>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit '18. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit 2018 at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, San Francisco. Great event, 900 people, we're excited to be here, it's our second year, and now we get to talk to some customers, which we are always excited to do. And our next guest is Alan Alderson. He is the Director of IT Ops for William Hill. Great to see you. >> Afternoon, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely, so for people that aren't familiar with William Hill, what are you guys all about? >> So William Hill offer customers opportunities to place bets on sporting events, presidential elections, snow at Christmas, you name it. We present about a million opportunities every week for customers to have a bet on. >> A million opportunities a week? >> Yeah, so picking on football matches, you know the game of the ramble. So we have opportunities for people to bet playing up to the game, and then once the game kicks off, we transition into what's called in play, so people can then place a bet on who's going to score the next goal, and about another 120 markets within that one game whilst the game's in play. >> Wow, so what's the average duration of the window to put a bet down? >> So generally leading up to the match it's as much time as you want, as soon as the markets are out there you can place the bet before the game kicks off. >> Okay. >> But once the game kicks off, you can, right up until about towards the last few minutes of the game, there'll be markets available to have a bet on. >> Okay, and then what percentage is kind of things that I would guess easily, like sporting events or those types of things, versus you know, whether it's going to snow or not? >> Well we provide the opportunities on the website, so you can have a look and, you know it's snow on Christmas day is a popular bet. People do their research, and they like to have a bet on it. There is a lot of novelty bets. There used to be, you know, life being found on Mars, Elvis being found, et cetera. So there's a lot >> Still taking action on Elvis? >> I don't think so. >> I thought we'd find him. So we're here at PagerDuty Summit. What are you doing here at PagerDuty Summit? >> So I've just come back from a stint in Australia, working for the William Hill business over there. So we introduced PagerDuty over there to help out with just getting the right message out to the right support teams quickly. So we deployed it out there, and we just brought it in to do infrastructure to start with but once we deployed it, it's a bit of a ripple effect. So it was like dropping a pebble into a pool, the ripple effect, and everybody, they seem to be doing all right over there, they use it now for the support models and so those sorts of questions. It's very quick how the other teams decided to latch onto PagerDuty as well. So I since moved back to the UK. So I moved back in January, took on this role back in the Leeds office in the north of England, and one of the first things I said is, guys, start having a look at PagerDuty, we've deployed it successfully in Australia, so let's have a look at what it can do for us. And so management works at William Hill. So I'm not trying to fix anything that's broken. So, it works. But what we can do is increase its speed of how we deal with things. So there's a lot of manual tasks in there that PagerDuty will come in and automate. It will take the pressure off the incident analysts 'cause, you know if there's an incident at two o'clock in the morning, we have 24 by seven business, so if there's an incident overnight, we've got to get on it and start fixing, resolving the incident. And if there's one guy who's trying to call out a number of responders, calling out a duty manager, trying to get comms out, it's a lot of pressure on one person to do that, and when there's pressure mistakes happen. I want PagerDuty to take away the possibility of the mistakes, take the pressure of the incident analyst, so they can focus on resolving the incident and getting service back to our customers as quickly as possible. >> I'm curious though when you said that other people and other groups saw PagerDuty in action. What were some of the other tasks that were not the primary tasks that you brought it in, where people saw value and are implementing it for some other types of activities? >> So initially when we put it in, we put it in purely for service. So for looking at the CPU disk and memory alerts. And we were getting our acknowledgements down from minutes to seconds in Australia. So the other teams are watching in, and within their applications there was a lot of alerts just landing as an email and not getting actioned upon very quickly. So we brought PagerDuty in, they said, can this help out in this space, and they started integrating it into their applications. So through hooking it into their applications they could get the alerts directly from PagerDuty, rather than it going through knocks and service decks et cetera, so it's just a quicker response and get 'em onto the issue quicker. >> And do you have it integrated in with some of your other development tools so it's just kind of part of whole process, or is it more kind of standalone notification system? >> It was integrated straight into ServiceNow and PagerDuty. PagerDuty would integrate with ServiceNow, raise the ticket, and then the things started moving. But the big win was getting the guys the call straight away as that alert happened. Otherwise you're relying on people watching screens, watching queues, waiting for that to happen, and then make the call. So if the call's gone straight to the engineer, he's on it immediately. >> Right, right, right. So what are some of your impressions here? Seeing kind of the ecosystem, what's behind PagerDuty, some great keynotes earlier today, really in terms of, again, the mission it sounds like it's very much in line with what you're trying to do, which is to help teams be more effective. >> Yeah, and what I like about PagerDuty is their passion. You just get a sense of urgency about this place, and you get a sense of passion and commitment, and they want to help people out, and that's what's drawn me to PagerDuty. The guys I worked with in Australia, the guys I worked with in the UK, they just can't do enough for you, and they want to help you succeed as well. You know, you deals with some companies that, they just want to sell you something and move on. These guys are, you know, they look after you, they work with you and they make sure that you're getting the value out of their product. >> It's a pretty interesting culture, 'cause when I talked to Jennifer Tejada a couple of years ago, I used to tease her, I'm