 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host, covering all the action for VMworld. Not in person this year, it's virtual. So I'm bringing you the virtual interviews remotely. We've got two great guests here. Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Cloud Services Business Unit at VMware. And David Brown is the Vice President for EC2 at AWS, Amazon Web Services, both CUBE alumni. Great to see you guys remotely. Thanks for coming on. Great to be back. Thanks for being here too. So at first, VMworld is not face-to-face. Usually it's a great event. Reinvent's also going to be virtual. Again, it's, you know, we're going to get the content out there, but people still got to know the news and got to know what's going on. I remember three years ago, I interviewed Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy in San Francisco on the big announcement of AWS and VMware, VMware on AWS. Really since then, what a great partnership. Not only has VMware cleaned up their clarity around cloud, but the business performance mark has been phenomenal. Congratulations. All the data that we're reporting shows customers are leaning into it heavily. Great adoption and super happy success. AWS, congratulations as well for great partnership. Mark, three years was the industry-defining partnership. A lot of people were skeptical. We were on the right side of history. I got to say, we called it. That's right. Give us an update. Yeah, no, look, we're super excited. Like you said, it's the third year anniversary of this game-changing partnership. And look, the relationship could not be stronger, right? Across engineering, the product teams, the go-to-market teams, really getting stronger and deeper every day. And at the end of the day, you know, of course what it's about is innovating on behalf of our customers, delivering compelling new capabilities that allow them to migrate and modernize. And, you know, look, we're just really pleased with the partnership, right? And I think as a result of that depth of joint engineering, building and delivering the service together, you know, we're proud to be able to say that AWS is our preferred public cloud partner for v-surface workloads. You know, I remember at the time, David talking to Terry Wise on AWS side, Andy, of course, and Ragu, the architect for this vision of the partnership. And this changed how VMware has been doing partnerships. And I want to talk about that because I think that's a great use case of what I call the new cloud-native reality that everyone's living in. But before we get there, Mark, there's some news tied around AWS and VMware. Could you take a minute to share the news around what's going on with VMworld, TENZU, you got Kinect, you got all kinds of enhancements. What is the update on the news? Yeah, sure. So, you know, we continue to listen closely to our customers and continue to deliver them new value, new capabilities. And a few things we're going to highlight at VMworld. The first is we've heard from many customers, you know, they love the ability to rapidly migrate their v-surface workloads to the AWS cloud. And VMC on AWS is really a game changer from that perspective. And so that continues to be a really, really compelling use case for many customers. But what they've also said to us is, look, it's not just about migrating to the cloud, it's also about migrating and then modernizing. And so together with AWS, we have really brought together the richest set of tools for our customers to enable them to modernize those applications. Of course, as we've talked about before, customers have access to the full, rich set of AWS services. And then within VMware Cloud and AWS, we're now announcing support for native Kubernetes capabilities within VMware Cloud and AWS, taking advantage of the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service. So really excited about bringing that service in particular to our joint customers. And then the other kind of key innovation that we're going to be talking about is around networking, right? And as our customer environments get larger and larger, and they're looking to create fairly sophisticated apologies between their on-prem data center, between multiple VMC and AWS instances, and between perhaps multiple native AWS VPCs, we've done a lot of work together to really simplify the way that customers can connect all of those environments together. And maybe Dave wants to talk a little bit about that. Yeah, Dave, chime in. What's the news on your end too? What's the relationship and update from the Amazon side for VMworld? