 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Hey Dave. Hey, Lisa, how's it going? Good, Dave too. Good to see you back here again. Exactly. The handsome between the sets. I am. 94 guests, it's good. In three days, yeah. We've learned a lot already and we're nearing the end of day two. We're excited to welcome two new guys to theCUBE. We've got Colin DuRochet, product manager from Dell EMC, and Sandra Bertielli, global product manager at Telefonica. Gentlemen, it's nice to have you here. Great to be here. First time on theCUBE. So first time on theCUBE, 20th anniversary of VMware. Lots to celebrate, lots going on. From an announcement perspective, momentum perspective, Colin, let's start with you. What are some of the trends, the market trends, the customer voices that you're hearing regarding data protection and its criticality in this multi-cloud world in which all these enterprises now live? Sure. I think we have to put it into context with the growth of the cloud, right? The cloud is growing exponentially and data protection is one of the leading use cases. I think IDC did a survey recently, 58% of people using the cloud are doing data protection in the cloud. Backup and recovery is the number one use case. So that's one trend. Another trend is, I mean, more specific to VMworld and VMware. Their vCloud provider program is, or the business unit is one of the fastest growing business units at VMware. They're having incredible success, built on the back of fantastic products. And so what we've done is about a year ago, actually at VMworld last year, we formed a three-way partnership between Telefonica, VMware and Dell EMC to provide a turnkey solution for cloud providers to deliver data protection as a service. So I wonder if we can talk a little bit about Telefonica and your business and how it's evolved, say, over the last, I don't know, pick a time frame, decade, half better part of a decade, how is it evolving and changing? You know, it's a long partnership that you have between Dell EMC and Telefonica and VMware. So we started many years ago, launching the new versions of VGC 2.0, 3.0, and now evolving to 4.0. So it was not so easy in doing this journey to improve our service cut a little bit to our customers. And right now, with the VGC 4.0, with new interface of the cloud director, 9.x is in Vamarin, data protection software of EMC, but increasing a lot of the functionalities to our customers and increasing the user experience of our customers. It was very valuable to our customers in this new approach of the VGC 4.0. So if you think about, if you go back to the early days of virtualization, everybody who sort of took, you know, 10 servers and brought them down to one, which is great because all the compute power was underutilized. But of course, the one job that needed all that compute power was backup. So you had, then you saw data protection change to accommodate that. Okay, and customers re-architected, et cetera. Now we enter the cloud era. We're knee-deep in it. How is data protection changing, whether it's architecturally or processes to accommodate multi-cloud? Maybe Colin, you could start. Well, so I think, you know, another trend that we're seeing is a move from managed services to more of a self-service delivery. Right, so providers like Telefonica want to enable their tenants to access data protection as a service. And that has certainly some architectural impacts to it. And, you know, I think that's what's really behind this announcement that we're making here at VMworld. So the most important to mention, it is the example about talking about the VGC, it's not just infrastructure as a services platform, it's everything as a services platform. So more than this, you're putting into our customer the edge-value services. For example, data protection. Data protection is very important. So our idea in the user experience is to change the customer's life easy. So, and it's with the new portal, as a self-service portal for data protection, the customers right now can do everything in the VGC. It just was possible within our allies in the partnership between VMworld and WMC, developing together the new integration, of our integration using the API for VCloud Director for the new version is better available to us. So in terms of impact, give us an example, Sunder, of how this three-way partnership that Telefonica has with Dell EMC and VMware, how is it impacting not just your customer's business, but Telefonica's business? How is it enabling your transformation from a top-line perspective? For sure. I think that what we are thinking right now if Dell EMC and VMware is the model that must be followed by the other manufacturers because we are curating the future if there is integration between data protection software of Dell EMC and VMware. And impact is directed to our customer because in our oldest versions, the customers, when it needs to require some, for example, restore procedures, need to talk to someone in Telefonica to ask them. So right now is immediately through the self-search portal. And this is very important to us, to increase the user experience and our customer experience. This is very valuable to us. So customer experience improves. How have you been able to expand