like, nobody here knows what a pager is, right? Nobody was born when pagers were >> I had one. >> the rage. >> You had one, yeah, I had one. Shell Oil upside down, I think it says hello, I can't remember, I have to check that. But it's an interesting, there's kind of culture around what a pager represents, and the work that they have duty in there as well, which is a very different kind of level of responsibility when you are the person with the pager on, and that seems to have really carried forward in the way that they deliver the services. >> Yeah, yeah. I mean, on-call has people running, doesn't it? When people, you know when they join a job and go, "Oh you might be expected to be on call", they run a mile, and they think that's not for me. But as we go down more of a DevOps transformation and we get a lot more down the we code it, we own it model, I think it'll change people's perceptions of being on call and just doing the right thing for the business, rather thank, you know, delivering something and expecting the Ops team to fix it all the time and call out the developers at a third line. We should be, we are heading towards being a team, where the alerts go to the right people at the right time, and we get issues resolved as soon as possible. >> Right. I'd just love to get your take on, a lot of talk about digital transformation, and the modernization of IT, and kind of expected behavior on apps going on. You're right in the middle of it. >> Massively in the middle of it. >> Massively in the middle of it, right. I'm sure, what percentage of your bets come in via mobile versus... >> On the digital platform, over 56%. >> A lot, right, a lot. >> And we've got, just said in the last session we had is, we've got competition. So if our app isn't performing, it isn't quick, or it's down, people will go elsewhere. They've got options, they've got choices, and they'll just go elsewhere. And the challenge is getting those customers back. We want to have a stack that just is available and is performing, so we don't drive customers away, or we make sure that things are available at peak times, so when they are wanting to bet on the Super Bowl, the Grand National, the three o'clock kickoffs on a Saturday afternoon in the UK, it's available for them and people can get the bet on as quickly as possible. >> Right. So do you have all your own infrastructure, or do you leverage public cloud? I'm just thinking as you're talking about Super Bowl and some of these other big events, you must have just crazy big spikes. >> You know we've, in the UK it's all on-premise, so we've got to build an infrastructure to cope with that one day of the year, which is Grand National. In the US, we've just opened up in New Jersey. The front end of that stack is in AWS, so we can scale, so when Super Bowl does turn round next January, February, we should be able to scale with the load. >> Right, last question before I let you go. What are your priorities next? What are some of the things that you're working on with your team, to kind of stay at the leading edge of this very competitive space? >> Yeah we're heading into AWS. So we're looking to move into Amazon next year, start migrating some applications in there, and we're looking to get some applications in there the back end of this year, but migrate the existing apps from the start of next year. We're going through a DevOps transformation. We've been doing an agile transformation as well over the last 12 to 18 months, so there's a huge amount of digital transformation going on at William Hill at the moment. It's a very, very exciting place to be. The US expansion, the place has just gone mad, you know. There's a lot going on, it's just a great place to be. >> Yeah, I mean significant changes obviously in the US attitude, I think you guys are a little more progressive on that side of the Atlantic. Big changes happening here. >> 14th of May was a big day, PASPA being repealed has opened up the betting opportunities in any state that wants to regulate. And we are leading the way in that charge at the moment, so it's very exciting. >> All right, well I'm going to let you go so you can get some sleep, 'cause I'm sure you're a very busy man. Alan, thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, he's Alan, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at PagerDuty Summit 2018, thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE Virtual Experience here for re:Invent coverage 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person doing interviews face to face, but we're remote this year because of the pandemic. We're here for the APN partner experience, kickoff coverage with two great guests, Rima Olinger, of global lead for VMware cloud on AWS. And Aarthi Raju, Senior Manager Solutions Architecture for Amazon Web Services. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Good to be with you John, thank you. >> So I got, want to get it out there this partner network experience, it's really about the ecosystem. And VMware has been one of the biggest success stories. They've been around for a long time, and not one of the earliest ecosystem partners, but a big success. 2016, when that announcement happened, a lot of people were like, whoa, we VMware is giving into Amazon. And Amazon was like, no, that's not how it works. So turns out everyone was been proven wrong, it's been hugely successful beneficial to both. What's the momentum, share an update this year on the AWS VMware momentum. >> So John, as you know, we're into our third anniversary, and the relationship cannot be any stronger. We see customers are leaning into the service very heavily. We see great adoption across multiple industries. As some data points for you, if we look at October of this year to October prior year, we're seeing the number of active nodes, or the number of consuming host and active VMS, nearly doubled year over year. we also continue to see greater partner interest in the solution, we have over 300 ISVs that have validated the services on VMC. And we see over 600 plus partners that continue to take the competencies and build practices around it. So the momentum is very strong, for years still today. >> One of the comments I made when the naysayers were like kind of pooh-poohing the deal, I was like, no, no, the cloud growth is going to be a factor at that time, then, the trendy thing was software's eating the world, was a big trend there. If you look at the growth of cloud scale, and software innovation, and the operating side of it, 'cause VMware runs IT, they let operators running IT. There's no conflict because Amazon's growing and now the operator roles growing and changing. So you have two dynamics going on. I think this is a really nuanced point for the VMware, AWS