 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Well, welcome back here to AWS re-invent 2019. Great show going on here in Las Vegas. We're at the Sands, we're live here on theCUBE. Once again, covering it from wall to wall. We'll be here until late tomorrow afternoon. Dave Vellante, John Walls. We're joined by David Chicoches, who's the Vice President of Product Management for Hybrid IT, a sentry link. David, good to see you. Good to see you guys. And Brandon Sweeney, who's the SVP of World Wide Cloud Sales at VMware. Good to see you. Good to be with you. This is going to be a New England sports segment actually, I'm surrounded by a bunch of patriots. Bruins, Celtics, Red Sox fans. I love it. ESPN in Vegas, right? I just want to remind you, the Washington Nationals are the reigning World Series champion. Even with that. Congratulations by the way. Well done. Yes, enjoy the moment. Enjoy the moment. That's a little bit. Maybe I know. Snapshot. Maybe shark forever. Moment in time. I got this. First off, let's talk about your relationship between VMware and Sentry Lake. And what brings you here at AWS, the offering that you're putting together to run on AWS? Yeah, great question. Maybe I can jump in and then we can go. So look, VMware, a long time player in the infrastructure space. Obviously incredible relationship with AWS. Customers want to transform their operations. They want to move to the cloud. We have VMware cloud on AWS. We continue to take tremendous ground helping customers build more agile infrastructure. Make that happen. VMware was built on our partners, right? Sentry Lake, great partner, MSP. And when you think about helping customers achieve their business outcomes, key partners like Sentry Lake make it happen. You've been a long-term partner and done a lot of great things with us. Yeah, and really what Sentry Lake and VMware have done, I mean, really we sort of created the managed private cloud market in the early days of managing VMware solutions for customers. And where we differentiate in either working with VMware on AWS is really with elements of our network or the ability to take those kinds of solutions and make sure that they're connected to the right networks and that they're tied in and integrated with a customer's existing enterprise and where they want to go as they start to distribute their workloads more widely. Because we run that network, we see a lot of the internet traffic. We see a lot of threat patterns. We see a lot of things emerge with our cybersecurity capabilities and managed services. So we add value there. And because of that history with VMware and sort of creating that hosted private cloud environment, there's a lot of complexity friendliness inside of our service offer where we can manage VMware, we can manage it in a traditional model that is vCloud verified, and then we can manage it as it starts to move onto the AWS platform because as we all know, and as even Andy has referenced in different points, there's just about every kind of workload can go to AWS, but there are still certain things that can't quite go there and building a hybrid solution that basically puts customers in a position to innovate is what a hybrid solution is all about. And that kind of moves the needle on some of those harder to move workloads. I mean, VMware is such an obvious place to start. But so you try to preserve that existing customer, VMware customer experience, but at the same time, you want to bring the cloud experience. So how is that evolving? Yeah, so a couple of things, all right? So ultimately customers, they all want to move to the cloud for all the reasons we want, security, agility, governance, et cetera, right? But fundamentally they need help. And so partners like essentially help figure out which workloads are cloud ready, right? And figure that out. And then two, you get to know the customer really well because the relationships that you have. And you can help them figure out which workloads am I going to move, right? And then that leads into more relationships on how do I set up DR, right? How do I offer other services through AWS against those workloads? Yeah, there's a lot of things where being a managed services provider for a VMware based platform or being a managed services provider for an AWS platform. There's a lot of things that you have in common, right? You know, first and foremost, is that ability to run your operations securely? You've got to be secure. You know, if you need to be able to maintain that bond of trust, you need to be auditable. Your operations model needs to be something that's transparent to the customer. You need to not just be about migrating workloads to the new and exciting environment, but also helping to transform it and take advantage of whether it's a VMware feature or tool or a next generation AWS feature or tool. So not just migrate and lift and shift, but then help to transform to what that downstream long-term platform can do. You certainly want to be in a posture where you're building a sense of intimacy with the customer. You're learning their acronyms. You're learning their business processes. You're building up that bond of trust where you can really be flexible with that customer. And that's where the MSP community can also come in because there's a lot of creative things we can do commercially, contracting wise, binding services together into broader solutions and service level agreements that can go and give the customer something that they could just get by going and teach individual technology platform under themselves. So those are ways where the service provider community really chips in. I think you're right. And when we think about helping drive customer success, the managed service providers, because of those intimate relationships with customers, we've had tremendous success of moving those workloads, driving consumption of the service and really driving better business outcomes based on those relationships you have. So let's talk about workloads. You guys, of course, remember Paul Moritz when he was running VMware. He said, any workload, any application, he called it a software mainframe. And then of course his marketing people scrubbed that from the parlance, but that's essentially what's happened. Pretty much run anything on VMware. I've, and you heard Andy Jassy, the keynote talking about people, you know, helping people get off of mainframes. And so I feel like he's building the cloud mainframe, any workloads, but what kind of workloads are moving today? It's