. The storage area network fill in the blank. I >>Mean, Jeff and I we've oh yeah. We've been on the, Jeff's been a little longer than I have, but we've been working together for 10 plus years on this. And we've, we've heard that many times. Yeah. Yeah. Our, our ecosystem has grown over the years. We've seen some consolidation, some M and a activity, but we're, we're not even actively recruiting partners and it's growing, we're focused on helping our partners gain more, share internally, gain, more share at wallet, but we're still getting organic growth in the program. Really. So it, it shows, I think that there is value in what we can offer them as a platform to build a cloud on. >>Yeah. What's been interesting is there's there's growth and there's some transition as well. Right? So there's been traditional cloud providers. Who've built a cloud in their data center, some sovereign, some not. And then there's other partners that are adopting VCP P because of our SA. So we've either converted some technology from product into SA or we've built net new SA or we've acquired companies that have been SA only. And now we have a bigger portfolio that service providers, cloud providers, managed service providers are all interested in. So you get resellers channel partners. Who've historically been doing ELAs and reselling to end customers. They're transitioning their business into doing recurring revenue and the only game in town where you really wanna do recurring revenues, VCP P. So our ecosystem is both growing because our cloud providers with their data center are doing more with our customers. And then we're adding more managed service providers because of our SA portfolio. And that, that, that combo, that one, two punch is creating a much bigger VCP P ecosystem overall. >>Yeah. >>Impressive. >>Do you think we have a better idea of what sovereign cloud means? Yes. I think we do. >>It's not Royal. >>It's all about royalty, >>All royalty. What are some of the things Jeff, as we look on the horizon, obviously seven to 10,000 people here at, at VMwares where people really excited to be back. They want to hear it from VMware. They wanna hear from its partner ecosystem, the community. What are some of the things that you think are on the horizon where sovereign cloud is concerned that are really opportunities yeah. For businesses to get it right. >>Yeah. We're in the early days of this, I think there's still a whole bunch of rules, regulatory laws that have not been defined yet. So I think there's gonna be some more learning. There's gonna be some top down guidance like Gaia X in Europe. That's the way that they're defining who gets access and control over what data and what's in. And what's out of that. So we're gonna get more of these Gaia X type things happening around the world, and they're all gonna be slightly different. Everyone's gonna have to understand what they are, how to interpret and then build something around them. So we need to stay on top of that, myself and Jay, to make sure that we've got the right cloud providers in the right space to capitalize on that, build out the sovereign cloud program over time and make sure that what they're building to support aligns with these different requirements that are out there across different countries. So it's an evolving landscape. That's >>Yeah. And one of the things too, we're also doing from a product perspective to better enable partners to, to address these sovereign cloud workloads is where we have, we have gaps maybe in our portfolio is we're partner partnering with some of our ISVs, like a, Konic like a Forex vem. So we can give our partners object storage or ransomware protection to add on to their sovereign cloud service, all accessible through our cloud director consult. So we're, we're enhancing the program that way. And to Jeff's point earlier, we've got 20 partners today. We're hoping to double that by the end of our fiscal year and, and just take a very methodical approach to growth of the program. >>Sounds great guys, early innings though. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what software and cloud is describing it to us, and also talking about the difference between that data residency and all the, all of the challenges and the, in the landscape that customers are facing. They can go turn to VMware and its ecosystem for that help. We appreciate your insights and your time. Guys. Thank >>You >>For >>Having us. Our >>Pleasure. Appreciate it >>For our guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cube. This is the end of day, two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We're excited to kick off day two of great conversations with VMware partners, customers it's ecosystem. We've got a V an alumni back with us Kumer on Siva corporate VP of business development from AMD joins us. Great to have you on the program in person. Great >>To be here. Yes. In person. Indeed. Welcome. >>So the great thing yesterday, a lot of announcements and B had an announcement with VMware, which we will unpack that, but there's about 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are excited, ready to be back, ready to be hearing from this community, which is so nice. Yesterday am B announced. It is optimizing AMD PON distributed services card to run on VMware. Bsphere eight B for eight was announced yesterday. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, >>No, absolutely. The Ben Sando smart neck DPU. What it allows you to do is it, it provides a whole bunch of capabilities, including offloads, including encryption DEC description. We can even do functions like compression, but with, with the combination of VMware project Monterey and, and Ben Sando, we we're able to do is even do some of the vSphere, actual offloads integration of the hypervisor into the DPU card. It's, it's pretty interesting and pretty powerful technology. We're we're pretty excited about it. I think this, this, this could, you know, potentially, you know, bring some of the cloud value into, in terms of manageability, in terms of being able to take care of bare metal servers and also, you know, better secure infrastructure, you know, cloudlike techniques into the, into the mainstream on-premises enterprise. >>Okay. Talk a little bit about the DPU data processing unit. They talked about it on stage yesterday, but help me understand that versus the CPU GPU. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's a different, it's a different point, right? So normally you'd, you'd have the CPU you'd have we call it dumb networking card. Right. And I say dumb, but it's, it's, you know, it's just designed to go process packets, you know, put and put them onto PCI and have the, the CPU do all of the, kind of the, the packet processing, the, the virtual switching, all of those functions inside the CPU. What the DPU allows you to do is, is actually offload a bunch of those functions directly onto the, onto the deep view card. So it has a combination of these special purpose processors that are programmable with the language called P four, which is one, one of the key things that pan Sando brings. Here's a, it's a, it's a real easy to program, easy to use, you know, kind of set so that not some of, some of our larger enterprise customers can actually go in and, you know, do some custom coding depending on what their network infrastructure looks like. But you can do things like the V switch in, in the, in the DPU, not having to all have that done on the CPU. So you freeze up some of the CPU course, make sure, make sure infrastructure run more efficiently, but probably even more importantly, it provides you with more, with greater security, greater separation between the, between the networking side and the, the CPU side. >>So, so that's, that's a key point because a lot of us remember the era of the tonic TCP, I P offload engine, Nick, this isn't simply offloading CPU cycles. This is actually providing a sort of isolation. So that the network that's right, is the network has intelligence that is separate from the server. Is that, is that absolutely key? Is that absolutely >>Key? Yeah. That's, that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah. And that's, that's, I mean, if you look at some of the, the, the techniques used in the cloud, the, you know, this, this, this in fact brings some of those technologies into, into the enterprise, right. So where you are wanting to have that level of separation and management, you're able to now utilize the DPU card. So that's, that's a really big, big, big part of the value proposition, the manageability manageability, not just offload, but you know, kind of a better network for enterprise. Right. >>Right. >>Can you expand on that value proposition? If I'm a customer what's in this for me, how does this help power my multi-cloud organization? >>Yeah. >>So I think we have some, we actually have a number of these in real customer use cases today. And so, you know, folks will use, for example, the compression and the, sorry, the compression and decompression, that's, that's definitely an application in the storage side, but also on the, just on the, just, just as a, as a DPU card in the mainstream general purpose, general purpose server server infrastructure fleet, they're able to use the encryption and decryption to make sure that their, their, their infrastructure is, is kind of safe, you know, from point to point within the network. So every, every connected, every connection there is actually encrypted and that, that, you know, managing those policies and orchestrating all of that, that's done to the DPU card. >>So, so what you're saying is if you have DPU involved, then the server itself and the CPUs become completely irrelevant. And basically it's just a box of sheet metal at that point. That's, that's a good way of looking at that. That's my segue talking about the value proposition of the actual AMD. >>No, absolutely. No, no. I think, I think, I think the, the, the CPUs are always going to be central in this and look. And so, so I think, I think having, having the, the DPU is extremely powerful and, and it does allow you to have better infrastructure, but the key to having better infrastructure is to have the best CPU. Well, tell >>Us, tell >>Us that's what, tell us us about that. So, so I, you know, this is, this is where a lot of the, the great value proposition between VMware and AMD come together. So VMware really allows enterprises to take advantage of these high core count, really modern, you know, CPU, our, our, our, our epic, especially our Milan, our 7,003 product line. So to be able to take advantage of 64 course, you know, VMware is critical for that. And, and so what they, what they've been able to do is, you know, know, for example, if you have workloads running on legacy, you know, like five year old servers, you're able to take a whole bunch of those servers and consolidate down, down into a single node, right. And the power that VMware gives you is the manageability, the reliability brings all of that factors and allows you to take advantage of, of the, the, the latest, latest generation CPUs. >>You know, we've actually done some TCO modeling where we can show, even if you have fully depreciated hardware, like, so it's like five years old plus, right. And so, you know, the actual cost, you know, it's already been written off, but the cost just the cost of running it in terms of the power and the administration, you know, the OPEX costs that, that are associated with it are greater than the cost of acquiring a new set of, you know, a smaller set of AMD servers. Yeah. And, and being able to consolidate those workloads, run VMware, to provide you with that great, great user experience, especially with vSphere 8.0 and the, and the hooks that VMware have built in for AMD AMD processors, you actually see really, really good. It's just a great user experience. It's also a more efficient, you know, it's just better for the planet. And it's also better on the pocketbook, which is, which is, which is a really cool thing these days, cuz our value in TCO translates directly into a value in terms of sustainability. Right. And so, you know, from, from energy consumption, from, you know, just, just the cost of having that there, it's just a whole lot better >>Talk about on the sustainability front, how AMD is helping its customers achieve their sustainability goals. And are you seeing more and more customers coming to you saying, we wanna understand what AMD is doing for sustainability because it's important for us to work with vendors who have a core focus on it. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, look, I'll be perfectly honest when we first designed our CPU, we're just trying to build the biggest baddest thing that, you know, that, that comes out in terms of having the, the, the best, the, the number, the, the largest number of cores and the best TCO for our customers, but what it's actually turned out that TCO involves energy consumption. Right. And, and it involves, you know, the whole process of bringing down a whole bunch of nodes, whole bunch of servers. For example, we have one calculation where we showed 27, you know, like I think like five year old servers can be consolidated down into five AMD servers that, that ratio you can see already, you know, huge gains in terms of sustainability. Now you asked about the sustainability conversation. This I'd say not a week goes by where I'm not having a conversation with, with a, a, a CTO or CIO who is, you know, who's got that as part of their corporate, you know, is part of their corporate brand. And they want to find out how to make their, their infrastructure, their data center, more green. Right. And so that's, that's where we come in. Yeah. And it's interesting because at least in the us money is also green. So when you talk about the cost of power, especially in places like California, that's right. There's, there's a, there's a natural incentive to >>Drive in that direction. >>Let's talk about security. You know, the, the, the threat landscape has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. Yes. Ransomware attacks happened like one every 11 seconds, older technology, a little bit more vulnerable to internal threats, external threats. How is AMD helping customers address the security fund, which is the board level conversation >>That that's, that's, that's a, that's a great, great question. Look, I look at security as being, you know, it's a layered thing, right? I mean, if you talk to any security experts, security, doesn't, you know, there's not one component and we are an ingredient within the, the greater, you know, the greater scheme of things. A few things. One is we have partnered very closely with the VMware. They have enabled our SUV technology, secure encrypted virtualization technology into, into the vSphere. So such that all of the memory transactions. So you have, you have security, you know, at, you know, security, when you store store on disks, you have security over the network and you also have security in the compute. And when you go out to memory, that's what this SUV technology gives you. It gives you that, that security going, going in your, in your actual virtual machine as it's running. And so the, the, we take security extremely seriously. I mean, one of the things, every generation that you see from, from AMD and, and, you know, you have seen us hit our cadence. We do upgrade all of the security features and we address all of the sort of known threats that are out there. And obviously this threats, you know, kind of coming at us all the time, but our CPUs just get better and better from, from a, a security stance. >>So shifting gears for a minute, obviously we know the pending impossible acquisition, the announced acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, AMD's got a relationship with Broadcom independently, right? No, of course. What is, how's that relationship? >>Oh, it's a great relationship. I mean, we, we, you know, they, they have certified their, their, their niche products, their HPA products, which are utilized in, you know, for, for storage systems, sand systems, those, those type of architectures, the hardcore storage architectures. We, we work with them very closely. So they, they, they've been a great partner with us for years. >>And you've got, I know, you know, we are, we're talking about current generation available on the shelf, Milan based architecture, is that right? That's right. Yeah. But if I understand correctly, maybe sometime this year, you're, you're gonna be that's right. Rolling out the, rolling out the new stuff. >>Yeah, absolutely. So later this year, we've already, you know, we already talked about this publicly. We have a 96 core gen platform up to 96 cores gen platform. So we're just, we're just taking that TCO value just to the next level, increasing performance DDR, five CXL with, with memory expansion capability. Very, very neat leading edge technology. So that that's gonna be available. >>Is that NextGen P C I E, or has that shift already been made? It's >>Been it's NextGen. P C I E P C E gen five. Okay. So we'll have, we'll have that capability. That'll be, that'll be out by the end of this year. >>Okay. So those components you talk about. Yeah. You know, you talk about the, the Broadcom VMware universe, those components that are going into those new slots are also factors in performance and >>Yeah, absolutely. You need the balance, right? You, you need to have networking storage and the CPU. We're very cognizant of how to make sure that these cores are fed appropriately. Okay. Cuz if you've just put out a lot of cores, you don't have enough memory, you don't have enough iOS. That's, that's the key to, to, to, you know, our approach to, to enabling performance in the enterprise, make sure that the systems are balanced. So you get the experience that you've had with, let's say your, you know, your 12 core, your 16 core, you can have that same experience in the 96 core in a node or 96 core socket. So maybe a 192 cores total, right? So you can have that same experience in, in a tune node in a much denser, you know, package server today or, or using Melan technology, you know, 128 cores, super, super good performance. You know, its super good experience it's, it's designed to scale. Right. And especially with VMware as, as our infrastructure, it works >>Great. I'm gonna, Lisa, Lisa's got a question to ask. I know, but bear with me one bear >>With me. Yes, sir. >>We've actually initiated coverage of this question of, you know, just hardware matter right anymore. Does it matter anymore? Yeah. So I put to you the question, do you think hardware still matters? >>Oh, I think, I think it's gonna matter even more and more going forward. I mean just, but it's all cloud who cares just in this conversation today. Right? >>Who cares? It's all cloud. Yeah. >>So, so, so definitely their workloads moving to the cloud and we love our cloud partners don't get me wrong. Right. But there are, you know, just, I've had so many conversations at this show this week about customers who cannot move to the cloud because of regulatory reasons. Yeah. You know, the other thing that you don't realize too, that's new to me is that people have depreciated their data centers. So the cost for them to just go put in new AMD servers is actually very low compared to the cost of having to go buy, buy public cloud service. They still want to go buy public cloud services and that, by the way, we have great, great, great AMD instances on, on AWS, on Google, on Azure, Oracle, like all of our major, all of the major cloud providers, support AMD and have, have great, you know, TCO instances that they've, they've put out there with good performance. Yeah. >>What >>Are some of the key use cases that customers are coming to AMD for? And, and what have you seen change in the last couple of years with respect to every customer needing to become a data company needing to really be data driven? >>No, that's, that's also great question. So, you know, I used to get this question a lot. >>She only asks great questions. Yeah. Yeah. I go down and like all around in the weeds and get excited about the bits and the bites she asks. >>But no, I think, look, I think the, you know, a few years ago and I, I think I, I used to get this question all the time. What workloads run best on AMD? My answer today is unequivocally all the workloads. Okay. Cuz we have processors that run, you know, run at the highest performance per thread per per core that you can get. And then we have processors that have the highest throughput and, and sometimes they're one in the same, right. And Ilan 64 configured the right way using using VMware vSphere, you can actually get extremely good per core performance and extremely good throughput performance. It works well across, just as you said, like a database to data management, all of those kinds of capabilities, DevOps, you know, E R P like there's just been a whole slew slew of applications use cases. We have design wins in, in major customers, in every single industry in every, and these, these are big, you know, the big guys, right? >>And they're, they're, they're using AMD they're successfully moving over their workloads without, without issue. For the most part. In some cases, customers tell us they just, they just move the workload on, turn it on. It runs great. Right. And, and they're, they're fully happy with it. You know, there are other cases where, where we've actually gotten involved and we figured out, you know, there's this configuration of that configuration, but it's typically not a, not a huge lift to move to AMD. And that's that I think is a, is a key, it's a key point. And we're working together with almost all of the major ISV partners. Right. And so just to make sure that, that, that they have run tested certified, I think we have over 250 world record benchmarks, you know, running in all sorts of, you know, like Oracle database, SAP business suite, all of those, those types of applications run, run extremely well on AMD. >>Is there a particular customer story that you think really articulates the value of running on AMD in terms of enabling bus, big business outcome, safer a financial services organization or healthcare organization? Yeah. >>I mean we, yeah, there's certainly been, I mean, across the board. So in, in healthcare we've seen customers actually do the, the server consolidation very effectively and then, you know, take advantage of the, the lower cost of operation because in some cases they're, they're trying to run servers on each floor of a hospital. For example, we've had use cases where customers have been able to do that because of the density that we provide and to be able to, to actually, you know, take, take their compute more even to the edge than, than actually have it in the, in those use cases in, in a centralized matter. The another, another interesting case FSI in financial services, we have customers that use us for general purpose. It, we have customers that use this for kind of the, the high performance we call it grid computing. So, you know, you have guys that, you know, do all this trading during the day, they collect tons and tons of data, and then they use our computers to, or our CPUs to just crunch to that data overnight. >>And it's just like this big, super computer that just crunches it's, it's pretty incredible. They're the, the, the density of the CPUs, the value that we bring really shines, but in, in their general purpose fleet as well. Right? So they're able to use VMware, a lot of VMware customers in that space. We love our, we love our VMware customers and they're able to, to, to utilize this, they use use us with HCI. So hyperconverge infrastructure with V VSAN and that's that that's, that's worked works extremely well. And, and, and our, our enterprise customers are extremely happy with that. >>Talk about, as we wrap things up here, what's next for AMD, especially AMD with VMwares VMware undergoes its potential change. >>Yeah. So there there's a lot that we have going on. I mean, I gotta say VMware is one of the, let's say premier companies in terms of, you know, being innovative and being, being able to drive new, new, interesting pieces of technology and, and they're very experimentive right. So they, we have, we have a ton of things going with them, but certainly, you know, driving pin Sando is, is very, it is very, very important to us. Yeah. I think that the whole, we're just in the, the cusp, I believe of, you know, server consolidation becoming a big thing for us. So driving that together with VMware and, you know, into some of these enterprises where we can show, you know, save the earth while we, you know, in terms of reducing power, reducing and, and saving money in terms of TCO, but also being able to enable new capabilities. >>You know, the other part of it too, is this new infrastructure enables new workloads. So things like machine learning, you know, more data analytics, more sophisticated processing, you know, that, that is all enabled by this new infrastructure. So we, we were excited. We think that we're on the precipice of, you know, going a lot of industries moving forward to, to having, you know, the next level of it. It's no longer about just payroll or, or, or enterprise business management. It's about, you know, how do you make your, you know, your, your knowledge workers more productive, right. And how do you give them more capabilities? And that, that is really, what's exciting for us. >>Awesome Cooper. And thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what AMD, what you're doing to supercharge customers, your partnership with VMware and what is exciting. What's on the, the forefront, the frontier, we appreciate your time and your insights. >>Great. Thank you very much for having me. >>Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco, but don't go anywhere, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

