[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering VMworld 2017.
Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partner.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017
here in Las Vegas.
Happy to welcome to the program two guests
who are going to dig into what's happening in the cloud space.
A big, big hot topic of the show.
Dave Shacochis, who is the vice president
of product management at CenturyLink,
Ajay Patel, SVP/GM
of now Cloud Provider Software at VMware.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thank you Stu.
>> Nice to see you again Stu.
>> Alright, so Dave.
Here's a question we've asked coming into this week.
VMware was doing this vCloud Air for a bunch of years.
They're a competitor, no they're a partner
with the vCloud network ...
vCloud air now went over to OVH,
and I think they waited 48 hours
before they made this big deal with AWS so,
tell us how the relationship has been
not just one of the 4,500 service providers,
but you're sitting on panels with VMware,
you're one of the larger partners.
>> We were on a panel discussion
and we were talking about this earlier today.
I think when vCloud Air launched
we had some of these same conversations,
and there were probably cube discussions
where almost the same question was asked.
What I said back then, and what a lot of us
in the service provider community said back then,
and we say it again now, is that ...
And this is true, not just of VMware,
but this is true of any enterprise architect,
you run a better system, you build better software
when you're running it 24-7 as a live service.
It's just better.
The software is better.
The user experience is better.
You're thinking about integration angles,
and availability issues.
The software gets better when you run it operationally,
and VMware's technology got better
when they launched vCloud Air
and figured out that their virtualization technology,
what they had been working
with the service provider community around for years,
it improved when they went and launched it
and lived the life of a service provider.
So we're actually excited about that.
We're aligning to the same architecture.
What's nice is that what they're running in the cloud,
in the VMware cloud foundation,
is the same thing we're running
in our cloud-neutral facilities
inside of the CenturyLink data center footprint.
So, it's very interoperable.
>> Ajay please ...
>> So my response would be
there are a few things that I've changed.
One is, there wasn't a Cloud provider
software business unit.
I am dedicated to making the likes of David successful.
Taking that IP and commercializing that,
that's fundamental to our strategy.
Second one is, we rebranded this to VMware cloud providers.
The idea is you can get VMware cloud in one of three ways.
You can build it yourself,
get it on VMware cloud or AWS,
more importantly but get it through our partners.
Your choice based on the best cloud that fits your needs.
So it's that level playing field,
both on go to market,
in terms of Geoff Waters,
now the cloud sales leader over all
of the different programs,
technology, IP being made available,
compensation neutrality ...
These are all the things we "learn" from our VCM experience,
if you will
to do this right.
So that we continue driving multi-cloud strategy,
and certainly about centered around customer choice.
>> Can we talk about the basic difference
between those three delivery methods?
From a customer's perspective,
what's the difference in the look and feel of those?
>> I think at the end of the day it's about getting
VMware value in an integrated fashion.
But that's not just sufficient,
so when you go to cloud it's no longer just say,
"Give me a virtualized environment."
That's the "hard bit" of packaging stuff infrastructure,
but that's not enough value.
On top of that is the application is really the value.
Managing that application, and the life cycle of the value.
This is where the likes of CenturyLink
really come into play.
So we believe we're kind of democratizing
in terms of the consumption of a cloud stack
in one of three ways.
It's really customer preference,
and really how much burden they want to take on.
On the private cloud side they're building it
instead of buying it as a service.
They prefer to go on AWS for whatever reason
for their cloud strategy.
They now have a VMware choice.
Or they can go to a partner like CenturyLink
to help them manage the entire journey
including managing multiple clouds.
So it's really about the customer choice,
what's right for them
versus putting them in a silo.
>> What's really been good for us especially around
the VMware cloud foundation reference architecture is that
it starts to make the private clouds react predictably.
Our offer net has now been architected and based around
VMware Cloud Foundation.
It stands up with the software defined
data center architecture at each layer of the stack.
We don't have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets
in order to make a private cloud app.
We've been running hosted private cloud
for as long as there have been hosted private clouds.
CenturyLink has been managing as part of
the cloud service provider program
and all its earlier naming variances.
But what this latest architecture allows us to do
is not only remove the number of things
that we need to integrate against,
the integration code we need to write
and all the different vendor technologies
we need to orchestrate against it,
it pulls it all into one scale out software,
a divine stack,
which makes our customer experience better.
It drives better self-service, more reliable self-service,
into the hands of our customers
so that they can move faster.
It allows our private cloud to become more predictable
so that we can start managing it
with our multi-cloud cloud application manager product.
So we launched that earlier this year.
It was a combination of some of the managed hosting tools
and capabilities that we've had back in the days.
It combines in the abstraction software we got
from a company called ElasticBox
that we acquired last year.
We weave that together into one multi-cloud layer,
so it now looks at private clouds
and other public clouds as just another deployment
destination on that multi-cloud managing journey.
>> Effectively competition moving above the SVC layer.
We're kind of making SVC common.
Let's compete on the value,
and the solution that we both want.