not, obviously he acknowledged some of the hardcore stuff's not going to move. And he didn't specify, it's a lot of the hardcore database, OLTV, transaction, high-risk stuff. But what is moving today and where do you see that going? Do I talk about some customers? Yeah, so there's a lot of joint customers we have that I think fall into that category. And in fact, tomorrow, on Thursday, we're actually leading a panel discussion that really dives into some customer success on the AWS platform that Centrelink and our managed services practice has been able to help them achieve. What's interesting about that, we have an example from the public sector, we have an example from manufacturing and from food and beverage. An example from the transportation industry and airlines, what's really interesting is that in all those use cases that we'll be diagramming out tomorrow, VMware is part of all of them, right? And sometimes it's because VMware is a critical part of their existing infrastructure. And so what we're trying to be able to do is design sort of systems of innovation, systems of engagement that they're running inside of an AWS or broadly distributed AWS architecture, but that still needs network integration, secure connectivity back to the crown jewels and what's kept in a lot of those workloads that are already running on the VMware platform. So that's a lot of, we see that a good deal with regards to you're moving your sort of innovative workloads, your engagement workloads, some of your digital experience platforms. We're working with an airline that wants to start building up a series of initiatives where they want to be able to sort of sell vacation packages and be very creative in how they market and deliver those, pulling through airline sales along the way. They're going to be designing those digital initiatives in AWS, but they need access to flight information, schedule information, logistics information that they keep inside of their VMware environment and the centralized data center. And so they're starting to look at workloads like that. They're starting to look at VMware cloud on AWS. VMware as it in and of itself as a workload moving up to AWS, there's a range of these solutions that we're starting to see, but a lot of it is still, and you had the graphic up there, we're still in the very early days of cloud adoption. We still see a lot of workloads that are moving to AWS that are in that system of engagement. How can I digitally engage with my customers better? That's where a lot of the innovation is going on and that's what a lot of the workloads that are running and launching are. And I mean we're seeing tremendous momentum and ultimately we should take any workload and we should be able to move it to the cloud. Sure. Right, and do it in an efficient and speedy path and we've got customers moving thousands of workloads. Right, they may decide over time to refactor them, but first and foremost they can move them. They can relocate them to the cloud. They can save a lot of cost out of that. They can use the exact same interface or pane of glass in terms of how they manage those workloads, whether they're on-prem or off-prem. It gives them tremendous agility and if they decide over time they have to refactor some workloads which can be quite costly, they have that option, but there's no reason they shouldn't move every single workload they have to the cloud. Is there a disadvantage at all to, if you're left with X workloads that have to stay behind, as opposed to someone who's coming up and getting up and running totally on the cloud and they're enjoying all those efficiencies and capabilities, I mean, are you a little bit of a disadvantage because you have to keep some legacy things lingering behind or how do you eventually close that gap to enjoy the benefits of new technologies? Yeah, this is sort of an old saying that if you're an enterprise, that means you've had to make a lot of decisions along the way, right? And so, presumably those decisions added value to your enterprise or else you wouldn't be an enterprise. So it really comes down to, yeah, to those systems of records, those legacy systems. We talk about legacy systems. The only in IT is the word legacy. I know, it's a positive word. The only in IT is the word legacy, a priority, right? Your legacy is the value you've built up and a lot of that, whether it's, you know, airline flight data or scheduling best practices or critical crown jewels kind of data systems are really important. You know, it really comes down to, if you're an enterprise and you're competing against somebody that is born in the cloud, how well integrated is everything? And are you able to take advantage of and pace layer your innovation strategy so that you can work on the cloud where it makes sense? You can still take advantage of all the data and intelligence you've built up about your customers. So in talking earlier, it seems like you guys do see that, that cloud is ultimately the destination of all these workloads. But you know, I think about Pat Gelsinger. He talks about the laws of physics, the laws of economics and the laws of the land. So then he makes the case for the hybrid world. And Murphy's Law. And, yeah, yeah, and Murphy's Law. But so that makes the case for the hybrid world and it seems like Amazon to a certain extent is capitulating on that. And it seems like we got a long way to go. So it's almost like the cloud model will go to your data wherever it is. And you guys can, I think, help facilitate that. How do you look at that? Yeah, so part of that answer is how much data centers are becoming sort of an antiquated model. There is a need for computing and storage in a variety of different locations. And there's that we've been sort of going through these cycles back and forth of, you use the term software mainframe and the polymer Ritz kind of model of the original mainframe decentralizing out to client server, now centralizing again to the cloud as we see it sort of thing to swing back in the other direction for, towards devices that are a lot smarter, processors that are finally tuned for whatever internet of things use case that they're being designed for, being able to put business logic a whole lot closer to those devices. The data, I think that this is what, one of the things that I think Pat said at one of the VMware's a couple of years ago, data centers are really becoming centers of data. And how are you able to go and work with those centers of data? First off, link them all together, networking-wise, secure