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

>> 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)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's The Cube covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Good morning. From Austin, Texas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at Pure Accelerate 2019. This is our second day. We just came from a very cool, interesting, keynote, Dave whenever there's astronauts my inner NASA geek from the early 2000s. She just comes right back up Leland Melvin was on >> Amazing, right? >> With a phenomenal story. Talking about technology and the feeling of innovation but also a great story of inspiration from a steam perspective science, technology, engineering, arts, math, I loved that and, >> Dave: And fun >> Very fun. But also... >> One of the better talks I've ever seen >> It really was. It had so many elements that I think you didn't have to be a NASA fan or a NASA geek or a space geek to appreciate the all of the lessons that Leland Melvin learned along the way that he really is inspiring, everybody the audience to take note of. It was I thought it was... >> And incredibly accomplished, right? I mean scientist, MIT engineer, played in the NFL, went to space, he had some really fun stuff when they were, you know, messing around with with gravity. >> Lisa: Yes. >> I never knew you could do that. He had like this water. >> Lisa: Water, yeah. >> Bubble. >> I'd never seen that before and they were throwing M&M's inside (laughter) and he, you know consumed it choked on it, which is pretty funny. >> Yeah, well it was near and dear to me. I worked with NASA my first job out of grad school. >> Dave: Really? >> I did, and managed biological pilots that flew on the space shuttle and the mission that the he talked about that didn't land, Colombia. That was the mission that I worked on. So when he talked about that countdown clock going positive. I was there on the runway with that. So for me, it just struck a chord of, >> Dave: so this is of course the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk. And you know I have this thing about watches, kind of like what you have with shoes (chuckles) >> Lisa: Hey, handbags. >> Is that not true? Oh, It's handbags for you? (laughing) >> Dave: I know this really that was a terrible thing for me to say. >> That's okay. >> Dave: You have great shoes so I just I just assumed that not good to make assumptions. So I bought a moon watch this year which was the watch that Neil Armstrong used to not the exact one but similar one, right? >> Lisa: Yeah. And it actually has an acrylic face because they're afraid if it cracked in space you'd have glass all over the place. [Lisa] Right. So that's a little nostalgia there. >> Well one of the main things too as you look at the mission that President John F. Kennedy established in the 60's for getting a man in space in that 10-year period. That being accomplished and kind of a parallel with what Pure Storage has done in its first 10 years of tremendous innovation. This keynote again Day 2, standing room only at least about 3000 people or so here. Storage as James Governor said, your friend and also who keynoted after Leland this morning you know, (mumbles) Software's eating the world storage is eating the world we have to have secure locations to store all this data so that we can extract maximum value from it. So nice parallel between the space program and Pure Storage. >> James is really good, isn't he? I mean he had to follow Leland and I mean again one of the better talks I've ever heard, but James is very strong, he's funny, he's witty he's he cuts to the chase. >> Lisa: Yes. >> He always tells it like it is. He's a very Monkchips is very focused on developers and they do a really good job there, one of the things he talked about was S3 and how Amazon uses this working backwards methodology which maybe a lot of people don't know about but what they do is they write and rewrite and rewrite and vet and rewrite the press release before they announce the product and even before they develop the products they write the press release and then they work backwards from there. So this is the outcome that we are trying to achieve, and it's very disciplined process that they use and as he said they may revise it hundreds and hundreds of times and he put up Andy Jassy's quote from 2004, around S3. That actually surprised me. 2000...Maybe I read it wrong. >> Lisa: No, it was 2004. >> Because S3 came out after EC2 which was 2006 so I don't know. Maybe I'm getting my dates wrong or I think James actually got his dates wrong but who knows, maybe you know what? Maybe he got a copy of that from the internal working document, working backwards doc that could be what it was but again the point being they envisioned this simple storage that developers didn't have to think about >> Lisa: Right. >> That was virtually unlimited in capacity, highly available and you know, dirt cheap which is what people want and so he talked about that and then he gave a little history of the Dell technology families and I tweeted out this in a funny little you know basically pivotal VM ware EMC and Dell and their history Dell was basically IPO 1984 and then today. There was a few things in between I know but he's got a great perspective on things and I think it resonated with the audience then he talked a lot about Kubernetes jokingly tongue-in-cheek how Kubernetes everybody thought was going to kill VMware but his big takeaway was look you got all these skills of (mumbles) Skills, core database skills, I would even add to that you know understanding how storage works and I always joke if your career is based on managing lawns you might want to rethink your career. But his point was which I liked was look all those skills you've learned are valuable but you now have to step up your game and learn new skills. You have to build on top of those skills so the history you have and the knowledge that you've built up is very valuable but it's not going to propel you to the next decade and so I thought that was a good takeaway and it was an excellent talk. >> So looking back at the conversations yesterday the press releases that came out the advancements of what Pure is doing, with AWS, with Nvidia, with the AI data-hub for example, delivering more of their portfolio as a service to allow businesses whether it's a law-firm like we talked to yesterday utility or Mercedes AMG Petronas Motor-sport, to be able to access data securely, incredibly quickly, recover it restore it absolutely critical and really can be game-changing depending on the type of organization. I want to get your perspectives on some of the things you heard anecdotally yesterday after we wrapped in terms of the atmosphere, the vibe, the thoughts on Pure's next 10 years. >> Yeah, so several things, just some commentary so it's always good at night you go around you get a lot of data we sometimes call it metadata. I think one of the more interesting announcements to me was the block-storage on AWS. I don't necessarily think that this is going to be a huge product near term for Pure in terms of meaningful revenue, but I think it's interesting that they're embracing the trend of the Cloud and are actually architecting Cloud solutions using Amazon services and blending in their own super gluing their own, I mean it's not really superglue but blending in their own software for their customers to extend. Now, you know some of the nuances I don't think they are going to have they have better right performance I think they'll have better read performance clearly they have better availability I think it's going to be a little bit more expensive. All these things are TBD that's just my take based on looking at what I've seen and talking to some people but to me the important thing is that Pure's embracing that Cloud model. Historically, companies that are trying to defend an existing business, they retreat. You know, they denigrate they don't embrace. We know that Pure's going to make more money on pram than it does in the Cloud. At least I think. And so it's to their advantage for companies to stay on-prem but at the same time they understand that trend is your friend and they're embracing that so that was kind of one thing. The second thing I learned is Charlie Giancarlo spent a lot of time with them last night as did you. He's a bit of a policy wonk in very certain narrow areas. He shared with me some of the policy work that he's done around IP protection and not necessarily though on the side that you would think. You would think that okay IP protection that's a good thing but a lot of the laws that were trying to be promoted for IP protection were there to help big companies essentially crush small companies so he fought against that. He shared with me some things around net neutrality. You would think you know you think you know which side of net neutrality he'd be on not necessarily so he had some really interesting perspectives on that. We also talked to and I won't share the name of the company but a very large financial institution that's that's betting a lot on Pure was very interesting to me. This is one of the brand names everybody would know it if you heard it. And their head of storage infrastructure was here, at the show. Now I know this individual and this person doesn't go to a lot of shows >> Maybe a couple a year. >> This person chose to come to this show because they're making an investment in Pure. In a fairly big way and they spent a lot of time with Pure management, expressing their desires as part of an executive form that Pure holds they didn't really market that a lot they didn't really tell us too much about it because it was a little private thing but I happen to know this individual and and I learned several things. They like Pure a lot, they use it for a lot of their workloads, but they have a lot of other storage, they can't necessarily get rid of that other storage for a lot of reasons. Inertia, technical debt, good tickets at the baseball game, all kinds of politics going on there. I also asked specifically about some hybrid companies products where the the cost structure's a little bit better so this gets me to flash array C and we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about this about his flash prices come down and it and opens up new markets. I got some other data yesterday and today that you know that flash array C is not going to be quite priced we don't think as well as hybrid arrays closing the gap it's between one and one and a quarter, one and a half dollars per gigabyte whereas hybrid arrays you are seeing half that, 70 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes as low as 60 cents a gigabyte. Sometimes higher, sometimes high as a dollar but the average around 65-70 cents a gigabyte so there's still a gap there. Flash prices have to come down further. Another thing I learned I'm going to just keep going. >> Lisa: Go ahead! >> The other thing I learned is that China is really building a lot of fab capacity in NAND to try to take out the thumb-drive market-place so they are going to go after the low-end. So companies like Samsung and Toshiba, Toshiba just renamed the company, I can't remember the name of the company but Micron and the NAND flash NAND manufacturers are