>> Ironically this was the promise of open source projects
to make this common platform across private,
public, and multi-clouds.
You use the term that a lot of people
may not be familiar with, cloud neutral facilities.
What is that term?
>> A cloud neutral facility is one that
can basically get you connected
to a number of different cloud deployment form factors.
It's not a one note show, a one approach kind of model.
It's really about a service provider that from...
When you said the term facility,
that can really just be a service provider environment
that basically gets the particular workload
to the best execution venue
for that individual set of run time conditions.
To us, being in more of a cloud neutral posture,
certainly means we're bringing some parts
of our hosted environment, whether it's private or
We have a multi-tenant environment
that we can provision to as well.
We use that multi-tenant environment to actually
speed up our own development of higher level services.
And then we partner across the different
cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
We tie into that.
It's really about looking at the data center
as an extension of all the potential run time venues,
both ones that you might build on your own,
and then ones that are available to you.
>> Dave, I want you to expand on that.
One of the things I've been getting out of this week
is that maturation of how we've been talking about clouds.
A couple years ago I was critical of VMware.
It was like, any device, any application, one cloud.
I was like "Wrong".
No.
Amazon.
Absolutely, 100 percent public cloud ...
I think they understand, if not 100 percent,
we'll see where Amazon goes in the future.
You said you're tying into the likes of Amazon and Azure.
I'm assuming that's direct connect,
and those kinds of services.
How do we think of CenturyLink?
Where do you add value?
How do you make money in these various pieces?
I remember (old company name)
was one of the vCloud era data centers,
and boy margins were going to be real tight
on something like that.
>> Our multi-cloud posture
and the direction we see things going
is really one that starts
and the largest anchor point for CenturyLink's strategy
is the strength of our network.
It's all the places that that network can take us.
A lot of the investments that we've made
in virtualization management,
a lot of the investments we've made
around managing workloads
inside data centers we control
has really been a precursor to how we need
to evolve the core of our network,
and how our networking is becoming more software defined.
We built and we launched, as I said before,
CenturyLink Cloud which is
a multi-tenant hosting environment.
That has been a huge IT accelerator for us.
As we've started to advance and start to figure out
how do we manage virtualization
inside the core of our points of presence on the network,
and as our network starts to expand,
as most folks know,
we're in the closing stages
of the announced acquisition of level three,
as that transaction completes
and the whole network gets even stronger,
and now we have more software assets to be able to drive
even further into the core of that network.
So it starts from the network
and everything we do from either a cloud neutral
or multi-cloud perspective is really
around helping customers at the workload layer
to really thicken that network value proposition.
>> I'm also excited about the whole notion
of competing on the edge.
And once you have a network of this scale,
and the ability to then distribute, compute,
either on the edge, consult in the back,
or even leverage third party probably clouds,
seamlessly with a high bandwidth, low jitter network.
I think that's a foundational infrastructure that's needed.
These guys have really done a good job
of kind of bringing that to bear.
Pretty excited about that opportunity.
>> Ajay, wondering if you can give us a little color
on service providers.
When I go to most service providers, most of them,
networking key strength, obviously we know CenturyLink,
Telco, all that kind of background.
Management layer.
Most service providers build their own.
So there's a lot of pieces now,
when I see the cloud foundation suite
and they're embracing it.
How did you work through some of those,
"Hey, no, we've got our way of doing things.
We know better."
As opposed to embracing them.
Where is that give and take?
>> I think what's happening is,
depending on the sophistication of the service provider,
the larger ones have the ability to kind of create
a bare metal service,
kind of drive higher automation,
have the infrastructure spend to drive that.
As you go a little bit down the market,
they're really looking for "a cloud in a box".
You and I spoke about this last year, right?
They want an easy to type experience for the end customers
without the cost and the complexity of building one.
So my opportunity as a service provider business is,
how do I give them that platform?
That multi-tenant platform that can cover resources?
But in the future, elastically leverage a VMware cloud
on AWS, right, as an endpoint
that they can start to use for geo distribution, DR,
or simply new capacity.
So we're going to see a world where they're going to start mixing
and matching what they build,
what they buy and how they drive that.
And the management solution around that,
around a high performance network,
is going to be the future that I see together.
>> So one of the buzzwords over the past few year
in the industry has been the invisible infrastructure.
This concept that infrastructure should be something
that people use and don't see.
How does CenturyLink help support,
not necessarily making an invisible infrastructure,
but this concept that this is something
we use and don't see.
From the network,
to the software layer that we're now talking about.
Where's the differentiating value that CenturyLink brings
versus me rolling my own?
>> Yeah, I think where we've been making
most of our investments,
and where we've been driving and focusing on success
for our customers has been up at that managed services
and application layer.
The way we view the infrastructure layer of the stack ...
When we think of stacks,
we think of the network at the base level of the foundation,
data center infrastructure at the next tier up
and then workloads and applications.
It's not a groundbreaking tiered model,
but it's helped me kind of think and organize
a lot of what's in our business.