them all together and then manage them consistently. I think that's one of the things VMware's been really great about is that sort of control plane, data plane separation inside your product design that makes that a whole lot more feasible. I mean, it is a multi-cloud and it's a hybrid cloud world. And we want to give customers the flexibility and choice to move their workloads wherever they need, right? Based on different decisions, geographic implications, et cetera, security regimens. And I mean, fundamentally, that's where we give customers a tremendous amount of flexibility. And then bringing the edge, it complicates me. Edge data center or cloud. It's so maybe it's not a swing back, because it really has been a pendulum swing, mainframe, decentralized swing back to the cloud. It feels like it's now this ubiquitous push everywhere. The pendulum stops. Yeah. Because there's an equal gravitational pull between the power of both poles. And compute explodes everywhere. You got storage everywhere. So brings me my question of governance. Governance security and the edicts of the organization, you touched on that. So that becomes another challenge. How do you see that playing out? And what kind of roles do you play in solving that problem? Or in the idea of data governance? Governance, yeah. I mean, the best way to think about in our opinion, the best way to think about data governance is really with abstraction layers and being able to have a model-driven approach to what you're deploying out into the cloud. And you can go all in with the data model that exists in the abstraction layers and the model-driven architecture that you can build inside things like AWS cloud formations or inside things like Ansible and Chef and Puppet. There are model-driven ways of understanding what your application known state should be. And that's the foundational principle of understanding what your workloads are and how you can actually deliver governance over them. Once you've modeled it and you then know how to deploy it against a variety of different platforms, then you're just a matter of keeping track of what you've modeled, where you've deployed it and inventorying those number of instances and how they scale and how healthy they are. That's certainly from a workload standpoint. I think the governance discipline that you need in terms of the actual data itself, I mean data governance and where data is getting stored. There's a lot of innovation here at the show floor in terms of software-defined storage and storage abstractions. VMware's got a great software-defined storage capability called VSAN. We're working with a number of different partners within the core of our network starting to treat storage as sort of a new kind of virtualized network function. Using things like SIFs and NFS and iSCSI as VNFs that you can run inside the network we've had an announcement here earlier in the week about our central links network storage offer where we're actually starting to make storage and the data policy that allows you to control where it's replicated and where it's stored just part of the network service that you can add as a value add. Or even the metadata, the fastest path to get to it if I need to, if I prefer not to move it. You're starting to see you talking about this multi-cloud world. It seems like the connections between those clouds are going to be dictated by that metadata and the intelligence to know what the right path is. And I think we want to provide the flexibility to figure out where that data needs to reside cross-cloud, on-prem, off-prem. And you can just hear from the conversation from David the level of intimacy some of our partners have with customers to work through those decisions and figure out how to move those workloads effectively and efficiently is where we get a lot of value for our joint customers. I mean it seems pretty fundamental to this notion of digital transformation. I mean, that's ultimately what we've been talking about. Digital transformation is all about data, putting data at the core, being able to access it, get insights from it, and monetize, not directly, but understand how data affects the monetization of your business. That's what your customers are doing. And I think we want to simplify. You want to spend more time looking up at your applications and looking down at your infrastructure, based on all the drivers across the different business needs. And again, if we can figure out how to simplify that infrastructure, then people can spend more time on the applications because that's how they drive differentiation in the market. And so let's simplify your infrastructure, put it where it needs to be, but we're going to give you time back to drive innovation and focus on differentiating yourself. You know, it's interesting on the topic of digital transformation in your brain, you're so right. The sort of interesting little pattern that plays out for those of us that have been in the service provider community for a little while, that a lot of the digital transformation success stories that you see that really, that get a lot of attention around the public cloud like AWS, the big major moves into going all in on the public cloud tend to come from companies that went all in on the service provider model 10 years ago. The ones that adopted the idea of, I'm just going to have somebody do this non-differentiating thing for me so that I can focus on innovation or then in a better position to go start moving to the cloud. As opposed to companies that have been downward focused on their infrastructure, building up skill sets, building up knowledge base, building up career path of people that actually are thinking about the technology itself as part of their job description, have had a harder time letting go. It's sort of that first step of trusting a service provider due to it for you, that leads you to that second step of being able to just leverage and go all in on the public cloud. Yeah, and customers need that help, right? And that's where if we can help activate moving those workloads more quickly, we provide that ability to put more focus on innovation to drive outcomes. Well, I know you were talking about legacy a little bit ago and the negative connotation. I think Tom Brady, don't you? There's the legacy. There's the legacy. There's the legacy there. One more run, number seven, number seven. Had to send them home smiling. That would always do it. Back with more, we continue our coverage here live on theCUBE, we're at AWS ReInvent 2019.