>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering AWS re:Invent 2018.
Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel,
and their ecosystem partners.
>> And welcome back once again here,
to Hall D in the Sands Expo.
We're at AWS re:Invent for the third day
of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE,
of this fantastic show.
Justin Warren, John Walls.
We're now joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar,
who is the SVP and GM of managed public cloud at Rackspace.
Prashanth, good to see you this morning.
>> Absolutely, thank you for having me.
>> You bet, and Ajay Patel who is the SVP and GM
of cloud provider services at VMware.
Good morning, to you as well
>> Glad to be here, good morning.
>> Alright, first off, let's just talk about
Rackspace, a little bit, if we can Prashanth.
You're kind of going through this metamorphosis, right?
This transformation of sorts.
So kind of get us up to speed a little bit about your journey,
about where you've been and where you're going.
>> Yeah absolutely, I'd love to.
I think Rackspace has been been on a phenomenal journey
over the past 20 years.
This is our 20th year anniversary as a company.
So obviously we've been know historically
for our managed hosting DNA
and we came from that, a long time ago.
But over the years, we very much are very,
very focused on customers,
just like Amazon is and VMware is
and we really thought about, how do we make sure
that we're at where our customers want to go.
And so we evolved effectively to support
the leading technologies in either the public cloud space,
like an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba
or in the private cloud space with VMware
and even our own OpenStack Private Cloud deployments,
along with our traditional managed hosting business.
So over the years, and also with a very,
very phenomenal new owner in Apollo,
we've been transforming as a company
that's truly a next generation IT services company,
looking to take enterprises into the future,
at their pace by the way,
meeting them where they are
and really making sure that we bring to bare,
really, best of read services, cloud services,
to really kind of manage their transition into the cloud
and to make the most of that investment.
>> Yeah, use that carrot approach, right?
Not the-- >> That's right, that's right.
>> Bring them along gently which many people need.
Alright, so each of you has your expertise.
I'm talking about the companies here.
But now this partnership, this synergy that you have,
it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate in a way, right?
Great combination!
Everybody's going to love it!
Talk about that partnership and how it's come together
and how that's playing out right now.
>> Yeah-- >> So from a
philosophy perspective, we're both goal aligned, right?
We're starting to see this world being a multi-cloud world
and more importantly,
it's all about the customer on their journey.
They're going to have existing assets, existing data centers,
for a long time.
They're going to need support
in terms of the legacy applications
but also they replatform, rehost,
and modernize the application.
And they need a strategic partner,
so Rackspace sees the same way.
Starting to provide that set of choice
and help the customer on their journey, at their own pace,
enabled by a common technology platform.
And so us as a company, we've also transformed ourself
from we're going to be a vSphere-only company,
to starting to embrace public clouds.
Whether it's VMware cloud on AWS
or our recent CloudHealth acquisition,
which allows us to start managing native public cloud.
So in this journey, we're seeing ourself as peanut butter
and chocolate, as you said,
working together, hand-in-hand for the benefit
of our customers.
>> Yeah, I really love that analogy and thank you for it,
because in some ways, VMware and Rackspace, are very much,
our philosophies are exactly the same
in terms of where the customer journey is,
but we approach the problem with two different angles.
One, we come from it from a technology-services angle,
'cause we're a service company at heart, right?
We're fanatical experience and we're known for that,
and VMware is obviously a phenomenal,
technology platform company.
But we both believe in a multi-cloud and a hyper-cloud world
where we see that, hey, the journey to the cloud is a
very, very, long-standing one.
We're in the early innings of this,
where customer workloads are actually moving
and this is, you can talk about the projections,
you're literally probably over a trillion dollars spent
over the next decade or so
that's going to move >> in the cloud, exactly.
>> with this very form factor, so it's a really exciting time
and we're really, really aligned with our partners
with VMware and of course AWS
and the other public cloud partners.
>> Yeah so, you mentioned that we are at the beginning.
This is just the start of how things are working,
So with customers who are looking
at this transformation journey
and trying to make this decision about,
what do I keep onsite, what do I transform,
what do I re-platform, what do I just completely replace
with something new and let the old one die.
How do you help customers make those decisions?
>> Yes, absolutely, so this is the heart
of what Rackspace is doing for our customers today, right?