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the partnership has just been incredible working with VMware right from four years ago when we first started with the idea of what could AWS and VMware do together. I think we've seen really deep engineering engagement, but also leadership engagement and support from leadership on both sides, which has really set us up for the partnership that we have today, which has been phenomenal. You know, Mark was just talking about the transit connect feature that VMware is adopting. And what you're really seeing there is years of innovation on the networking side of EC2, where we've really understood deeply what customers need from a network, understood the fact that they're trying to recreate some of those large network topologies that they're doing on-premise and then trying to support them in a cloud way or supporting them in a cloud-like way. And so transit gateway is the service under the hood that we released about two years ago at Reinvent. And so what we've been doing with VMware is working out what does transit gateway mean within the VMware environment? And so really bringing customers that rich connectivity that they need, whether it's between their VPCs, between the VMware environments, even back to on-prem or between regions. And so that's what transit connect now on VMware is going to be utilizing and bringing to customers. So we're pretty excited about, you know, what that means for our end customer. You know, one of the trends I see coming out all the announcements, David, I want to get your thoughts on it because we talked briefly a few months ago for your summit, virtual, but I want you to kind of put it in context of VMware because you're seeing virtualization of physical things, you know, NICs with Project Monterey and all the stuff with NVIDIA and software, EC2, you guys have seen this vision, not just compute, but you talked about networking. You know, you have the, really the first time this convergence of physical-owned software virtual. And this is not new to you guys. I know this is the premise of Amazon Cloud. First, you have the building blocks S3 and EC2, but now slew of other services. But this trend is going to continue certainly with COVID and work at home. There's more need for more compute, more different kinds of compute. You got the physical layer from the network of the devices. This isn't going to go away. I mean, I would just did some interviews about space force and talking about software-defined devices. You can't do break fix in space. So, you know, all this is going to be done with software and this idea of the physical virtual coming together. I mean, I know I love the virtual cube. We're not in person, which we were, but this virtualization trend around the hardware, this is all about EC, what EC is doing over years. How does that relate to VMware customer? So, I mean, I think the VMware customers experience virtualization, right? Long before EC2 was around as well, when VMware back in the day with VMware Workstation, it's kind of central to what they've been able to do. You know, being able to virtualize environments, being able to stand up environments ready really quickly on a physical machine is what VMware has brought for the customer. EC2 started in a similar place. You know, the strength of EC2 was being able to get a VM in a few minutes. And, you know, we've just grown the, what we can support in a virtualized world. So you think about where we started with very simple machines, you know, today you're supporting things like HPC and advanced, you know, accelerators like GPUs and FPGAs. And so we've really pushed the virtual world. Interestingly enough, you know, VMware was obviously doing the same thing with their hypervisor and, you know, many, many happy customers there. The real interesting thing is through the innovation that we were doing on the EC2 side to work out how do we really get the most out of virtualization, right? Historically, virtualization has been plagued with things like Jitter and, you know, just performance, you couldn't really get the network performance there or the CPU would stall. And those are sort of the old issues. The cloud and the innovation we've been doing has largely gotten rid of those. And so it's actually almost the ability to remove the virtualization from EC2 that really was the ingredient that enabled us to allow VMware to run on us. And so that's where it all started back in late 2016 when we started to work with the VMware team saying, you know, we've actually built the ability through our nitro system to not require our virtualization layer. And then we could replace that virtualization with a VMware virtualization layer. And that set us up for what we have today, right? That made VMware on AWS a reality that gave the VMware customer, you know, the full VMware virtualization support, which is what their applications have been built for. That's what they've really come through to love. I don't want to change all of that when they move to the cloud. And so being able to move those workloads to the cloud for VMware, you know, on AWS and get the benefit of great hardware design together with the great top advisor from VMware. Obviously it's all virtual at the end of the day with a lot of innovation that we need to make in that hub. Mark, I want to get your thoughts on this because I remember when we, again, years ago when we covered it, we again, on the right side of history of the prediction, we said it's going to be a great thing for AWS and VMware. Some of the other commentary was at that time was, oh my God, VMware's lost, it's capitulated. Amazon is going to suck all the thousands and thousands of VMware customers into the cloud and they're going to eat them up in VMware is going to be sitting there, you know, inside of the road. Okay, not the case. Your business performance has been exceptional. Okay, the customers have been resonating with their offering. It's been a win-win. Can you talk about the business momentum and how this continues to go? Because again, everyone got it wrong on that side. This has been exactly how you guys had teed it up. I