relationship around, how they both fit together. Because it's a win win better together scenario, and it is on AWS, which is a distinction. Can you guys share your reaction to kind of that dynamic of operating software at scale, and how this translates for customers? >> Absolutely, we see a lot of benefits that this service is bringing to the customers. Because what it's doing is providing them with this consistent infrastructure and operations across hybrid cloud environments. And in this way, they have the choice of where to place their applications on-prem or in the cloud, specifically. And this is one of the reasons why AWS is a VMware's preferred cloud provider for all vSphere workloads. We see the customers gravitate towards it and be receptive to it specifically because they say I accelerate my path towards migrating and modernizing my application. It provides me with consistent as I mentioned, operations and infrastructure. And it also helps them with factoring, and helps us scale their business and very fast, very seamless fashion. Aarthi what is your perspective, maybe additional things. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, from a technical innovation perspective, the momentum, John has been very strong, especially, listening to what customers have been asking us the past couple of years. 2020 has been a big year for us in terms of launching some giant innovations. A couple of things to call out is, we launched the VMware Transit Connect. This was announced during VMworld this year and customers have been telling us, hey, we are migrating workloads from on premises to the cloud, we need a simplified way of connecting all these resources on-prem resources, resources on VMware cloud on AWS, and their AWS native resources as well. So, the VMware Transit Connect, uses the AWS transit gateway that we launched at re:Invent two years back to provide that simplified connectivity model for our customers. The next big thing this year was, we introduced a new instance type i3en.metal, So customers have been telling us they want denser nodes for especially storage heavy workload. So we launched this i3en, that comes with approximately, like 45 terabytes of storage per node. So that's a lot of storage for individual nodes. So customers have been taking advantage of these dense nodes as well. There was other areas that we kind of focused on from a lower entry point for our customers. When we initially started the service, John, you know that we had, the minimum entry point as four nodes, we've scaled that down to three, and now we've come to two nodes, giving the same production SLA for customers. The other big launch this year was the acquisition of Datrium by VMware and how we introduce the VMware cloud disaster recovery. Datrium uses the eight native AWS services like S3 and EC2, providing customers this low cost TR options. We're talking about the APN here and for partners, we launched the VMware cloud Director Service, which delivers multi-tenancy to our managed service providers, so that they can cater to small, to medium sized enterprises. >> What are some of the other use cases that are the key in these migrations, because this becomes a big benefit we're hearing, certainly, during the partner day, here at re:Invent, is, migration, cloud SaaSification, getting to a SaaS, but not losing the business model. Either was on premises or born in the cloud, this done new operating models, the key thing, what are some of the key use cases for partners? >> The most widely adopted use case that John, which you rightfully touched on, is really the cloud migration. We see around 41% of customers use the service just for cloud migrations. Now, this could be an application migration, like SAP, SQL server or Oracle Applications, or it could be a complete data center evacuation. And we see that with some customers who have a cloud mandate, or they have refresh cycles that are coming up, or maybe they're in a colo, and they're not happy with their SLA. I could use the example of William Hill, is one of the customers largest betting and gaming companies that are in the UK. And what's the use case was, a combination of a data center extension as well as a capacity expansion specifically. And what William Hill was able to do is, move 800 on-premise servers, and they decommission them in the first 12 months. And they also migrated 3000 VM. So that is cloud migrations is a big use case. The second big use case, as I mentioned earlier, is the data center extension that includes also VDI, the combination of both is around 42% of the use cases, with around 26%, I would say for data center extension and 16% for VDI. Why, customers want to expand their footprint, they want to go to a new region, and they want to meet on demand, cyclical capacity needs, or sometimes temporary needs for some events or some seasonal spikes. So we see that as a second big use case. A third one equally important, tend to be disaster recovery. Now, this is either to augment an existing DR. Replace a DR that is already in place, or start a new DR, and that constitutes around 17% of the use cases that we see. Because customers want to reduce their DR, avert some cost by moving to the cloud. And one example that comes to mind is Pennsylvania Lumbers Men's Mutual Insurance, it was a DR use Case. They worked with an external storage partner of ours faction in order to put that in place. So overall a great use cases across the board. And I know a big one is application modernization, Aarthi, I know you work with your teams on that, if there's any feedback from you on that. >> Yeah, the next generation applications or application modernization comes a lot. We talk to like AWS customers who are migrating from on-premises to the cloud using VMware cloud on AWS. And three or four years back as we were building the service and architecting, one thing was very evident, like we wanted to make sure that as we were building the service, we wanted to ensure that customers can take advantage of the native AWS services. We've got 175 plus services and new services launching at re:Invent, So we wanted to make sure that there is this, seamless mechanism and seamless path for customers to modernize using native AWS services. So what we've done as part of like onboarding for customers and as customers built on VMware cloud on AWS, is provide them both the network path and data path. So they can as your into the same availability zone or region, they're like, hey, I can use S3 for backups. I can use EFS, for file shares, etcetera. So we're seeing a wide range of next generation application use cases that customers are building on. >> Why would I get at the reasons why customers are continuing to adopt VMware cloud on AWS? Can you guys share an