We are very much a company
that's basically taking a very unbiased approach upfront.
We're taking about literally,
thinking about the planning stage
and assessing their workloads,
going through an application assessment
and doing all the work that's required to understand,
you know what, which workloads need to go on each
of the public clouds?
Which one runs well on Amazon?
Which ones actually should be better leveraged on a VMware
on AWS sort of scenario and so on, right?
So there's a very deep assessment that's done upfront
and then we go through the process of architecting
and deploying, based on best practices
that we've gained from, by the way,
thousands of these customers that we've actually moved
and then actually managing and operating
in these environments, which we've been talking about
at Rackspace, that's our DNA,
and optimizing those environments, for cost
and the greatest and latest of features that any
of these providers provide.
So that's the journey and the way we do that is,
using a true next-generation cloud services
set of capabilities which we announced a couple weeks ago
in a press release and that includes something
with a notion of service blocks, as we call at Rackspace,
service blocks where you're literally able to mix
and match all the things
that I just mentioned along the journey,
dependent on where the customer is on their journey.
So we could say, let's focus just on architecting,
deploying and migrating apps and that's it.
That's what the enterprise wants,
because they want to enable an internal,
focused motion to manage these,
and they want to skill up their internal people to do that.
Or you might encounter a company that actually wants us
to actually manage the whole thing,
and that's fine too.
And then maybe, by the way,
nine months into their experience that they realize that
or later down the line, they want us to help 'em
with cost optimization or Kubernetes expertise
to actually move into the container world.
So that whole curve and the transitioning
through that process,
is our job to make sure, meet the customer where they are
and make sure we deliver value very specifically
at that point in time, for them, and not be,
not put customers into some long-term,
monolithic sort of contract.
So really being agile around us.
>> You know it's funny, it's very interesting,
because as you see the complexity has only gone up.
It hasn't gone down.
That's when you talk about cloud benefits,
the amount of services being launched,
the complexity of all the different technologies.
Rackspace is uniquely set up,
they're going to have their VMware expertise
and the AWS certified partners,
that we can start to bring the value together.
So we're excited about kind of mixing and matching
and kind of this modular set of services and capability,
that you can bring to bare for the customers.
So I think, it actually puts us
in a unique position in some ways, right?
To be that trusted partner as we move on this journey.
>> And to put some numbers around that, very specifically,
that Ajay said, we have over a thousand, no,
eleven hundred Amazon certified certifications at Rackspace.
We have probably a very similar number of VMware, right?
Over a thousand VMware people
that actually service customers and that's all--
>> With Enterprise DNN Enterprise support, right?
>> That's correct, that's right, and then ultimately we know
that combination of expertise is very material in that scale
for our customers to be able to leverage.
>> So Ajay, you've got a long history
with the Enterprise customers.
The people have been using VMware for a long, long, time.
What are you seeing from your existing customer base?
What kind of technologies are they interested in?
What are they moving to?
Where is the momentum?
>> So, clearly the excitement hype is around containers,
Kubernetes, serverless, et cetera.
But their bread and butter workloads,
are existing applications.
They're looking to optimize their data center costs,
some trying to eliminate data centers,
they're looking to lift
and shift entire landscapes of application,
move them to cloud.
They're looking for expertise,
building a center of excellence.
Start up a prominent operation model
or on a multi-cloud world
So they're now starting to hit, what I call,
real-world problems, where the experiments are working,
they need to now create operational model around it
and it's starting to go back to the trusted partners,
VMware is a platform provider,
Rackspace is a trusted managed services provider.
Whether it's up front and design or to help operate.
So we're starting to see this maturities coming in place
and cost is not really the driver.
They're starting to find
that public out cost is actually an issue.
So cost management too.
If you just walk around the shop floor,
it's all about cost management, security, visibility.
These are all signs of a maturing market.
>> And because of that, and you talk about a maturing market,
if I'm just now making my entry, alright?
I've decided, hey we're running our company,
it's time to jump into the public cloud.
Is there benefit to us being maybe a bit--
>> A bit more lore? >> more reticent
yeah, than others, because there've been
other growing pains,
you've already kind of, you've found where the wrinkles were
and so we will benefit by those past experiences?