going to have to now go use their capacity and go after the enterprise because China fab is going to crush the low-end and bomb the low-end pricing. Somebody else told me about a third of flash consumption is in China now. So interesting things going on there. So near term, flash array C is not going to just crush spinning disk and hybrid, it's going to get closer and it's going to slowly eat away at that as NAND prices come down it really could more rapidly eat away at that. So I just learned some other stuff too but I'll take a breath. (laughter) >> So one of the things I think we are resounding with it we heard not just yesterday on the program day but even last night at the executive event we were at is that from this large financial services company that you mentioned, Pure storage is a strategic partner to many organizations from small to large that is incredibly valued to your point the Shuttleman only goes to maybe a couple of events a year and this is one of them? >> Dave: Right. >> This is a company that in its first 10 years has embraced competition head on and I loved how you talked about yesterday 10 years ago they just drove a truck through EMC's market and sort of ripping and replacing. They're bold but they're also doing it in a way that's very methodical. They're working on bringing you know changing companies' perspectives of even backup data as becoming an asset to put it on flash. Because if you can't rapidly restore that, if there's an outage whether it is an attack or it's unintentional human related, that data can't be recovered quickly, you're in a big big problem. And so them as a strategic component of this isn't in any industry I think it was a very resounding sentiment that I heard and felt yesterday. >> Yeah, this ties into tam expansion of what we talked to Charlie Giancarlo about new workloads with AI as an example flash or AC lowering prices will open up those some of those new workloads data protection backup is clearly an opportunity and I think it's interesting, you're seeing a lot of companies now announce a lot of vendors announce flash based recovery systems I'll call them recovery systems because I don't even consider them backup anymore it's not about backup, it's about recovery. Oracle was actually one of the first to use that kind of concept with the zero data loss recovery appliance they call it recovery. So it's all about fast and near instantaneous recovery. Why is that important? It's because it's companies move toward a digital transformation and what does that mean? And what is a digital business? Digital business is all about how you use data and leveraging data in new ways to create new value to monetise or cut cost. And so being able to have access to that data and recover from any inaccess to that data in a split-second is crucial. So Pure can participate in that, now Pure's not alone You know, it's no coincidence that Veritas and Veeam and Cohesity and Rubrik they work with Pure, they work with HPE. They work with a lot of the big players and so but so Pure has to you know, has some work to do to win its fair share. Staying on backup for a moment, you know it's interesting to see, behind us, Veritas and Veeam have the biggest sort of presence here. Rubrik has a presence here. I'm sure Cohesity is here maybe someway, somehow but I haven't seen them >> I haven't either. >> Maybe they're not here. I'll have to check that up, but you know Veeam is actually doing very well particularly with lower ASPs we know that about Veeam. They've always come at it from the mid-market and SMB. Whereas Cohesity and Rubrik and Veritas traditionally are coming at it from a higher-end. Certainly Cohesity and Rubrik on higher ASPs. Veeam's doing very well with Pure. They're also doing very well with HPE which is interesting. Cohesity announced a deal with HPE recently I don't know, about six months ago somebody thought "Oh maybe Veeaam's on the outs." No, Veeam's doing very well with HPE. It's different parts of the organization. One works with the server group, one works with the storage group and both companies are actually doing quite well I actually think Veeam is ahead of the curve 'cause they've been working with HPE for quite some time and they're doing very well in the Pure base. By partnering with companies, Pure is able to enter that market much in the same way that NetApp did in the early days. They have a very tight relationship for example with Commvault. So, the other thing I was talking to Keith Townsend last night totally not secretor but he's talking about Outpost and how Amazon is going to be challenged to service Outpost Outpost is the on-prem Amazon stack, that VMware and Amazon announced that they're co-marketing. So who is going to service outpost? It's not going to be Amazon, that's not their game in professional service. It's going to have to be the ecosystem, the large SIs or the Vars the partners, VMware partners 'cause that's not Vmwares play either. So Keith Townsend's premise, I'd love to have him on The Cube to talk about this, is they're going to have trouble scaling Outpost because of that service issue. Believe it or not when we come to these conferences, we talk about other things than just, Pure. There's a lot of stuff going on. New Relic is happening this week. Oracle open world is going on this week. John Furrier just got back from AWS Bahrain, and of course we're here at Pure Accelerate. >> We are and this is our second day of two days of coverage. We've got Coz on next who I think has never been on The Cube. >> Dave: Not to my knowledge. >> We've got Kix on later. A great lineup, more customers Rob Lee is going to be on. So we're going to be digging more into Pure's Cloud strategy, the next ten years, how they're going to accelerate that and pack it into the next couple of years. >> I'll tell you one of the things I want to do, Lisa. I'll just call it out. An individual from Dell EMC wrote a blog ahead of Pure Accelerate I think it was last week, about four or five days ago and this individual called out like one, two, three, four.... five things that we should ask Pure so we should ask them, we should ask Coz we should ask Kix. There was criticism, of course they're biased. These guys they always fight. >> Lisa: Naturally. >> They have these internecine wars. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Sometimes I like to call them... no I won't say it. So scale out, question mark there we want to ask Coz about that and Kix. Pure uses proprietary flash modules. They do that because it allows them to do things that you can't do with off-the-shelf flash. I want to ask and challenge them that. I want to ask about their philosophy on tiering. They don't really believe in tiering, why not? I want to understand that better. They've made some acquisitions, Compuverde is one acquisition, it's a file system. What does that mean for flash play? >> Now we didn't hear anything about that yesterday, so that's a good point that we should dig into that. >> Yeah, so we'll bring that up. And then the Evergreen competitors hate Evergreen because Pure was first with it they caught everybody off guard. I said it yesterday, competitors hate Evergreen because competitors live off of maintenance and if you're not on their maintenance they just keep jacking up the maintenance prices and if you don't move to the new system, maintenance just keeps getting more and more and more and more expensive and so they force you, you're locked in. Force you to move. Pure introduced this different model. You pay for the CapEx up front and then, you know, after three years you get a controller swap. You know, so... >> To your point competitors hate it, customers love it. We heard a lot about that yesterday, we've got a couple more customers on our packed program today, Dave so let's get right to it! >> Great. >> Let's wrap up so we can get Coz on stage. >> Dave: Alright, awesome. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube from Pure Accelerate 2019, day two. Stick around 'Coz' John Colgrove, CTO, founder of Pure, will be on next. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the cube. Covering VMWorld 2019 Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> It is 10 years and going strong for the cube coverage here at Vmworld, Vmworld 2019, we were here 10 years back, and looking forward to the next 10 or more. We're at Moscone Center North San Francisco, the cube with Dave Vellante, John Walls. We're joined now by Tom Barsi, who is the senior vice president, business development at Carbon Black Inc. Tom kind of required couple of weeks for you not much really going on in all serious.. >> Tom: Just a little bit (laughs) >> Yeah I mean big purchase VMware, I'm sure you're aware pick up Carbon Black making that announcement official this week. You were in the center of that, that discussion so if you would kind of give us a little behind the scenes peek, behind the curtain if you will of how those talks developed and really back to your relationship with VMware to begin with. >> Tom: Yeah >> Cause this goes back for a while. >> Tom: Needless to say a super, a super exciting week and accomodation of a lot of work amongst a army of people to get us to where we are and obviously announcement last week, around the acquisition of Carbon Black was huge but I think the announcement this week in terms of going into more detail that Sanjay and Pat went to in terms of combining the best infrastructure management with our best app reek cloud, native, modern, security platform with analytics combine that together, I think there is really an opportunity to transform the industry and currently we've been working with VMware for well over 2 years. So 2 years ago Vmworld we announced an exclusive partnership with VM where we integrated with Vmwares newly announced app defense product, which is really around securing cloud workloads, obviously their in a unique position to secure workloads because of where they sit, leveraging the infrastructure and knowing what's good and what should be running within those workloads so they've leveraged that and build app defense and for the first time we built that integration, exclusive integration and for the first time a security operation center has been able to have visibility into the hypervisor. So that's where we started to see that potential and the opportunity and it also gave us an opportunity to really start to work closely with the Vmworld team, understand their culture, understand their community, understand their leadership, their commitment to winning, understanding commitment to really sort of transform in security and it just became, we dated and it became just obvious that there is so much energy between our leadership and theirs, so much energy in terms of vision of you know, securing the world from, make them safe from cyber attacks and so it just made so much sense. So in Pat's words sure it de-risked the acquisition over a period of time but it also allowed us to really work closer together know what we're getting into and really getting super excited. So I can tell you the response from our employees has been overwhelming and their response here at Vmworld has been just amazing in terms of traffic and the partners, customers and all that. >> Dave: I asked Pat Gelsinger 5 years ago if the cube was security broken and he said "Yeah, it's broken" and I was like "what you going to do about it" stay tuned well, we've been tuned. I did an analysis of, and this may be, first of all Patrick is going to take over as to run Vmwares cloud security business? >> Tom: Correct. >> Dave: So when Patrick stated... >> John: Patrick Morelik >> Dave: Yeah, Patrick Morelik CEO of Carbon Black and Pat Gelsinger said that we want to be the cloud security company. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Dave: Okay, so I love when they lace down aspirations like that, now this now may not be fair to you because you... >> Tom: We've been in the security, yeah. >> Dave: But there's a portfolio there that may not be as familiar with but I'll ask you anyway cause you're going to have to come familiar with it soon. So I did analysis of the Carbon Black acquisition, obviously app defense was in there but if you look at the VMware security portfolio, NSX has a micro segmentation. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Dave: News case. Obviously, Air watch you know. >> Tom: Workspace One >> Dave: Competing with Workspace Once >> Tom: Absolutely >> Dave: Cloud Corio, E8 security bracket, Trinsic is another tuck in acquisition that VMware did so while their building up this portfolio, can you help us understand how that's shaping out and where Carbon Black fits. >> Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about first the opportunity here. The opportunity is to leverage infrastructure management and security portfolio that VMware has and then sprinkling the Carbon Black portfolio, capabilities across that infrastructures, so in betting NSX for network to end point. And embedding works in base one, which we've already done. Embedding it with integrating app defense, which we've already done. The ability to do agent less within the steer, super super powerful. Post close we'll be working on things like that, so basically by integrating across that portfolio you really have the ability to transform the entire security space, and I'll talk about that in a second. But what that means is basically by embedding security across that infrastructure management and eliminate a lot of complexity in the overhead in the bloat you're coming up with basically intrinsic security. The best thing from a human prespective to increase your immune system, you know, is or staying healthy is boosting your immune system and the best way, reason we're doing this, the best best way to secure enterprise is to integrate, embed security into the actual infrastructure and take the benefits of infrastructure management with security, combine it and eliminate a lot complexity, so let's talk just a second about being broken. It's hard for a security guy coming in and saying the industry is broken, I will tell you that but truth is it needs to be transformed there is just no question about it. So let's talk about it just from in point perspective, and then we'll get into the whole opportunity to extend that capability. You look at the end point from a enterprise customer perspective it's well documented that you know Legacy AV was built 20 years ago and not built for the modern tact factor so it's well documented, yes customers still have Legacy AV, it's not, you know it's 35% effective so what have customers done? They've gone and deployed EDR and point detection response, which is what Carbon Black strive has been a market leader hands down market leader in this space in terms of adding EDR's, yet another sensor. Then you want to have the ability to say look we got workloads and there's another sensor for that. Then you want to talk about, hey, vulnerability is coming out and we want to be able to query across the fleet to understand what vulnerabilities were in your environment, tanium like, right, there's a sensor for that. So you know what 2 and a half years ago our customers came back to us and said look we love you guys, what you guys are doing but there's too many sensors on the end point bloating and slowing my systems and my security teams is getting fatigue with all this point tools they said we need a integrated approach, in comes the Carbon Black clouds and that's we're we had the ability to integrate multiple services, NG, next-gen anti-virus, EDR, Life ops, the ability to query across. We've integrated App D for hard workload all those are shipping today, all those service on single, soft, light weight sensor and a modern cloud native SAS back in with analytics, so it's just super powerful and so now you're consolidating on that, you're getting more efficient, you're eliminating overhead and you're making the security operations team that much more effective, now, imagine taking that approach to the broken network and workload and exedra and extending that capability across the entire infrastructure and that really is what we're talking about in terms of teaming with VMware embedding our security capabilities across infrastructure a lot across NXS into work app D into workspace one which we're already doing and again eliminating a lot of that bloat and making our customers more secure and much more efficient. >> Dave: So there's another dimension to this acquisition which I like which is your SAS business, so I think it's about 38% of your revenue, I call it roughly 40% of your revenue, but growing very very rapidly, growing to 70% of the year. >> Tom: Exactly. >> Dave: So VMware has said that this acquisition along with pivotal is going to have add a billion dollars in, basically, mostly in all subscription revenue next year and three billion in year two and it's going to be accretive in cash flow deposit acquisition by year two so all very, VMware actually keeps well generally in acquisitions and so notwithstanding some weird stuff in the economy they usually hit their targets. >> Tom: Yes. >> Dave: You know they intend to be conservative so I really like that and that's clearly the direction you're moving. The other thing about this, a lot of people on Wall street said well it's maybe overpaid for stock and I want to get your opinion. Cause you're out competing everyday and cloud strike is obviously the comparison to use, okay. Say a company is a 16/17 billion dollar valuation you're valuation was 2.7 billion, you look at cloud strikes post IPO's, doc chart, it looks like a bathtub you know, it kind of goes like this and then goes like that because people start to realize wow this asset actually has you know a lot of intrinsic value upon attend it. So in comparing cloud strike with Carbon Black in terms of feature, function, capabilities you know execution and those technology. Is it really that much of difference 16 billion and 2.7 billion (laughs) >> Tom: You know I can't really comment on Crowdstrike's market cap, obviously I respect them as a competitor. >> Dave: Great, great job. >> Tom: I don't have to like them but I respect them as a competitor no question. >> Dave: What in terms of the function and the capabilities. >> Tom: In terms of the functionality look we've significantly close the gap and adding cloud workload capability with app D adding the query kit with live ops and extending that capabilities so from a feature functionality look at VMware is technology driven they kick tires and they do the diligence on technology that's the strength of VMware, they look deep and what they came away with was we have a super competitive platform, you're seeing it in our wins our growth rate you're seeing it with our wins and large customers that I can't really name so from a feature functionality perspective you know we're at parr in many ways we're better now, now if you look at where the market is going look Crowdstrike is going to be a great point product solution for end point. But we believe, that they're going to do phenomenally well but we believe there's an opportunity here, again to integrate infrastructure management that VMWare has security capability and deliver an end to end platform and truly transform across the entire infrastructure of an enterprise so that really where we see the opportunity and the opportunity for growth and then you want to look at our growth rate I mean to your point, VMware does an incredible job and you know you start talking about the reach of VMware and talk about the reach of DellEMC and it's super exciting. >> Dave: Yeah the VMware brain trust is very capable both from a strategy standpoint and a technical, strong, very strong engineering culture. >> Tom: Yeah >> Dave: You saw this with Airwatch so Airwatch when VMware required Airwatch VMware was struggling what was then the VDI business and airwatch wasn't you know number one in the market place but VMware like now crushes, people are making similar analogy with regard to Carbon Black do you think that's fair, I mean you think you can repeat that sort of momentum. >> Tom: Yeah you know I've obviously been very very close to this relationship and I have been sort of the number one fan and cheerleader of this partnership because I just believe in my soul that it's going to be transformative really is so to that point I you know I think and I've talked about it internally what they've done with my serie what they've done with aiwth now workspace one and the ability to take a business from me no revenues or couple hundred million and take them to two billion. I absolutely believe you will see, it's going to take a lot of work but we're going to see rejectorty I've been focussed on if there are gaps we're going to force it in or anything to accelerate the road map to allow us to win and then you're going to talk about the triple acceleration with VMWare and DeliMC so answer I say I truly truly believe that we can take our position to number two and really be number one >> John: Transformative in a significant way a significant word to use. What's that end product going to be that makes you looking at it at this visionary stand point that, this is a perfect marriage this is a fantastic opportunity. You're not you're selling hard >> Tom: Yeah >> Dave: It's a platform really >> Tom: Look it is a platform and at the end of the day we're focused on here as customers we're talking about how do we protect our customers and the best way to protect those customers is to embed the capability you know we did many years back Carbon Black we exposed our data and many of our partners, sometimes we compete with cisco or firehire a number of other players because customers demand the end to end visibility from network to end point. Can you imagine the kind of damage when you integrate Carbon Black and our modern platform are analytics and the ability to pull data from hypervisor the ability to pull data from NSX to ability to pull data from workspace one into a common console and then understand exactly what is happening from an attack perspective and then let's talk about okay, so now you have the visibility it's a 360 degree view of what happening in the network now you want to talk about the ability to orgistrate or imidiate like solve the problem. Well historically it's been security operations center over here and you got IT over there. And there's been this friction because Sycguys says take it down take the server down there's a problem and the IT guys ops, hey, I got run time I got to keep it up so now you have the opportunity again to leverage that management to identify a threat and the ability to seemlessly leverage VMware infrastructure's management tools to instantly reimmediate and orgistrate a problem without the conflict with IT and security operations. So we've actually seen an opportunity to eliminate our friction and create coloboration between those two. >> Dave: And security is broken, it is a do over and to talk to ops team they'll tell you, we're fighting everyday and bombs are dropping, we have to succeed everyday. The bad guy only has to succeed once so yeah they bring in all these tools and a lot of times they don't work together and they have a very hard time to just figure out okay, what do we prioritize on and obviously analytics helping that but yeah, you see that stats after you get infiltrated to whatever 300 days 250 days they even identify that you have been infiltrated and it's just a very complex environment so the do over is a platform that will give you end visibility and doesn't force you to different point tools and it has a comprehensive in a view of your >> [Tom[ That Right >> Dave: Infrastructure >> Tom: That's right and I do want to point out it doesn't mean that we're going to create this platform that's closed. A lot of competitors like to built closed platforms and Carbon Black has always been API driven like open, and the whole point of this openness is to, we collect this powerful end point data and we want to expose that data across the infrastructure so we're exposing it to the network security guys whether it be Vectra or Palato networks or FireMandion depending on who it is. We're exposing that data to splunk IBMQ radar and IBM rasilion and we're going to continue to do that, leverage this platform and all this powerful delimentry and we're going to continue to have this open platform and continue to work across the industry to make sure it's not just our platform from the MDM just across the ecosystem. >> Dave: Well it's something VMware has been strong if this heritage genaty, you know they help you know balance the score card >> Tom: Yeah >> John: It's been a understatement that it's been an exciting week for you, it's been a great two years it sounds like and we wish you success now it's on down the road