mean, a little bit here and then not exactly, but from a business perspective, it hit the mark. What's your thoughts? Yeah, no, look, we've been incredibly pleased that the customer adoption that we've seen for the service, in fact, the total workload count on the service has increased by over 140% versus this time last year. So clearly customers are adopting the service at a large scale and growing rapidly. But I think if you sort of peel that back a little bit, it's really driven by the use cases and the value that we're able to deliver to customers. And so if you're a customer that's got a vSphere-based workload in your own data center and you want to move to the AWS cloud, the fastest, lowest cost, lowest risk way to move that workload is using VMware Cloud on AWS. And so it's that use case that's powering a lot of that consumption. Another interesting use case that's driving a lot of demand and that we continue to invest and expand is disaster recovery. So there's some customers that still want to run some workloads in their own data centers, but they'd like to be able to leverage the public cloud as a target for disaster recovery. And if you think about it, you're talking about cloud delivered as a service and the elasticity and all of those benefits, those really play out strongly in the DR use case where you only really want to spin up that capacity in the scenario where you actually need it, right in the case of an actual disaster. And so VMware recently acquired a company called Datrium and we're using that technology to enable a new service we call VMware Cloud DR on top of the VMC on AWS offering. And this is a really powerful capability because it allows our customers to significantly reduce the cost of disaster recovery by taking advantage of AWS's low cost S3 storage combined with some unique capabilities in the Datrium service that allow us to store the VMDKs very cost effectively on that S3 storage. And then in the case of a disaster, we can spin up those hosts. Dave talked about the Nitro hosts, I can spin up those bare metal hosts with the VMware hypervisor on it and automatically restart those workloads without requiring any VM conversion because of course it's all all these surveys, right? So, we're really pleased with the business performance but sort of behind that, of course, it's the value that we can deliver to our joint customers together. You know, the integration thing is interesting. And again, I think the success is that there's a partnership at the highest levels and trickles down into engineering. David, talk about what's next for AWS because, you know, after cloud, you've got cloud native. The integrations are going to be needed across more partners and more customers but they don't want to do the heavy lifting, right? So, if I'm a customer like, hey, you know what, I just want more cloud scale, I want more cloud capabilities but I don't want to do all this integration. How does Amazon view that conversation? Because again, that's one of the things that every interview, every reinvent, every time I talk to Andy and the team, it's undifferentiated heavy lifting. What are customers asking for from you guys, VMware customers and what's your thoughts on this? What are you guys thinking about right now? Absolutely. I think Mark had a couple of key points there as well or I did customer use case. So if I have a workload today that I run in my data center or if I'm running a COLA facility, whatever it might be and I've run it for many years. In many cases, we're working with customers and industries like healthcare and finance, where they've actually had these applications qualified or certified to actually run on that hardware. And so requiring them to move to a different hypervisor is obviously a really big lift and may slow down the ultimate migration to the cloud. And so having VMware cloud on AWS and the ability to say to those customers, just bring your application and your workload and honestly the benefit of the entire ecosystem that VMware provides and come and enjoy that on AWS and burst into AWS. And so that's just been enormously beneficial for our end customer for AWS and for VMware. I think that's the thing that really makes the partnership incredibly strong. And from there, these customers can pivot. And so one of the things that we've been doing together with VMware is ongoing innovation. So we recently just launched support for our I3EN storage instance type which offers up to 50% discounting storage per gig with VMware. And there's a lot that went into that behind the scenes to make sure that that instance type is perfectly tuned for what VMware needed for their end customer. We're very excited to get that out there and many, many customers are excited about the benefit that that brings to them. So they get in all the benefit of AWS innovation while they keep the benefits that they've been enjoying on the VMware side. And this speaks to the largest sort of approach that AWS has taken in several industries or across several industries. VMware I think is probably the best example of that. But if you look at many other areas like our networking products, customers will often come to us and say, I love using a certain type of load balance. So I love using this firewall within my environment. And we have great partnerships with all those companies to say, if your customer or our