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>> 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.
>> 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.
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