update, I'll show you the obvious reasons, the beginning was nice strategy for VMware, it's proven to be clear. But where's the innovation coming from? What's the key drivers for the adoption of VMware cloud on AWS? >> So one of the key patterns that we are seeing is, customers who used to be risk averse, customers will be invested a lot in VMware. And at the point, they did not want to move their workloads or applications to the cloud because of the risk involved, or sometimes they didn't want to refactor, or they were worried about the investment in tools, resources, they tend to gravitate towards this solution. The fact that you could provide your customers with this consistent infrastructure and operations across on premise, as well as on the cloud environment. The fact that you do not need to do an application refactoring. You could optimize your workload placement, based on your business needs, you could move your workloads bidirectionally, you could either leave it on-prem, or move it to the cloud, and vice versa. We've also noticed that there is a lower TCO associated with the use of the service. We know from a study that VMware commissioned Forrester in 2019, for that study, that 59%, there is a recurring savings in terms of infrastructure, and operational savings that is related to that. Customers tell us that, this consistency in infrastructure is translating it, into zero refactoring. This consistency in operations, is leading them to use their existing skill sets. And with the ability to relocate the workload skill into the environment that best suits them, that is providing customers with maximum flexibility. So I would say it is delivering on the promise of accelerating the migration and the modernization of our customers applications so that they can continue to respond to their business needs and continue to be competitive in the marketplace. >> Aarthi I want you to weigh in and get reaction to that. Because again, I've talked publicly and also privately with Ragu, for instance, at VMware, when this was all going down. It's a joint integration, so there's a lot of things going on under the hood that are important, what are the most important things that people should pay attention to around this partnership? Could you share your opinion? >> Yeah, sure, John. So one of the most common questions that we get from customers is, hey, this is giant integration, we can take use of make use of native AWS services, but what are some of the use cases that we should be targeting, right? As we talk to customers, some of the common use cases to think about is, it also depends on the audience. Remember, admin scoring example, who might not be familiar with the AWS side of services, they can start with something simple like backing up. So S3, which is our simple storage service, we see that use case way more often with our VMware cloud on AWS customers. This also ties with that Datrium integration that I talked about with the VCD or the VMware cloud disaster recovery, providing that low cost TR option. We are also starting to see customers offload database management, for example, with Amazon RDS, and taking advantage of the manage database service. As we talk to more customers, some of the use cases that comes up are like, hey, how do I build this data lake architecture? I've migrated to the cloud, I want to make use of the data that I have in the cloud now, how do I build my data lake architecture or perform analytics or build this operation resiliency across both these environments, their VMware cloud on AWS, as well as their native AWS environments? So we've got that seamless connectivity that they can take advantage of with VMware Transit Connect, we've got the cross account ENI model that we built, that they can take advantage of. And he talks about this one, and talks about the security is always job zero for us. And we're also seeing customers that take advantage of the AWS services like the web application firewall or shield, and integrating it with the VMware cloud on AWS environment. And that provides a seamless access right? You now have all these security services that AWS provides, that allows you to build a secure environment on VMware cloud on AWS. So providing customers the choice has always been a priority, right? We're talking about like infrastructure level services. As we move up the stack, and as customers are going through this modernization journey, like VMware provides containerization option using VMware Tanzu, that came out at VMworld. And then they also have the native options, we provide a EKS, which is our Kubernetes as a managed service. And then we also have other services that enables customers to take that jump into that modernization journey. One customer we've been working very recently with is PennyMac. They migrated their VDI infrastructure into VMware cloud on AWS. And that's allowed them to scale their environment for the remote workers. But what they are doing as part of their modernization journey, is now we're helping them build this completely serverless architecture, using Lambda on the AWS cloud. >> Yeah, that's really where they see that, the value is high level services, the old expression prima, they use the hockey from Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck is going to be, or, get to where the ball will be in the field. This is kind of what's happening, and I'm kind of smiling, when Aarthi was talking because, I've been saying it's been, going to, IT operations, and IT serviceman's is going to change radically so years ago. But you're really talking about here is the operating side of IT coming together with cloud. VMware, I think is a leading indicator of, you still got to operate IT, you still got to operate stuff. Software needs to be operated apps need to be operated. So this new operating model is being shown here with cloud, this is the theme with and without IT. With automation, this is the big trend from re:Invent this year. Obviously AI machine learning, you still got to operate the stuff. It's IT, depends on, we got lammed in automation doesn't go away, the game is still the same, isn't it what's happening here? >> Absolutely, so what we're saying is, once there's that you're absolutely right about the fact that they needed to, worry about the operations, once they migrate their workloads, they're taking their data, they're saying, how do I make sure that I put in place operational excellence, and this is where, AWS comes in, and we provide them with the tools needed to do that. And then step number two, say, what can I do with this data? How do I translate it into a business benefit? And this is where the AI ML tools come in place, and so forth. And then the third step, which is all right, what can I do to modernize these