>> Absolutely, yeah. >> So I'm giving you a chance,
I mean talk to somebody who hasn't made that commitment yet,
and they're thinking
I'm so far behind >> Yes.
>> But they're not.
>> Yeah, I mean I think this is a spot-on point, right?
So when we work with enterprises,
what we're really seeing is that,
let's say a company has got 10 divisions within the company
and you know, generally speaking,
you've got maybe a couple divisions that have gone
ahead of the pack.
They've already done it, because they actually went
with the cloud curve.
They're leading the world internally.
They're being the internal sponsors and the champions
for the movement and you've got some laggards
along the way as well.
So Rackspace, our job is to really bring true up,
if you will, the level of capability with the groups
that are actually lagging.
And also, not to do it in an artificial way,
but actually do it on their terms,
to say, you know what, you may not be ready for,
a containerized world tomorrow.
Maybe you actually start leveraging basic, easy to,
and that's the way to get started.
Which is fewer and fewer number of companies
that are not there already,
but the ability for you to move along
and use advanced services, that's our job,
to keep moving them and encouraging them to do it,
bu enabling them through our tooling that we built
and leveraging through partners like VMware
or even on the top of each of the public clouds
that we built, proprietary tooling,
or through the expertise that we bring up to bat.
So that's the combination.
>> It's never to late to get started,
so for customers who might've just decided that,
actually I've decided, yes,
it's time to go to cloud, I'm ready.
How do they begin?
How should they start on this journey?
How would they start to engage with you?
>> Yeah, I think for us, it's a what we've noticed,
is that it's very important to just make sure
that you take a success-based and phase-based approach.
And so, starting with a place in the organization,
where it actually makes a difference,
there's a differentiated set of applications
that are going to make a difference for the customer
that they're trying to serve.
Or it could be, listen,
they have actually a problem where they have 27 DC's,
as a customer that I was talking to yesterday
that is about to join us,
they're trying to consolidate down to six data centers
over the next two years.
So how do you go about that problem
of doing DC consolidation and how do you figure out
which workloads go on which platform, et cetera.
So starting with some very specific problems,
could be as big as a DC problem,
or it could be as specific as, let's go work
on this very specific differentiated critical application
on the cloud et cetera,
and that really creates a mushrooming effect,
'cause you notice the difference it makes in terms of
developer productivity, your agility,
your ability to deploy coded production multiple times
and that just drives, you know, it gains the attention of,
what we've seen is,
that finally gets the attention of the CIO in the company
and then the CIO is like, listen I better get control
of this, because in some situations we have hundreds
and thousands of Amazon accounts within these organizations,
that they ultimately now want governance and visibility,
and so that's when it starts creating a more holistic,
enterprise-wide strategy around cloud and adoption
and one of the various form factors they should use,
to actually to keep moving on.
So really it's mushrooming with a center of excellence
and a sponsor or a line of business that's really starting
and that's really where we've seen success.
>> You know one other thing I'll add to that is,
the guys who are fast followers now,
are getting the benefit of hindsight of other partners,
as you just said.
And couple things I'm starting to see in the market.
They're starting to make some strategic bets.
They're picking a strategic technology partner
from a technology platform perspective.
They're looking for a strategic service provider partner,
a managed service partner.
And they're starting to look at them as trusted partners.
The conversations are moving away from being transactional,
to more success oriented.
Now even Andy talk about that.
It's really about outcomes and in this journey,
I think you're starting to find the right partners,
building the core competency within your organization
and finding those sustaining technology platform choices
that guide you through this hybrid world.
That's what the world went with,
the battlefield now is all about hybrid.
It's no longer about private or public.
Everyone's just, even Amazon finally recognized,
the world is a hybrid
with their outpost announcement, right?
And starting to look at how do I work in this hybrid world
and what's the right operating model.
So it's a really interesting time to kind of make,
say look, the world is going to be public and private,
how do I operate in this?
>> Cloud all the things
>> Makes sense.
I do want to say, before we say goodbye,
that when Prashanth was talking about laggards,
he was really looking at us
(all laughing) an awful lot,
but I don't know, I don't know what to make of that,
but we won't take it too personally
>> Might be the beard maybe.
>> Thanks for being with us.
>> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having us,
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thank you gentlemen.
Back with more from AWS re:Invent.
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