>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE
covering the AWS re:Invent 2017.
Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman
joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend,
and this is one of the interviews we've been really excited.
Of course, we've got about 60 interviews.
We love all of them.
Lots of good excitement.
Lots going on at this ecosystem.
Over 43 thousand in attendance here in Las Vegas,
but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf,
who's the Vice President and CTO
of Global Field and Industry at VMware.
Chris, great to see you.
>> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith.
Great to see you guys.
>> So for the year, the whole VMware on AWS
has been a hot buzz discussion.
We've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE
about you know, partnering and how does that work
and who gets the most benefit out of it,
but let's start, Chris I'd love to hear
your viewpoint, you know.
You talk to a lot of customers.
I've talked to some customers that are really excited
about it, especially at VMWorld,
that were there testing it and doing it.
Give us the customer viewpoint.
What's really exciting them?
What's interesting them?
And I know there's a lot of new news
we're wanna gonna get into.
>> Yeah, you know, there's so much
that I think is exciting to customers
because you know, they're struggling with being more agile,
being more software defined, being able to
have more flexibility in their environments.
And to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS
allows them to go through data center consolidation easier.
It allows them to get applications to the Cloud
to take advantage of Cloud services.
One of the things people, I think kind of falls
between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS
is the fact that if I want to modernize
an application or a traditional application,
refactoring an application is enormously expensive.
It's very hard to do.
It's very time consuming.
If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud
on AWS and then start to integrate that
with other native AWS services,
I get the benefit of modernizing that application
without having to touch any of the application code,
which is a huge benefit to customers.
>> Yeah, we've spent the last couple of years at this show,
which well, do I lift and shift?
Do I just re-platform it?
Do I refactor it?
Do I totally rewrite it?
You know, the number of customers
that I've talked to at this show,
their advice that they give to their peers
is like well, go faster.
And how do we go faster?
Do I just take my VMware stuff
that I was doing in my own data center,
stick it in VMware on AWS,
start using all the cool stuff.
Is that kind of the path that you see?
>> That's part of it.
You know, I think there's a couple threads here.
There's the notion that you know, I wanna go faster,
but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT.
Where I have to change my mindset.
You know, I can't say I want to be more software defined
and more agile and then have specific hardware
requirements in my architecture.
Of course, that's not for all applications,
but that's part of that shift in mindset
is how can I go faster?
And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers,
if I can get into that operational model
by getting on Amazon quicker,
then that's good for my business.
>> Yeah, let me just poke on one more thing on that
and I know Keith wants to jump in here,
but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago.
It was like, you know
my Windows operating system going end to life.
I'm gonna stick it in VM and keep it there forever.
But, boy that application was all the technical data.
My users hated it and everything like that.
How does VMware go from I managed what you had
to enabling your future?
>> The thing that we're really focused on here
in terms of enabling the future,
when you think about programmatic compute
and networking and storage and security,
all applications need them.
I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function
or whatever, but at the end of the day,
somebody has to do it and that part of the fabric
becomes really important for things
like having a security auto-trell.
The other thread there is where VMware's strategic
to customers is that they say,
"You know I might wanna start this in the Cloud,
"but I wanna maintain full control
"of all of the intellectual property,
"so I wanna use Kubernetes, I wanna use containers,
"I wanna use a variety of open source projects.
"I wanna use their native API's for my software engineers,
"but I wanna have flexibility to build these applications
"without pre-destining their future."
Maybe it runs in a Cloud today,
maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow,
maybe it runs out at the edge.
Maybe I do an acquisition and
it has to run in that facility.
The bottom line is, I don't always know
what the future holds for my apps.
And for the aspect of the apps
that are core to your business,
there's a lot value in running them on VMware
because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility
and independence, just like we've done way back in the past
with your traditional enterprise applications.
>> So Chris, that's a great setup
for the next set of questions,
which is, VMware has been known to move
at the speed of the CIO.
We're at AWS re:Invent.
These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO.
The question is around, what's VMware's focus?