applications further. So you're spot on, John, in saying that this is like a transformation, it is no longer a discussion about, migration anymore, it is more of a discussion about modernizing what you have in place. And this is, again, where this brilliancy between the collaboration, between VMware and AWS, is bringing to the table, sets of tools and framework for customers, whether it's security framework or networking framework, to make the pieces fit together. So I'm very excited about this partnership. And we continue to innovate, as you heard in prior discussions with our executives on behalf of our customers, we spoke about the RDS Amazon, relational database service on vSphere. We spoke about how to post on VMware cloud on AWS, to bring the cloud to the customers data center for specific needs that they have in spite. And we're not stopping here. We are continuing not to make more joint engineering and more announcements, hopefully in the future to come. >> That's great insight. And a lot of people who were commenting, three, four years ago, when this is all going down, they're on the wrong side of history, that the data is undeniable, refutable, it's a success. Aarthi give us the final word, modern applications, modern infrastructure, what does that mean, these days? What's the bottom line when you talk to people out there? When you're at a party or friends or on zoom, or a Jime, in conference? What do you tell people when they say, what's a modern application infrastructure look like? >> Yes, the word modern application, the good or bad thing is it's going to, what I said yesterday could be different from what I'm saying today. But in general, I think modern application is where we enable our customers to focus more on their business priorities using our services, versus worrying about the infrastructure or worrying about like, hey, should I be worrying about capacity? Should I be worrying about my operational needs or monitoring? I think we want to abstract all that. We want to take that heavy lifting off of customers and help them focus on their business. >> Horizontally scalable and leveraging software in the application, can't go wrong with that formula in the cloud. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for the awesome conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John. >> Thank you >> Okay, it's theCUBE Virtual for re:Invent Experience 2020, this is virtual, not in person this year. I'm John Furrier, your host from the theCUBE, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Voiceover: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this announcement with VMware cloud on AWS update. Happy to welcome back to the program, Matt Morgan. He is the Vice President of global marketing with VMware cloud services. And welcome into the program Fred Wurden, he's the general manager of EC2 enterprise at Amazon Web Services. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Same, thanks Stu. >> Matt, and Fred, the VMware AWS partnership is one that has gotten a lot of attention. I know any time back in the day when we used to go to physical trade shows, I could know when there was a session talking about this because it was usually full and overflowing. When I've written about this topic or doing videos about it it definitely gets quite a lot of attention. So it's been over three years since the partnership was announced but still, when I talk to people, they don't necessarily really understand the depth of the integration and the work that gets done on both sides even though you get clear messages from both Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger about how important this is. Matt, maybe start with you and Fred would love your commentary as to this three year partnership and where we are today here in 2020. >> Absolutely, since the initial announcement of the VMware AWS relationships, we have actually built a very special cloud service. And today, we're actually deepening our partnership. In fact, today, VMware goes to market saying that AWS and only AWS is our preferred public cloud partner for all vSphere based workloads. VMware cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service. Meaning, our product teams our r&d teams are all working together to deliver VMware enterprise class Software Defined data center solution to the AWS cloud. VMware Cloud foundation is the core technology that's behind our service. And it gives us the capability to deliver that same level of infrastructure familiarity and consistency that our customers use today, across every data center location, the edge and of course inside the public cloud. VMware cloud on AWS attracts an enormous amount of interest from customers. And these customers are in every vertical, whether you're speaking of healthcare, media and entertainment, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, energy, government, education, professional services, and of course technology. And together with AWS, we're bringing together services that are being used across the whole portfolio of cloud optionality. This includes cloud migration from whether you're talking about a single app or complete data center, disaster recovery, whether you're talking about replacing a legacy system or building new disaster recovery in the cloud. Data center extension building that hybrid cloud. And of course, modernizing applications which we classify under the term application modernization. >> Great, and Fred from the Amazon side. >> Yeah, the partnership is been fantastic over three years. And I can't express enough how hard it is to actually deliver a simple solution that customers are asking for from all levels of both organizations. And to do that it takes both AWS and VMware to deliver a solution that allows companies to leverage what they know today and extend that into the cloud. And leverage all of the benefits that we're going to go over and a rapid delivery of new features which they haven't had before ever. So it's fantastic a partnership. I love what we've been doing at all levels. And I say it's going to continue. The scale at which we're growing is fantastic. And with that, I'm happy to go over some of the announcements and why we're doing what we're doing which is all based on listening and what our customers want. >> Excellent. Well, Fred, hey, we're glad first of all, that it did not get called VMC on AWS SS. Because we have enough acronyms already in tech. Matt, VMware and AWS, of course, clear leadership in the marketplace. With three years, bring us inside as to you talked about all the verticals that were used, but where's the proof on the adoption of this technology? Love to hear a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have customer examples across the verticals we