joint customer wants to use whatever appliance, whatever application, we have a full marketplace full of thousands of applications that are all certified to run on us. We want to make sure we can meet those customers where they are and simplify that progression story for them as much as we can. All right, so I got to put you guys in the spot. Mark, we'll start with you. Can't give the same answer to the same question. The question is, what are the customers most happy with with the partnership from a feature perspective? What's the one, what would you say, Mark, is the big aha, this really is amazing. I'm so happy because of this feature capability. Yeah, yeah, I mean, a little bit back to the discussion we were having before, but I think, you know, the killer use case really for the service today is that cloud migration use case I was talking about before. And if you think about what it might have taken them previously, right, you know, expensive, time consuming, you know, it requires changes to their environment in some cases with VMware cloud and AWS. We can take the cloud migration that would previously been taking them perhaps years, millions or tens of millions of dollars. And we can shrink that down to literally months, right? We have some customers like MIT that migrated hundreds of applications literally over a weekend, right? And we're able to do that because it's the same core enterprise class VMware capabilities that the customers already optimized their application to run on in their own data centers that now we've enabled on AWS as a cloud service. So that cloud migration use case kind of combined with the fact that we're, that we're delivered to them as a service in the AWS cloud, I think is, you know, one of the use cases that a lot of customers find extremely attractive. All right, David, your turn from an AWS perspective, what are people happy with you for on this partnership? What praises are you getting sung your way when someone says, hey man, this partnership has been great. Amazon really is awesome for this. What would you say to that? So I, you know, Mark spoke about the migration. I was going to choose sort of, you know, once they're in AWS, the benefits of the cloud breaks right to the ability to scale on demand. I think one of the great things about VMware Cloud and AWS that VMware did is they really built it as a cloud native service. And so, you know, the customers are able to provision additional capacity very easily. We have that capacity available on AWS. And so they're able to meet any sort of unexpected demand of scale. And then together with the breadth of services that we have on AWS as well, you know, and we've thought very carefully about how a VMware customer would want to consume those and to make sure that the whole system set up to allow that to happen. And so allowing them to broaden what they're using over time as their engineers and teams find other services that allow them to innovate faster and build more interesting applications. So it integrates incredibly well between AWS and VMware and customers benefit from that. I want to ask you guys some more on the industry side to comment on cloud native, mainly because one, we cover it and two, it's kind of an important trend. Recently, Snowflake went public, it's the largest IPO in the history of Wall Street and it's an enterprise company. Okay. And I was using that as an example because actually VMware was the second most popular IPO happens to be another enterprise company. And I was commenting on this and I want to get your reaction to it. And that is, is that if you look at the mega trend that's going on now of all the things people talk about, it's the cloud native that's the most interesting because this is all the value. If you look at the modern applications all the way down to the networking, everything in between, it's all about cloud native. And it's not just about cloud, public cloud, it's not about, it's an operating model. And we talk about that. But cloud native is the big wave that people are on. And if you're on it, you're modern. This is not just, you know, hand waving. It's legit. I mean, you're seeing benefits of it, you're seeing speed, time to value, all the things that people talk about at the events. Could you guys comment on why cloud native is so important today and why customers and developers should be really thinking through what that is for them? David, we'll start with you. Yeah, absolutely. So for us, cloud native really means, have you built your application in a way that takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud? And so are you able to scale the application horizontally? Are you able to build in a way that's redundant across multiple data centers? Are you able to utilize services that are provided by AWS or the cloud provider to not have your teams build that? And so what it ultimately means is you're able to spend more time focused on building stuff that really matters for your applications. So you mentioned Snowflake. They're a great AWS customer, work very closely with them and they're able to have us run a lot of the infrastructure, all the infrastructure for them in the cloud and they can really focus on building an absolutely incredible data warehousing solution for their end customer and we innovate very closely with them. And so that's really what it means. And I