like he said a lot of hard work still ahead of you. >> Tom: Absolutely, so congratulations on ten years, I look forward being here in year 20. (laughs) >> John: We'll be right back, we'll be right back just taking a break here on the cube we're at Vmworld 2019. Moscone center, San Francisco. (music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at VMworld 2018. Day one, VMware's 20th anniversary. I am Lisa Martin, very excited to be joined by Dave Vellante. Hey, Dave! >> Hey, Lisa, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, too. We are welcoming back to theCUBE, an alumni, Geoff Waters, the VP of Global Cloud Sales for Vmware, hi, Geoff. >> Hi, great to be here, guys. Last year, we talked about the buzz, VMware getting the buzz back. Boy, this is a sonic boom this year. >> Yeah, it's a lot of buzz. >> Superpower infused. And we've also got David Wigglesworth, the Chief Revenue Officer for OVH. David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, both of you, Dave and Lisa. >> So, I have to ask first, do you have the VMware tattoo that Pat Gelsinger sported this morning? >> I don't have VMware, but I do have OVHcloud. Okay, so, speaking of OVH, David give our viewers an overview of what you guys are doing and what momentum you have created with VMware. >> Yeah, you know, it's an exciting time for us, especially to be here, as a Global Diamond sponsor, right? This is our second year, as OVHcloud, to be here. Last year, when we came, it was right after the vCloud Air acquisition of the asset from Vmware. Which is where our partnership just continued to grow more and more. And, so, for the last year, what we've been doing is we've really been focusing on deploying our data centers here, as well as getting our products ready to go to market. I always joke that OVHcloud is, probably, the best-kept secret in the US because that, when we acquired vCloud Air's assets, is when we kind of launched in the US. But, as Geoff can tell you in a few minutes, we've been a partner with VMware for years, right? And it's been really exciting. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about that, Geoff, a little bit, I mean, the signal on vCloud Air early on, you guys kept having to tune the radio station, so to speak. >> Yep. >> Yep. >> And then, boom, finally it hit the OVH acquisition and then AWS deal, of course, IBM and other cloud service providers. Talk about how that all came about, and the track that you're on now. >> Yes, so, I mean, we've been partnering with OVH for actually nine years, I went back and I researched it. >> Did you? >> Yeah, back in Europe. So, they've actually been a seven-time Service Provider of the Year award winner. So, our relationship with OVH is nothing new. And we've been working with them for years. The other thing is the breadth of the portfolio adoption, the full SDDC stack, so not just vSphere, NSX, vSAN, the entire stack. So, you know, OVH is right in the forefront of our overall cloud strategy, and it has been for years. >> Yeah, and as a global infrastructure provider, we have almost a million 500 thousand customers, in 138 different countries. We have 28 data centers, three here in North America. We've got the breadth to go to the market in a big way. So, it's exciting to be here. >> So, lay out the options that you have for OVH customers. What services can they get from you? What are the platforms? >> No, it's a great question. So, obviously, have a very purpose-felt solution built on VMware, right, with our Hybrid Private Cloud. It's all built on the SDDC stack. So vSphere, vSAN, NSX, everything that Geoff mentioned. We also offer a bare metal solution. And then we also have a public cloud offering that's built on our relationship that we have with OpenStack. So, we give our customers three different choices on what they want to go to the market with. >> So, what do you make of, what's the AWS-VMware partnership mean for OVH? How do you guys take advantage of that? >> Well, I mean, you know, look. I think Pat, in his keynote this morning, talked about that eight out of every 10 customers is using cloud today, multi-cloud strategy. The average large customer is using, what did he say, eight clouds? >> Yep. >> He said that they're forecasting that there would be 10 clouds by the end of 2019. I'd like to take one of those two spots, if you don't mind. So, no, we think there's huge opportunity. I mean, Amazon's built a business on, and has created kind of the standard. We think there's plenty of room to play in a very large market. >> Well, the services market has always been highly fragmented. >> Yep. >> And it's always been local in nature. Maybe not as to the degree and scale, but, so, you've got, what did you say, a million and a half customers? >> Globally. >> So what are they telling you about their cloud strategy? >> Well, what our customers are asking for is they're asking for agility. They're looking for low cost. You know, we announced a partner program earlier this morning, where we're launching that. And our partners are coming to us saying, David, give us choice, give us flexibility, and help us save a little bit of money. I mean, all of our partners are dealing with margin erosion, as well as everybody else in the industry. So, if we can come to market and actually help them go acquire a customer, and help them do that in a way that's cost-effective, they're very excited about that. >> So, what's the conversation that you're having with customers? You know, we were, a lot of press, a lot of news came out this morning. A lot of great announcements made by Pat and team on stage. Customers talking about migrating from on-prem to the cloud, from public back to on-premises, for security compliance reasons. What are some of the things that you guys are hearing from customers, when you're having those business-level discussions about being able to execute a successful cloud strategy? >> You want to hit that first, and I'll come over. >> Go ahead. Well, I can. So, what our customers are talking about is simplicity. One of the things that we're excited to work about, to work with VMware on, is that our customers, when they move their solution on-prem to our hybrid cloud, they use the exact same resources that they use on-prem today. They don't have to go hire new people. It's all of the exact same economics that they've built to an on-prem solution, is in their off-prem solution with OVHcloud. That's what makes this so unique, right? I mean, look, part of the vCloud Air acquisition, what are we doing? We're migrating VMware customers, right, that are using VMware technology, that we're setting on vCloud Air into OVH data centers, using VMware technology to do it. And, so, it's. >> Just to add to that, the beauty is reducing day two complexity onto the operations, day two operations. So, instead of customers having to build out all themselves and integrating it, OVH is doing that already. Right out of the gate, in a hosted managed environment. >> That's because it is a like to like homogeneous, and you guys have laid that vision out years ago. >> Yep, yep. >> We sure did. >> When Maritz was running the company. But how does that actually manifest itself? So, a customer says, look, I'm sick of the heavy lifting, I want to get to the cloud. Alright, so they come to you guys, what are the steps that they take to get there? >> Well, there's, you know, the first thing you'll do is you'll sit down with the client. And some clients know exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it. And some customers say, hey, I think I need to be in the cloud, please help me. So we'll have that conversation, right, first of all. Yeah, exactly, it's from A to Z, soup to nuts, whatever you want to say. So, you know, a lot times we'll sit down and we'll walk them through that journey to the cloud. And then, once we determine what applications or workloads we want to move, then we'll back into, okay, well here's the best way to move that, right, and whatever technologies we then decide to do. And if it's vSphere based, it makes it real simple, right? >> And you hit the nail on the head. It starts with the application. It's always about the application. What is the end goal? Right, once you identify that, you start looking at the use cases, a lot of it's app migration, a lot of data center evacuation. A lot of these data centers, as the different leases are coming up, they want to get out of there. Right, and that's the opportunity to then have the discussion. There's also tools that we got. HDX, which allows for bulk migration of workloads and it reduces, you know, the complexity of going to another cloud and another hypervisor from, like, years down to months and weeks. We've had some customers that have done that, migrated hundreds of VMs over a weekend. >> Oh sure. And we're in the process of that right now. >> So, go ahead, please. >> Oh, thank you, I was going to say, could you give us an example of a customer, whether they're in Europe, where you guys have really had a lot success, or here in the Americas, that have really demonstrated substantial business outcomes, revenue, et cetera, leveraging the joint service? >> Well, sure, I mean, you know, we've got customers both in the U.S. and in EMEA, but, you know, I'm thinking about a customer in particular that's based in the U.K.. That, they're a MNA company, right? And, at one time, they had 97 data centers that they were trying to manage. The complexity of that. And, so, they originally went to vCloud Air because they were like, help us with this complexity, we're built on VMware, but we've got to close these data centers, right, we need to go to more of an asset-like model, and we need to be able to manage it effectively with the staff that I have that's already overworked. So that's how we won them as a client with vCloud Air. What's exciting is, is when we come in and we start talking about what we're doing with OVH, and some of the new technology that we're building, on the VMware stack, right, plus the fact that we own our own network. I don't charge ingress and egress charges, right. A lot of the things that we do, We've got 33 points of presence, you know, globally. Then we start having a conversation and they're like, listen I already had a great solution in vCloud Air on VMware, now I've got that on steroids. I've got the benefit of both companies coming together for a solution for my client. >> So how do you get the data from point A to point B? Do you back up the Chevy truck and load it on? >> You can do it that way. >> You talked about your network. What's the kind of best practice? >> Yeah, so the best practice is to come in and understand the actual environment we're working with. What is the tolerance to take that workload up or down? But, if we use technology like HDX, I don't have to take that workload down at all. I'm able to basically, essentially, and don't let me get over my skis, VMware guy, but I am going to essentially do a Vmotion over my network, right, no cost to the customer, into my data center, and the customer can continue to use the app while that's happening. >> And the time that takes is a function of, obviously, the volume of the data, >> Sure, of course. The bandwidth. >> The number of VMs, the complexity of that. >> So you'll schedule that out over a period of, what, days, weeks, months? >> Exactly Years, even, I mean, maybe not years but, maybe I have a multi-year strategy, right? So that's how you're seeing people do it? It's sort of a planned approach. >> Weeks and months is sort of. >> I would say, typically. >> It's project based, yeah. >> So, within months, I can get an entire data center from my on-premises into your platform. Is that a fair statement? >> And if you ever wanted to bring it back, we can do that real easy too. >> You see that happening? >> We see customers moving workloads back and forth, it depends on seasonality. I mean, you take the retail industry, right? There's a lot of times where, during the retail industry, they'll send things to us, they'll flip it around, and, after the holidays are over, they'll bring there on-prem or what have you. >> And, more importantly, I think having network access back into the on-prem data center, with HDX, allows you to have a network connection. So it does need a talk back. The whole workload may not move back, but you need to have communications back into the network. And that's what HDX, their technology, allows. >> Right. >> So