spoke of, but it's the customer stories that are the real value demonstrator. Let's pick up a couple of those. IHS market, they were able to move 1000 plus workloads to the public cloud. And that story is kind of common in the world. But what's unique about this particular story is IHS market moved them in just six weeks. If you look at the cloud migration strategy in general, for someone to move that fast with that many workloads, it's unheard of. VMware empowers that because the operating setup that organizations have standardized in their data center is identical in the public cloud. So organizations can move workloads we see them move hundreds of workloads in a week from their data center up to the public cloud. In addition to that, we have customer examples like the Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company. They were able to demonstrate 20% cost savings by moving their disaster recovery systems to VMware cloud on AWS. And that was initial savings right off the rip. Other customers like William Hill, George St. PA, Stage Coast, PHS Mortgage, they're all demonstrating the significant value adds when people move over to the public cloud, but leverage that VMware cloud solution. >> And Fred obviously, AWS also plays across these environments. We would like to hear your side too. >> Yeah, a couple examples like S&P global ratings, they spin up a new application environment in a few hours instead of months. Let alone taking all the burden off of their supply chain and management of that. Like Matt said in terms of seeing cost savings. So agility and speed allows them to really focus on their applications and start to modernize and innovate in areas that really differentiate them. They've had 100% uptime for regulatory applications and a 50% improved disaster recovery time. Other customers have built out a disaster recovery plan and then actually spun to VMware cloud on AWS as their primary because they had better performance. So it's the whole range of options in terms of better performance, better TCL and economics and mostly agility on what they can do going forward with applications that may already be built on AWS as well with native services. >> Matt, you touched on some great customer examples, maybe maybe give us some, broad themes as to what are the key drivers as to why customers are adopting VMware cloud on AWS? >> Yeah, absolutely. As with any infrastructure conversation, total cost of ownership is a big piece of the equation. Organizations want to look at their footprint today. They want to look at their footprint next year, and then of course, many years out. So when you look at the public cloud, cloud economics are a big driver. VMware, of course adopts the whole concept of cloud economics whole full horse. Meaning that we give you the capability to recognize the advantages of an apex object model, the ability to have on demand services, the ability to have a managed IaaS, all of that is part and parcel to our service. But on top of that, there's unique capabilities that VMware cloud on AWS delivers that deliver unique economic value. The first is this concept of zero refactoring. Our customers tell us that this alone allows them to eliminate what they call is rework, sometimes called the rework tax. Which prevents organizations from moving applications to the cloud without reworking them, without working their data layer, re architecting how they run, they can move them because the operating layer is consistent. Another area of value that's unique to VMware cloud on AWS is the leverage of existing skill sets. Today's operators are trained on vCenter. They're trained on all the supporting infrastructure around VMware. All of that applies with VMware cloud on AWS. So the ability to translate those skills into a cloud skill set right off the bat is of enormous value. Of course flexibilities another big one, as organizations embrace what it being seen as composite applications, which are applications that span the data center, the public cloud out to the edge. The ability to move logic as needed to be able to have portability is something we deliver. Again, that's an economic value that we are able to provide. Now this has been quantified by third parties. There's been several major third parties, including Forrester, including IDC, that have published value added statements around the total economic impact of VMware cloud on AWS. In fact, just last year, there was a study that was commissioned by Forrester that demonstrated a 59% reoccurring savings in terms of infrastructure and operating savings, compared to an on premise implementation. When you look at migration that accelerates to 69% 'cause organizations can save almost 70% of moving applications by eliminating rework and refactoring. That's an IDC statistic. >> All right Matt. Maybe it would make sense to talk about just overall adoption of the solution. I believe you've got some stats you can share. >> So yeah, if you look at the adoption, we have delivered enormous growth over the last year of the service. Total number of hosts year over year are up 2.5x. Total number of running VMs year over year is actually larger at 3.5x. Which indicates that customers are not just adopting, but they're accelerating their adoption. We now have 21,000 plus number of hands on labs that have been consumed since July of 2019, a year ago. And there are now 300 plus validated technology partner solutions available. And on top of that, 530 channel partners with VMware cloud service competency are now registered and available to assist. These are tremendous statistics for 12 short months. >> Well, congratulations on to both VMware and AWS on that progress. Maybe talk a little bit about trends. Just briefly, if I look over the last three months we've talked about AWS and VMware customers. Obviously, with the global pandemic, there's been certain things that they've needed to rapidly do things like, VDI, end user computing, remote contact centers are something that they need to rapidly expand on. But, is there anything different or general trends that that you would both like to share? Matt, we'll once again, start with you and then Fred get your take on it. >> Yeah, there's a regional school district in the US that in light of COVID, needed to spin up 10,000 plus people working remotely. And by leveraging VMware cloud on AWS, they were able to conduct virtual classrooms in very short order by leveraging this broad scale infrastructure powered by VMware cloud on AWS. Over time, that provided flexibility and agility, but it also reduced their costs. They've been able to eliminate hardware replacement plans that were going to cost significant amount of money. In fact, they're showing and telling us that they're able to save 75% of