think organizations that have gotten themselves there really get a lot of benefit. They're able to innovate faster. They're able to deliver more to the end customer. We spend a lot of time with companies that you wouldn't say are cloud native today. And as a cloud provider, as exciting as it is to support the cloud native customer, it's also incredibly important that we find a way to support the company that's on a journey towards adopting the cloud, right? They've got a long history. Maybe they've been around for many, many, many years and they've got a large application stack that they need to move. And so that's where our migration programs really support customers. You need to bring non-cloud native applications and then we're able to work with them over time to make them more cloud native and get a lot of those benefits. And so it's a journey that I think many of companies on. Some started there and some have a way to get there. Definitely has a lot of benefits. Is it a snowflake really just an example of value creation? I mean, it's not about that they're on Amazon. You're happy about that, but it shows that you don't have to go a certain way. If you create value, speed, scale, speech for itself. And so that's just, that could be an enterprise. That could be a startup. That could be the cube. It could be anybody, right? I mean, don't you see it that way? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, they had a great use case that a customer need. It's in a really interesting area, obviously dealing with big data. And so I think, you know, there's earning a limit there. Mark, you guys are in the modern app. And this is what you're hearing. It's one of the things that people are going to want to come out of COVID. They're going to want to have a growth strategy, cloud native, why is it important? And what's your take on this? What's your reaction to the cloud native being the big wave? Yeah, I mean, I think Dave said it very well. I mean, when I talk to customers, regardless of where they are in that journey, they all have some form of digital transformation agenda, right? And at the end of the day, they want to deliver better services to their end customers because they know that's what is going to differentiate them or they want to better empower their employees, right? And as part of trying to deliver that value to their customers, their employees, they want to focus their time and energy on the things that really differentiate them, right? And for many of them, that means, they don't want to have to worry about upgrading some infrastructure software, right? That's not delivering value to their customers. And so, I think as they go down that journey, we're really pleased to be able to partner with AWS to be able to create these powerful platforms together between VMware and AWS that really deliver a lot of value to customers and allow them to focus on what's important to their business, right? And by bringing together those enterprise-class VMware capabilities that hundreds of thousands of customers trust for their most mission-critical workloads, combining that with, as Dave talked about, the flexibility, the agility, the scalability of the AWS cloud, and then sort of not just those existing workloads, but also enabling a rich set of new services those customers can take advantage of to modernize. Whether it's VMware services, like I talked about before with our native Kubernetes capability built in to VMC, or whether it's the hundreds and growing portfolio of AWS services, giving them all, giving them the power of that full toolkit as a service so they can focus on building value on top. I mean, that's, I think, really the winning equation which would, and it's why so many customers are moving down that path together with us. Well, congratulations, I want to say to you, because Dave Vellante's been digging into the buyer behavior data, looking at what the budget projections are going to be, and VMware on AWS has been strongly performing, and it's doing really well, congratulations. And, David, great to have you back on, and you got re-invent less than 60 days away. Can you give us a little teaser and taste of what you've got going on? I know you can't reveal, but what kind of generally are we going to be seeing at re-invent with EC2 and your team? Absolutely, re-invent's a little different this year. It's obviously virtual, and so we're pretty excited about that. We think it'll bring a new flavor, and so there's a lot of planning going on, both in terms of product delivery. It's always a great time of year for us as we finish up a lot of our big releases aimed at re-invent. And then obviously working on content and presentations, and so a lot of interesting stuff for customers to think about. So you're not revealing anything, you just, you know. Okay, you're going to have some announcements, I'm sure. EC2, that's a big announcement. Exactly. I'll hide in the ball, as they say. David Brown, Vice President of EC2 at Amazon Web Services, AWS, Mark Lomar, SVP and GM of Cloud, who serves the business unit at VMware. Great partnership, congratulations. We'll be following it. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here in Palo Alto, remote for theCUBE virtual, for VMworld 2020 virtual. Couldn't be face-to-face, we'll do our best with our CUBE virtual to get you the content. Thanks for watching.