it allows me to leave whatever component of my workload I want to keep there. >> Yep, that's right. >> When I'm talking to each other. >> That's right. >> Okay, so for years at VMware, we heard this theme, any app, any workload, really anywhere in the world. >> Exactly. >> Now, you guys, right, you guys have an open source based public cloud. Vmware, obviously, like, hey, some of these cloud native apps, we'd like a piece of that action. You hear Pat talking about Kubernetes and containers. So what's that conversation like, between you guys, I mean you want some of that, right? Are you talking about Edge? Is that more integration? You guys got some work to do there to really compete in the that space? >> Well, I mean, it's your solution. But I'll start off of on the Edge. So, the announcement on Edge today, I don't know if you guys have heard it yet, but really exciting. We've actually announced a lot of different solutions around automation of the data center. I mean, this whole cloud operations is becoming sort of a major problem, as we have eight to 10 global service providers in most enterprises. So, reducing the complexity of that down is incredibly important. All the pieces that we're announcing, a VMware as a service, we're going to roll to our service providers in a managed service environment. So all these new technologies that we just announced, right, David and OVH are going to get access to that and have the same capability. >> That's right. >> I'll let you guys speak, specifically on your OpenStack. >> Well, I mean, listen, the beautiful thing about OpenStack is it's open, right, so, I mean, it doesn't really matter what cloud's out there, we can interface with it, right? So, that's the beauty of it, right? And it doesn't change at all the way that we go to market. It's just, really, we're giving the customers choice. What do you want? And it depends on the app, right? That's what's beautiful about it, is when we've sit down and meet with customers or partners, it's, like, what do you want to do, what workload would you want to move? And we've got choice for you. >> Yeah, I remember when we talked to Pat about this, years ago, when OpenStack was kind of the hot new toy, and he said, OpenStack, we like OpenStack, that's cool, we'll embrace it, no problem, and we're like, really? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of exactly what's happened. I mean, you're seeing the same thing with Kubernetes, and containers, and the like. But, again, you guys still got some work to do to really earn their business for those types of workloads, and I presume you're hard at work. >> We are. I don't know if you wanted to hit on some of the announcements that you. >> Yeah, I'd love to. >> Yeah, let's do that. >> So, the real thing I'm excited about is this morning we announced the announcement of our partner program at OVHcloud. It's an exciting day for us on that because, if you'll remember a few minutes ago, I was talking about all of the things we've been doing for the last year, right, getting our data centers ready, and, also, building out our product stack to be able to go to market, and migrating our customers. Well, the fourth thing we were doing, for the last nine to 12 months, is we've been meeting with partners. And I'm fortunate, from my years at EMC-Vmware, and my team, we have a lot of relationships out there. And so we were able to go meet with these partners and say, listen, here's what we're thinking, what do you guys think, what are you looking for, right? We've got all these big players out there, obviously we know all the names, but what differentiation could we bring to your business to help you go grow revenue? And, you know, they came back to us and they said, Wiggs, what we really want to be able to do is we want to be able to come in slowly, expand that as much as we can, make big commitments, make small commitments, we want the ability to be agile, we want to be able to, help us figure out a way that we can save money and worry about that. Help us resolve that issue of that margin erosion. That's a big thing that a lot of the channel's dealing with today. And, so, that's what we did. We came up with a program of four different levels, right? You can dip your toe in, and with a very minimum commitment, the higher commitment you make, not only do you get a better price, but you also get a ton of support on the backend. So, I actually come in and work with you on your messaging. I have sales teams that can actually go out and help them sell the solution, with us as the infrastructure layer in the underpinning, right, and, so far, it's been really good. >> So these are, don't hate me for saying this, these are sort of traditional box sellers, now trying to transform their business, right, and add more value, or their value added supply. Maybe they're SAP. >> Well, you've got manage service providers. You've got manage service providers. >> Okay, so hosting. >> You've got the SI's and the OS's, right? So, you know, some of these guys they either want a private label, right? Or white label your solution? Some guys just want to go to mark up their solution and they just need an asset like model, right? They're just exhausted with, you know, investing in infrastructure, right? So, they're like, "Listen >> And bodies. >> And body, you take that over and let us worry about that. >> You see, from VMware's perspective, that's exactly what we're seeing. We've got an ecosystem of 42 hundred global service providers. They build their own data centers, have a VMwares based hosted solution of some type. A lot of different flavors. They want to get out of the hardware space and out of the data center management space. This is why it's a great solution for OVH, they want to focus on, and, again, we call this asset light, they want to focus on high margin trusted value. Things that they're good at, where they can make a lot of money. >> Which is what? Like, I always see there's a consulting piece up front, security. >> It could be security specialist. >> Yep, security security services. >> Patching monitor, you know, automation, migration services, I mean, the exact discussion we just talked about, right? Customers need that journey. So OVH abstracts a way, the need to do hardware, and that allows them to go focus on the rich or higher margin services that they offer. >> And how are they making it sticky? Because, obviously, they want that, right? So what do you see there and how are you helping them? >> I think anytime you're adding a value added service, if you add that value it is sticky, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, for an example, to help our relationship with Vmware, and just how strong it is, you know, FusionStormers was one of the partners that we had announced today, right? And they had a quote in there. And I was just sitting in Pat's keynote, next to our customer. You know, and I'm like, so, you know, I get this, it makes sense, you're looking for this, you know, infrastructure as a service play. He's like, David, what we're trying to do is help our customers that love the VMware stack, we're trying to help them to get to the Cloud, right? They don't care about the infrastructure, all they want is great service, right, and great support. And he said, that's my secret sauce, that I am able to offer that. And he goes, you guys handle the infrastructure. He said, it's perfect. >> Last question, David, for you. What are people going to be able to see and feel and touch at the OVH booth here at VMWorld? >> Oh, that's a great question. So, you're going to be able to go over, and you're going to be able to learn about some of our other announcements, with VMwares. Specifically, around what we're doing on the whole SCDC as a stack, right? In the VMware Cloud foundation, and the announcement we had on that this morning. Or, actually, I think that was Friday. You're actually going to be able to go over and they'll pull up and they'll show you some demos, and be able to see the technology live. I think they have a show every hour, and you go over there. And if you go over, you might win a Yeti mug. I think they're giving a Yeti mug to whoever pays the most attention. (Lisa and Dave ooh) So, go over there and learn about that. >> Can always use another Yeti, yeah, I love the Yeti. >> Yeah >> You can't have too many Yeti's. >> Does it come with caffeine? Because that, I'm all over it. >> No, well, we'll leave it clean, yes, maybe caffeine. >> Okay, awesome. David, Geoff, thanks so much for joining Dave and me this morning. >> Thank you so much, we really enjoyed it. >> You're watching theCUBE, live from VMWorld 2018. Day one, Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, fro-- >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE! Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. We're here for three days of live wall-to-wall coverage at the OpenStack Foundation's show they have it twice a year John, pleasure to be with you again, you and I were together at the OpenStack show in Boston, a year ago, little bit further trip for me. But views like this, I'm not complaining. >> It's a great time to be in Vancouver, little bit overcast but the convention center's beautiful and the people seem pretty excited as well. >> Yeah so if you see behind us, the keynote let out. So John, we got to get into the first question of course for some reason the last month people are always Hey Stu where are you, what're you doing and when I walk through the various shows I'm doing when it comes to this one they're like, why are you going to the OpenStack show? You know, what's going on there, hasn't that been replaced by everything else? >> I got the same thing, there seems to be kind of a almost an antireligious thing here in the industry maybe more emotional perhaps at other projects. Although frankly look, we're going to take the temperature of the community, we're going to take the temperature of the projects, the customers, we got a lot of customers here, that's really the key here is that our people actually using this, being productive, functional, and is there enough of a vendor and a community ecosystem to make this go forward. >> Absolutely, so three years ago, when we were actually here in Vancouver, the container sessions were overflowing, people sitting in the aisles. You know containers, containers, containers, docker, docker, docker, you know, we went through a year or two of that. Then Kubernetes, really a wave that has taken over, this piece of the infrastructure stack, the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon shows, in general, I think have surpassed this size, but as we know in IT, nothing ever dies, everything is always additive, and a theme that I heard here that definitely resonated is, we have complexity, we need to deal with interoperability, everybody has a lot of things and that's the, choose your word, hybrid, multi-cloud world that you have, and that's really the state of opensource, it's not a thing, it's there's lots of things you take all the pieces you need and you figure out how to put 'em together, either buy them from a platform, you have some integrator that helps, so somebody that puts it all together, and that's where, you know, we live here, which is, by they way, I thought they might rename the show in the open, and they didn't, but there's a lot of pieces to discuss. >> Definitely an open infrastructure movement, we'll probably talk about that, look I loved the message this morning that the cloud is not consolidating, in fact it's getting more complicated, and so that was a practical message here, it's a little bit of a church of opensource as well, so the open message was very well received and, these are the people that are working on it, of course, but yeah, the fact that, like last year I thought in Boston, there was a lot of, almost confusion around containers, and where containers and Kubernetes fit in the whole ecosystem, I think, now in this year in 2018 it's a lot more clear and OpenStack as a project, or as a set of projects, which traditionally was, the hit on it was very insular and inward facing, has at least, is trying to become outward facing, and again that's something we'll be looking at this week, and how well will they integrate with other opensource projects. >> I mean John, you and I are both big supporters of the opensource movements, love the community at shows like this, but not exclusively, it's, you