You know, there's VMware Cloud on AWS,
there's PKS, there's VIG.
You guys came out with Openstack,
VMware integrated Openstack 4.0,
and then even VMware Cloud on AWS,
the promised innovation three and a half months
after the release.
Iteration on that.
That's much faster than what the CIO used to have.
How are those conversations balanced between
the CIO and the new business user here at AWS?
>> Yeah, way to sugarcoat Keith.
That's a good question.
Look at CIOs today.
There's very innovative CIOs.
We had the NFL CIO up on stage
in the morning Keynote, right?
And I thought that was highly dynamic,
really talking about how you have to transform business.
What we're really focused on in terms of helping customers
is making sure that that fabric
that runs their business applications
is just as fluid and dynamic as their businesses.
The security has to be as fluid and dynamic
or more dynamic than the threats that you face.
So, these are areas that we're focused on,
but your point is: how can VMware continue
to deliver quick innovation?
I think VMware integrated Openstack
actually is an example of VMware integration
or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up.
We don't talk about Openstack that much now,
but VMware was the very first Openstack distro-vendor
to make upgrades of Openstack versions
they feature as software.
Where our competitors in that space
were making it a professional services engagement.
You look at us, what we've done
in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere.
We announced PKS and we were very quick
to embrace Kubernetes.
We announced Greengrass preview
that we're bringing to market as well on vSphere.
So, you're absolutely right to give us the feedback
that in the past, you could say Vmware
was a bit conservative of a company.
We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations.
They were important and we were deliberate
because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality.
That's what our customers expect,
but at the same time, it's very good feedback
to say that we have to work quicker,
and that's the model that we're in.
I think that the AWS partnership for Vmware
is one example of how we've had a couple of companies
learning from each other in terms of AWS
and interacting with the enterprise
and VMware in terms of innovating a Cloud space,
and you're staring to see the benefits
and the fruits of that labor now.
>> So, ironically I ran into the VMUG president, Ben Clayton
doing a show floor.
It's amazing to see the crossover
between the VMware community and the AWS community.
I think VMware Cloud on AWS has been a boom,
a realizing that Cloud is coming
into the enterprise in a great way.
Let's talk about the community and the users.
How do you help move that traditional community
of, I think VMUG is 200,000 users.
How do you help move that membership forward
to this new speed of IT?
>> It's a terrific question.
There's definitely some challenges with getting folks.
Part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart.
We love building everything.
We love the pieces and parts.
We can understand how they matter,
but even if they matter like this much,
it doesn't necessarily mean that
I should build a snowflake for my business
because some of the problems that VMware solves,
you could say that every business in the world
has to solve the same problems.
So why focus on some of those smaller nuisances?
What we've been really after is providing
much more content into the VMUG communities
around transformation, around how more modular
IT architectures are important.
Even beyond the VMUG community,
if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners,
where their core focus was on some
very tightly integrated hardware-based solutions.
Those partners, the more innovative ones,
are now building hybrid applications
across VMware and AWS components
and modernizing enterprises that way.
We're trying to encourage our
VMUG community to do the same thing.
I've had talks with VMUG events this year
talking to them about Edge Compute
and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like.
Part of this is, I think all of us in IT,
we have to have that point in time
where we say "I have to let go,
"I know the market's shifting,
"I know I have to do something different."
If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known
for being a Certified Novell Engineer, right?
Times change and we have to change too,
so it's really important to be prescriptive
and give our community all the tools they need
to evolve with us.
>> Chris, you mention the Greengrass thing
that you have in preview for a bit.
I want you talk about that a little bit
and when I heard Andy Jassy this morning,
he talked about the continuum.
Instances, which underneath,
that's virtualization from VMware.
There's containers and there's serverless.
Andy says if he was to build IWBS today,
he'd build it all serverless.
We know it's not a zero sum game
and nothing changes overnight,
but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight
and containers doesn't go away
now that serverless comes out.