those forecasted costs. But everything is really about business continuity today. Today's unfortunate economic environment where we're working through this pandemic, this global pandemic, IT organizations and businesses, they're embracing a tried and true understanding of what it means to move to the cloud. But they're embracing it in a more aggressive way because the supply chain has been disrupted. If you think about a traditional supply chain, where organizations have to receive machines, set up those machines, have them wired in have certain people on site to get those machines configured, move application. That's a lot of steps in the process, many of which have been totally disrupted during the pandemic. The idea of VMware cloud on AWS is that you replace an analog supply chain with a digital supply chain. We can now help organizations get new equipment, new capacity, new resources up and running instantly. They don't have to worry about all the steps that were previously required that have been disrupted in a pandemic. The cloud provides that operating environment that maps one for one to the realities of today's world. And they're also able to understand that looking forward, that that setup enables them to be more future ready. Ready for whatever comes next to deliver what the business needs. >> Yeah, there's a number of reasons that you just touched on Matt, that are examples that we can bring out on that elasticity. For example, Penny Mac, anytime there are changes in the market, for example, on either both for VDI or just on processing of loans. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people actually paused on both looking and or changing their patterns. And this solution has been fantastic for either scaling up or scaling down both ways. And they can do it very quickly. They can do it within a number of a variety of means whether it's a single VM, or it's moving an entire migration into VMware cloud on AWS. So great results there. The case studies speak for themselves. There's a lot of examples that we have up on both of our sites. We'd really be good to take a look at those in detail if you're interested, it's fun to see. Helps a lot of people out. >> If I could follow up with you on something here. I want to talk about I go to the cloud, often that movement is step one, how do I take advantage of modernization, whether that be for my application standpoint, or leveraging new services? I wonder you can give me the AWS side there? And, Matt would love to hear how VMware is helping customers along this journey too. >> Well, the first is we want to meet people they're at with their knowledge set and their skill set. And this is a fantastic part. Customers can move quickly with the domain knowledge that they've go. We can assist in translating and making sure that the environment and the STDC is set up in a way that is tailored to what their needs are. Whether it's an extension, or if it's a complete migration of step one. But step two really is once they're leveraging VMware cloud on AWS is they have a lot of needs in terms of their CICD, their development tools, or samples and applications around automation. And we can take and help them with that. That content is already posted on our developer tool site and our developer center for this solution. It really assists them in learning about how to leverage the elasticity and the security and the networking capabilities that allow them to go in and then use all the rest of the rich AWS services as well. So, if you look at some of the things that are coming out for example, VMware Transit Connect. Which allows, a layer three solution to be built on top of our AWS transit gateway so that we can interconnect multiple VPCs in an environment that may be running either software as a solution on AWS or a native application that was built with managed services, completely in sync and in harmony, with VMware cloud on AWS. So that's what's happening at a rapid pace. It allows people to bite off the chunks that they want to modernize and reuse tools that are either familiar with them, and or automation improvements that we've got between code tools across the board. So it's great to see the work that they're doing >> Great, and Matt on the modernization piece. >> Yeah, so our surveys tell us that customers want to modernize their existing applications. But those same customers don't want to start over. So this is an important value proposition that we deliver in partnership with AWS. Organizations can take a business process application, they can migrate it to the cloud, they can extend and reach that application with AWS services. They can extend and reach that applications with additional machine learning capabilities, they can extend it with containerized extensions. They can support a broader modern agenda without having to start over. And I think that that is a value proposition that resonates with everyone, because people often need must leverage what they already have built with what the baseline is for the business itself. In addition to this, composite applications are now becoming the norm. With data and processing being more CO located, end to end Applications often consist of processing and data for certain tasks to be either pushed out to the edge or remain on premises in the data center in addition to the cloud. That value proposition of VMware delivering a hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations enables those composite applications to be built and deployed in a highly efficient way, which is a big piece to the modernization story. In addition to this with tons of Kubernetes grid as a customer managed option, organizations can run those containerized components right on top of our service, all of which integrates very cleanly with a whole library of services that AWS offers. End to end, you have all the optionality you need plus the speed of migration and capabilities once you get up to the public cloud. >> All right, let's get into the new pieces of the partnership here. Matt, first of all, when I think about VMware cloud on AWS, the customers that I've mostly spoken to over the last couple of years have tended to be some of the larger enterprises. I've heard you're alluding towards some capabilities to the small and medium business. I know I'm looking forward to talking to PLM insurance, one of the companies that are leveraging this solution as part of this announcement. What's new and the impact that this will have on the addressable market that VMware cloud can hit for AWS? >> Yeah, so with this announcement, VMware cloud on AWS, we're extending it to offer three new capabilities. Three new announcements of capabilities. The first one is all about what you just spoke of. Which is about extending