know, Amazon participating a little bit, using a lot of opensource, they take opensource and make it as a service, you were at Red Hat Summit last week, obviously huge discussion there about everything opensource, everything, so a lot going on there, let me just set for, first of all the foundation itself in this show, the thing that I liked, coming into it, one of the things we're going to poke at is, if I go up to the highest level, OpenStack is not the only thing here, they have a few tracks they have an Edge computer track, they have a container track, and there's a co-resident OpenDev Show happening a couple floors above us and, even from what the OpenStack Foundation manages, yes it OpenStack's the main piece of it, and all those underlying projects but, they had Katacontainers, which is, you know, high level project, and the new one is Zuul, talking about CI/CD, so there are things that, will work with OpenStack but not exclusively for OpenStack, might not even come from OpenStack, so those are things that we're seeing, you know, for example, I was at the Veeam show last week, and there was a software company N2WS that Veeam had bought, and that solution only worked on Amazon to start and, you know, I was at the Nutanix show the week before, and there's lots of things that start in the Amazon environment and then make their way to the on-premises world so, we know it's a complex world, you know, I agree with you, the cloud is not getting simpler, remember when cloud was: Swipe the credit card and it's super easy, the line I've used a lot of times is, it is actually more complicated to buy, quote, a server equivalent, in the public could, than it is if I go to the website and have something that's shipped to my data center. >> It's, yeah, it's kind of ironic that that's where we've ended up. You know, we'll see, with Zuul, it'll be very interesting, one of the hits again on OpenStack has been reinvention of the wheel, like, can you inter-operate with other projects rather than doing it your self, it sounds like there's some actually, some very interesting aspects to it, as a CI/CD system, and certainly it uses stuff like Ansible so it's, it's built using opensource components, but, other opensource components, but you know, what does this give us advantage for infrastructure people, and allowing infrastructure to go live in a CI/CD way, software on hardware, rather than, the ones that've been built from the dev side, the app side. I'm assuming there's good reasons, or they wouldn't've done it, but you know, we'll see, there's still a lot of projects inside the opensource umbrella. >> Yeah, and, you know, last year we talked about it, once again, we'll talk about it here, the ecosystem has shifted. There are some of the big traditional infrastructure companies, but what they're talking about has changed a lot, you know. Remember a few years ago, it was you know, HP, thousand people, billion dollar investment, you know, IBM has been part of OpenStack since the very beginning days, but it changes, even a company like Rackspace, who helped put together this environment, the press release that went was: oh, we took all the learnings that we did from OpenStack, and this is our new Kubernetes service that we have, something that I saw, actually Randy Bias, who I'll have on the show this week, was on, the first time we did this show five years ago, can't believe it's the sixth year we're doing the show, Randy is always an interesting conversation to poke some of the sacred cows, and, I'll use that analogy, of course, because he is the one that Pets vs Cattle analogy, and he said, you know, we're spending a lot of time talking about it's not, as you hear, some game, between OpenStack and Kubernetes, containers are great, isn't that wonderful. If we're talking about that so much, maybe we should just like, go do that stuff, and not worry about this, so it'll be fun to talk to him, the Open Dev Show is being, mainly, sponsored by Mirantis who, last time I was here in Vancouver was the OpenStack company, and now, like, I saw them a year ago, and they were, the Kubernetes company, and making those changes, so we'll have Boris on, and get to find out these companies, there's not a lot of ECs here, the press and analysts that are here, most of us have been here for a lot of time so, this ecosystem has changed a lot, but, while attendance is down a little bit, from what I've heard, from previous years, there's still some good energy, people are learning a lot. >> So Stu, I did want to point out, that something I noticed on the stage, that I didn't see, was a lot of infrastructure, right? OpenStack, clearly an infrastructure stack, I think we've teased that out over the past couple years, but I didn't see a lot of talk about storage subsystems, networking, management, like all the kind of, hard, infrastructure plumbing, that actually, everybody here does, as well as a few names, so that was interesting, but at the end of the day, I mean, you got to appeal to the whole crowd here. >> Yeah, well one of the things, we spent a number of years making that stuff work, back when it was, you know, we're talkin' about gettin' Cinder, and then all the storage companies lined up with their various, do we support it, is it fully integrated, and then even further, does it actually work really well? So, same stuff that went through, for about a decade, in virtualization, we went through this in OpenStack, we actually said a couple years ago, some of the basic infrastructure stuff has gotten boring, so we don't need to talk about it anymore. Ironic, it's actually the non-virtualized environments, that's the project that they have here, we have a lot of people who are talking bare metal, who are talking containers, so that has shifted, an interesting one in the keynote is that you had the top level sponsors getting up there, Intel bringing around a lot of their ecosystem partners, talking about Edge, talking about the telecommunications, Red Hat, giving a recap of what they did last week at their summit, they've got a nice cadence, the last couple of years, they've done Red Hat Summit, and OpenStack Summit, back-to-back so that they can get that flow of information through, and then Mark Shuttleworth, who we'll have on a little bit later today, he came out puchin', you know, he started with some motherhood in Apple Pi about how Ubuntu is everywhere but then it was like, and we're going to be so much cheaper, and we're so much easier than the VMwares and Red Hats of the world, and there was a little push back from the community, that maybe that wasn't the right platform to do it. >> Yeah, I think the room got kind of cold, I mean, that's kind of a church in there, right, and everyone is an opensource believer and, this kind of invisible hand of capitalism (laughs) reached in and wrote on the wall and, you know, having written and left. But at the end of the day, right, somebody's got to pay for babies new shoes. I think that it was also very interesting seeing, at Red Hat Summit, which I covered on theCUBE, Red Hat's argument was fairly philosophical, and from first principles. Containers are Linux, therefore Red Hat, and that was logically laid out. Mark's, actually I loved Mark's, most of his speech, which was very practical, this, you know, Ubuntu's going to make both OpenStack and containers simpler, faster, quicker, and cheaper, so it was clearly benefits, and then, for the folks that don't know, then he put up a couple a crazy Eddy slides like, limited time offer, if you're here at the show, here's a deal that we've put together for ya, so that was a little bit unusual for a keynote. >> Yeah, and there are a lot of users here, and some of them'll hear that and they'll say: yeah, you know, I've used Red Hat there but, you can save me money that's awesome, let me find out some more about it. Alright, so, we've got three days of coverage here John, and we get to cover this really kind of broad ecosystem that we have here. You talked about what we don't discuss anymore, like the major lease was Queens, and it used to be, that was where I would study up and be like oh okay, we've got Hudson, and then we got, it was the letters of the alphabet, what's the next one going to be and what are the major features it's reached a certain maturity level that we're not talking the release anymore, it's more like the discussions we have in cloud, which is sometimes, here's some of the major things, and oh yeah, it just kind of wraps itself in. Deployments still, probably aren't nearly as easy as we'd like, Shuttleworth said two guys in under two weeks, that's awesome, but there's solutions we can put, stand up much faster than that now, two weeks is way better than some of the historical things we've done, but it changes quite a bit. So, telecommunications still a hot topic, Edge is something, you know what I think back, it was like, oh, all those NFE conversations we've had here, it's not just the SDN changes that are happening, but this is the Edge discussion for the Telcos, and something people were getting their arms around, so. >> It's pretty interesting to think of the cloud out on telephone poles, and in branch offices, in data centers, in closets basically or under desks almost. >> No self-driving cars on the keynote stage though? >> No, nothing that flashy this year. >> No, definitely not too flashy so, the foundation itself, it's interesting, we've heard rumors that maybe the show will change name, the foundation will not change names. So I want to give you last things, what're you looking for this week, what were you hearing from the community leading up to the show that you want to validate or poke at? >> Well, I'm going to look at real deployments, I'd like to see how standard we are, if we are, if an OpenStack deployment is standardized enough that the pool of talent is growing, and that if I hire people from outside my company who work with OpenStack, I know that they can work with my OpenStack, I think that's key for the continuation of this ecosystem. I want to look at the general energy and how people are deploying it, whether it does become really invisible and boring, but still important. Or do you end up running OpenShift on bare metal, which I, as an infrastructure person, I just can't see that the app platform should have to worry about all this infrastructure stuff, 'cause it's complicated, and so, I'll just be looking for the healthy productions and production deployments and see how that goes. >> Yeah, and I love, one of the things that they started many years ago was they have a super-user category, where they give an award, and I'm excited, we have actually have the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research is one of our guests on today, they won the 2018 super-user group, it's always awesome when you see, not only it's like, okay, CERN's here, and they're doing some really cool things looking for the Higgs boson, and all those kind of things but, you know, companies that are using technology to help them attack the battle against cancer, so, you know, you can't beat things like that. We've got the person from the keynote, Melvin, who was up on stage talking about the open lab, you know, community, ecosystem, definitely something that resonates, I know, one of the reasons I pulled you into this show in the last year is you're got a strong background there. >> Super impressed by all the community activity, this still feels like a real community, lots of pictures of people, lots of real, exhortations from stage to like, we who have been here for years know each other, please come meet us, so that's a real sign of also, a healthy community dynamic. >> Alright, so John first of all, I want to say, Happy Victoria Day, 'cause we are here in Vancouver, and we've got a lot going on here, it's a beautiful venue, hope you all join us for all of the coverage here, and I have to give a big shout out to the companies that allowed this to happen, we are independent media, but we can't survive without the funding of our sponsors so, first of all the OpenStack Foundation, helps get us here, and gives us this lovely location overlooking outside, but if it wasn't for the likes of our headline sponsor Red Hat as well as Canonical, Kontron, and Nuage Networks, we would not be able to bring you this content so, be sure to checkout thecube.net for all the coverage, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.