I want you to talk about the Greengrass
and how that spectrum fits into the customers
you're talked to in the VMware journey.
>> I think it's really, really exciting
and certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless.
My 14 year old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom
and he likes to program it to do really fun things.
My favorite example is he had it talking
about who the ugliest person in the world is
and wanted Alexa to name his sister.
There's a part of me that's like "No don't do that, son"
but then the other part's like
"I'm so proud of you." >> That's awesome.
But if we step back, there's this huge press
to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics
and the intelligence to either
where the data's being created
or where the data's being consumed.
We've had a lot of customers come to us jointly,
saying "Look, I can't move the data to the Cloud
"to do deep analytics or machine learning.
"It defies the laws of physics
"or the networking costs are just too much.
"Or there's latency considerations.
"I need a faster transaction execution time."
We have a customer, a joint customer,
where they're monitoring the heat
of the brake pad on a train and they're trying to understand
in real time, how that impacts
the train's maintenance schedule
and when they should take it out of service.
They need to get the intelligence of the Cloud
closer to where these things are occurring.
Let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere.
You heard an announcement of machine learning
on Greengrass today.
To do machine learning,
I need some considerable compute horsepower
to really make it effective.
Most of our customers already have a lot
of that horsepower already out at the edge.
One of our customers has six to 10 servers.
This is very common of a lot of retail organizations,
six to 10 servers per stores times 10,000 stores.
They're trying to do more with IOT and more analytics.
They want to leverage the investments
that they already have an infrastructure.
The other part that's strategically important
to VMware is this: we want to have Cloud services
be able to execute where the data's being created
and that's a natural use case for virtualization.
Then second, we want to have a platform
that can allow the most popular opensource technologies
to also run there to give customers all of that choice.
So for us, it's all about promoting
heterogeneity at the edge.
We see those Cloud services as really
that new generation of application platforms
that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint
of a Cloud data center to say "this is where it has to run."
I want it to run wherever the business requirements
say it needs to run and that's what's important
and that's what we're doing with this announcement.
>> Chris, we talk to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs
and even looking at VMware, trust that part of it
has been very stable in the environment for years,
the product selection can be overwhelming.
CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment
and their strategies in a certain area.
Conversations, where are you telling
CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment?
>> It's a really good question.
You definitely have to have a focus area
and for us, it's about a platform
for rapid agility and innovation.
That's really key.
We don't know what the future's gonna be.
We can guess and you are both two very visionary guys
and you have a general idea of what's gonna happen
over the next 12, 18 months,
but there's things that are just unexpected,
especially in the business context.
We can understand technology,
but business dynamics change very quickly.
Helping CTOs and CIOs understand
how to build a fabric that can make them
more agile and flexible is really key.
That's one.
So, greater automation, greater efficiencies,
rapid innovation, but even more importantly
for a lot that's really top of mind is security.
Giving them a way to do rapid recovery,
being able to start to segment some of their resources,
being able to dynamically offer and adjust security
and understand threats in real time
and combat them in real time is key.
The traditional model of security is:
I have a dynamic threat so I'm gonna have increased layers
of static security to combat it
and I'll just add more layers.
Doesn't work.
We've had customers have massive outages
that we've worked with because
they've had ransomware attacks and things like that,
so they want to be more agile and more dynamic.
Their VMware environments, they've been able
to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching
organizations that they have to think differently.
So really, that security and agility I see
is really top of line for a lot of folks.
>> Chris, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth,
talked to a lot of customers that are interested.
The elephant in the room when
I talk to all of them is cost.
We've looked at Big Bear Metal,
Amazon released that instance.
That's a big hunking instance,
a lot of memory, a lot of networking.
I've talked to a couple customers that said,
"I did the analysis on VMware over AWS
"versus heck, just buying a rack
"and stick it in my environment."
You get a significant difference in there.
One customer is like "Hey, it was 3x the cost
"for me to just buy it and do it myself,
"and I didn't feel I was gonna get any
"operational efficiencies even doing it
"'cause I know VMware and I know how to run it."