When it comes to the infrastructure layer, as I said before,
we're in a highly interoperable posture
with a lot of the other partner clouds,
because our network can link us there pretty seamlessly,
and because we still know how to orchestrate enough
at the infrastructure layer.
But the investment has really been
inside the core of the network,
as we start driving that virtualization
capabilities into the core,
and then up at the workload layer,
what we're really trying to work around is creating,
as in all computer science problems, an abstraction layer.
The trick about an abstraction layer
in our part of the world,
and in our part of the industry
is not creating one that creates a new layer of lock in.
That allows each of the individual underpinning
infrastructure venues to do their thing,
and do what they're good at.
We build that abstraction layer with the idea
of a best execution venue mindset that lets each of those
individual underpinning infrastructure offerings,
whether its the VCF architecture or hosted up on AWS,
or whether it's one
of the other particular software platforms
because of geography or performance,
or service capabilities that they're good at.
The trick of creating an abstraction layer
is not locking anybody in or reducing those platforms
to lowest common denominator.
So what our cloud application manager offering
being able to manage our private cloud based on VCF,
as well as manage other environments down the road ...
That's really where we try to make that infrastructure
invisible is to sort of create
a lightweight abstraction layer
that they can think more at the workload layer
than at the individual nuts and bolts layer.
>> The great thing about creating an abstraction layer,
when you own the underlying infrastructure,
it makes it a lot easier to support.
So I want to make sure that I understand this concept
from the ground up.
You talked about the network as being the glue
or the foundation that ties all this together,
especially with the level three acquisition.
From an ILT perspective, if I need those far flung services
I have the physical network capability to get it there.
If I need to put (data terminology) in at the edge,
we just had a guest on talking about (data terminology),
and at the edge.
And get that data into a CenturyLink data center
using VCF to get it there
and consistently have that same level of abstraction,
and then I can build cloud native applications
on Azure, Google Compute...
(cross talking)
and it's a consistent experience across
that whole abstraction layer.
>> Right.
Right.
Going back to that idea that,
what we call the hybrid IT stack
of network infrastructure and workloads,
what we're trying to build
is a platform that spans those layers,
that doesn't try to own or be one
or indifferentiate at one of those layers,
is build a connective tissue that spans them,
so a workload running on the right
infrastructure venue connected to the right networks.
We're investing in orchestration that crosses all of that,
and it's really some of the great conversations
we've been having this week with VMware
about what they're thinking,
we think PTS is interesting
because container based deployment models
are going to be what makes the most sense
as you get further into the core of the network
and out towards the edge.
We think Pulse is interesting.
As we start to do more things in our smart cities,
and smart venue type of initiatives,
that we're doing at the
Internet Of Things solutions base as well.
>> Ajay, last thing I want to get to is
when you look at your partners, how do you see them?
Both that similarity that they're going to have,
but how do they differentiate,
and also how will they participate
in the VMware on AWS piece that we've been talking about?
>> Yes, so I think I'll break it into two parts.
As I talk to customers, the consistent feedback I get
is we made resource consumption ubiquitous.
And we're hoping to standardize that
with VMware Cloud Foundation and other approaches.
What's hard is the experienced skillset
and knowledge of how to use this technology.
So increasingly we're constrained with the folks
who know how to take this complexity,
put an organized plan together,
and drive the set of value in our own applications.
So I believe the cloud provider program
and the partnership is really about moving up
from trying to build infrastructure, to build solutions,
and offer value to our partners.
And the differentiation is really moving up stack
in terms that manage services value.
The second part is- They themselves now have a choice.
If I'm a regional player,
or customer who, everyone's a multinational nowadays,
you always have some customer
who happens to reach beyond the boundaries ...
How do I now go into a new market?
How can I leverage VMware Cloud
on AWS as another data center?
So the management technology we're trying to provide is
we will priority manage your endpoint, customer endpoint,
or even VMware Cloud.
You mix and match what makes business sense.
Then abstract the complexity.
As we talked about the cloud as a new hardware.
How do we take that infrastructure and really make it easy?
And the issues are on security, management,
are going to be different ...
So, application usage, value added services,
being able to leverage resources,
build or buy is really the basis of our strategy.
>> Yep.
So we're excited to ...
As we know that that program starts to expand
a little bit more in 2018
and we've had some early discussions
with the VMware team around what that starts to look like,
but at our most foundational level,
because what we're already launching
and what we launched here this week at VMware
is just what we call our dedicated cloud compute product,
which is now based
on the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture.
It's going to look the exact same
as the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture
that runs in AWS.
Our approach towards managing both
is to let their own individual control panels
do what they do best,
but then manage over the top of it
with our cloud application manager service.
>> Dave and Ajay.
Thank you so much for sharing with us all the updates.
Look forward to watching the continued maturation
and development of what's happening
in the cloud environment.
>> Great chat, thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Keith Townsend and I will be back with lots more
coverage here of VMworld 2017.
You're watching theCUBE.
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