the VMware cloud on AWS value proposition to more customers. So currently, customers can spin up production clusters with three hosts are, of course much more than that. But three hosts was kind of the entry level for a production cluster. What we're announcing is the ability to create production clusters with all the capable abilities that go into what we define as a production cluster with just two hosts. That means customers will be able to deploy production environments with two hosts in a cluster, dramatically reducing their costs. In fact, the traditional costs will come down by 33%. So this is all about providing the full capabilities of VMware cloud on AWS, but to be able to do it at a smaller investment envelope. So in addition to this, we're rolling out enhancements to VMware cloud director offering it as a service. VMware cloud director now will deliver multi tenancy to VMware cloud on AWS specifically designed for MSPs. As you know VMware partner ecosystem is filled with managed service providers. We have a mean enormous collection of these that add value on top of VMware cloud on AWS. Here by using VMware vcloud director service, they can deliver multi tenancy to their customers. And this is designed specifically to serve the needs of small to medium sized enterprises. These capabilities enable MSPs to serve those needs and it will be available initially in North America. And this will give them the opportunity to say, hey, if you want to get started on VMware cloud on AWS, we can give you bite sized pools designed specifically for what you need. And this is a very asset light pay as you grow model, which aligns specifically to that market. >> It's fascinating to watch Matt, I think, not that many years ago, if I had attended VMworld and talked to the MSPs. And they talk how deeply they appreciate the VMware partnership and that cloud company was the enemy. And, today AWS and VMware partnering with them, helping to make sure that in this hybrid world that they play a role to help get to the enterprise. Fred, anytime we go to reinvent, new announcements usually come to a huge fanfare, even something like a new bare metal instance. Last year it was the I3en metal instance. People get pretty excited. Help us understand you know what this really means, what advantages it has? Are there any limitations? What should we know about the capabilities AWS has now available to the VMware cloud? >> Well, first off, thanks Stu, I3en is really exciting that we're launching. It will meet the need of storage intensive workloads. And it'll do it far better than what we've had before. It takes advantage of all the learnings and the investments that we put into instances across the board for AWS such as Nitro. If you have, high random IO access, such as needed for relational database or workloads that have additional security that we have baked in, it's going to meet those needs. Compared to I3 metal, it has more memory, more usable, high performance storage and additional security. The example of a yield compared to I3 is about a 22% performance improvement and value. We're delivering four times the raw storage for about 2.2 times the cost. So in essence, you're getting raw storage at half the cost of an I3. So customers are excited. it's one of many instances that we will launch in the future for VMware cloud on AWS. And that's one of the advantages, is people can instantly take advantage of these innovations that we have. Just like we've done across all of the other instance families to meet workloads that customers are talking to us about that they want to run on this platform. >> Excellent, well, we really look forward. I know we're going to have a deep dive with Colbert to go into a little bit under the hood. And as I mentioned, got one of your joint customers PLM Insurance to understand their use case and how they're doing it. Matt and Fred, if you could just give us final takeaway, VMware cloud on AWS, Matt, and then Fred. >> Well, first off, thank you Stu for this opportunity to speak. I always enjoy spending time with you and certainly with Fred. We're just super excited and thrilled about our partnership. VMware couldn't be happier with our partnership with AWS from engineering to marketing, customer experience. Our teams are working together hand in glove to ensure success for our customers. VMware cloud on AWS is a truly unique service. Customers can continue business operations with minimal disruption in case of any uncertain event, they can migrate their workloads fast in a very cost effective manner with minimal risk. And we're really all about helping large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journey. In fact, if you look across the board, we have seen enormous uptake. And now with these new offerings that we talked about, especially the two hosts production cluster, and VMware cloud Director service, we believe we're going to be more attractive to more organizations of various sizes. We're excited about the road ahead. >> And Fred. >> Customers are excited about this road, I would add. One, thank you guys for having us on. It's great to tell this story. The feedback has been phenomenal . The growth in the adoption and what we're seeing in terms of the use cases across the board is much stronger than we could have imagined. So it's really great to see this work that is hard to do to really merge the best of VMware and the best of AWS in a true deep partnership. And that takes work at all layers, whether it's a commerce system integration, or if it's the instance engineering and roadmap work across the board or networking. And customer support across the board for solutions that run on this platform. Both of us are joined to make sure customers are satisfied regardless of what it takes. That's something that no one else has. And it is unique. And it's a long term commitment that we have with each other to do the right thing for the solution. 'Cause we can't do it individually. This is something that truly only a joint partnership as strong as this is, and has gotten stronger can deliver. So we're super excited about it. I think you're going to continue to see the pace of innovation on what we're delivering increase. And so, with that, it's been great to work with VMware on this. It's really fun. >> Well, thank you, Fred. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, congratulation to your team. And of course, love hearing the customer stories and feedback. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. Be sure to check out the other interviews as part of this announcement and check out theCUBE.net of course, we're covering VMware and AWS deeply including their shows whether they are in person or virtual. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.