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