What do you say to those customers?
What are they missing?
I'd love any misconceptions
that you're hearing out there.
>> I'll give ya an example.
Let's use the cost analogy.
My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas.
I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo,
but that's actually 3x the cost
of me buying the circuit board kit,
say on Amazon, and soldering in the components myself.
When you think about that in a practical,
real world example, we used to buy motherboards
and build PCs and servers back in the day.
We don't even think about doing it anymore
and even if I could save 25 dollars doing it,
I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things
I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business.
Look, we are--
>> I wanna poke at that.
Because you're partners at Delium Sig
and I buy one of the VX whatever family
from their team.
It's pretty easy to ploy,
I do that.
I understand how to do VMware.
It's not gonna take me months to deploy.
I know how to a VMware environment
and it's that type of configuration.
They're saying it's not building versus buying
and I understand there's a spectrum there,
but just the raw VMware and AWS.
They said "I'm gonna get two bills.
"I'm gonna get one from VMware and one from Amazon"
and the price of it does seem pretty massive
compared to what they were doing.
So, are they wrong about that?
>> I'm really surprised at that.
We're not hearing that from our customers
We're seeing them have very solid
in terms of cost saving, in terms of running on AWS
because unlike a traditional Cloud environment,
I can oversubscribe physical hosts,
I can run more workloads because it is native VMware.
You're also getting additional benefits.
I'm getting V-SAN storage,
I'm getting NSX for networking and security.
To say I'm just gonna take vSphere and compare,
I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison.
There's other aspects that we're providing
that operate in a Cloud environment.
And, listen, we had this before.
Five years ago, people were saying,
"Well, Cloud's too expensive so I'm gonna stay on premises."
We don't even think that way anymore.
There's other benefits that you're getting
in the Cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration
and we've seen VMware Cloud on AWS is
as price competitive as a lot of the native public
Cloud services are without all the added benefits
of networking and security and management
and other things that we throw in.
>> Chris, wanna give you the final word.
What's exciting you these days?
You used to sit on kind of this side of the table,
look at the environment.
You're deep in some of the emerging pieces.
What's getting you excited?
I'd love to hear any final insights
on partnering between VMware and Amazon,
which a lot of us on the outside
are like cats and dogs living together.
>> Okay, let's hit a couple of them.
First, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring
at the edge, I think is extremely exciting.
Driving new use cases around
augmented reality, more machine learning.
How we're looking in terms of moving services
to where data's being generated
instead of moving the data, which is always problematic.
That's a new wave of innovation
that I think is really exciting.
So that's the certainly the area I'd say
that's most exciting for me,
is how we can innovate there.
It's also around hybrid applications.
It's the integration of things like Lambda functions
in a traditional file system.
I was with a major global financial services organization
yesterday and we were not talking about
traditional Lambda function use cases.
We were talking about integrating Lambda with database
and file system events and VM's running on vSphere.
So, there's this whole new way to modernize
applications that we're just at the cusp of.
That pace of innovation's happening faster and faster.
I'll say this about Amazon: we are really committed
to working together and I think what you're seeing
in the industry in general, it's not just VMware
with AWS, but it's with our partners
in the container spaces.
An example is containers as a service
and platform as a service,
is we're being very pragmatic about focusing
on what we're really, really good at.
And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at it,
in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge
and there's natural synergies where we can work
together with Amazon web services.
In my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner.
All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team
and the IOT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market
on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience.
We share lessons learned, we share engineering,
work together.
It's extremely collaborative
because just like all of our technology partners,
there's always areas where we're going to compete
a little bit and there can be some overlap,
but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together
and that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS.
>> Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate
your perspectives, the VMware community engagement,
know you're always open to having some good,
real discussions here, so really appreciate you
coming sharing all our viewpoints.
Congratulations on all the progress here.
We're certainly excited to see where it goes.
>> I appreciate the opportunity.
>> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman.
We'll be back with lots more coverage here.
You're watching theCUBE.
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