your customer base globally leveraging this partnership? For example, VDC and Telefonica is just better to talk about our business. You are the most important deployment of VMware around the world. We are one of the eight countries around the world, in South American Europe, running the VDC software. This is very valuable to us because evolving our global catalog, if just, and using the AVAMAR data protection software, producing the TCO to us and to our customers, using, for example, the data application and the new functionality in the solution is very good to us and to our customers. So VCloud director, maybe you could drill into that a little bit in terms of how it's impacted your business, how, talk more about the value that it brings to, not just you, but to your customers. Jesus Christ, it was not so easy during that time. You know, we are using VCloud director science at the beginning of our global product and global strategy. So following during these years, with the oldest version, we have a lot of limits in the VCloud director interface. So right now, using the VCloud director nine in the cloud extensions, the cloud director availability. So this is very valuable to us because the AVAMAR changes a lot to the user interface. And the oldest interface was very ugly to other customers. So right now, because director nine dot one dot X is very good interface. And in the same way, improving the user experience in the quality of our services. So the business impact is it's simpler to manage, so saving time so people can, and integration. I think you have to think about how do service providers like Telefonica differentiate themselves, right? A cloud provider that only offers infrastructure as a service, they're getting their margins squeezed, right? So they have to bring in these value added services. And how do they do that better than the others? They differentiate themselves through a better user experience, which means, you know, the way the user interacts with the product. Also it means it comes down to the cost, right? So that goes directly to the service provider's bottom line. They're able to pass that on to their customers. And then also performance and scale, right? So these are really very, very important points. And that's what I think our partnership is all about. How do you guys go to market? Is it a three-way, two-way? What's the go-to-market strategy? So our strategy is not to do not compete with the hyper-scaler providers. If our VTC, you have our own services running in our own data centers and combining, if our global network infrastructure, you can provide the better service to our customers in a local perspective, if you're local billing, local support. And this partnership with Dell EMC, you're consuming Dell EMC software and technologies many years ago. So we are evolving our services in this way. And this is the right thing to do right now, to do not differentiate us between the hyper-scalers providers. And you were, I'm sorry, go ahead, Collin. Well, I was just going to add to that, that in terms of our go-to-market, we've made a very big announcement here at VMworld 2018, which is that VMware, the VCPP business unit, is actually selling Dell EMC data protection to their service providers. So this is actually, our goal is to really make it a native feature of VCloud Director, built right in. So the VMware cloud provider business unit is essentially OEMing reselling your product, which ultimately makes it into Telefonica. Sure. And the way that they're doing that is actually really interesting because it adds value for us in the sense that they allow service providers to pay by the drip. So the way that we sell it is very different than other routes to market that we have. And something that I think is of a lot of value to service providers like Telefonica. So that's a, you say it's paid by the drip, by that you mean it's a monthly service? It's a monthly, per-protected VM, very simple, very simple business model. They pay a certain number of cloud provider points for one offering, a different amount for the other offering, and it's paid in arrears on a monthly basis based on what they've consumed. And I cancel anytime. It's not like I got to buy three years in advance. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we've been hearing a lot, we hear this a lot better together, right, David? Every event and every aspect of life. There's a lot of things that are better together. What, I'm curious, Colin, from your perspective, Dell EMC, VMware, lots of change in the last few years. Absolutely. How is this, you know, we talked about the value streams that go to market. How are you seeing your customers embracing and feeling what Dell EMC and VMware are doing as really better together? How do you simplify the complexities that all these customers are living in with this partnership? So I can say that, you know, over the course of history, we've had a lot of co-engineering partnerships, right, between Dell EMC and VMware. I mean, I could probably name five or six of them. And there's a number of them happening right now. This partnership, or this aspect of it, is a little bit different because there's a sales and marketing aspect to it. So that's taking the partnership to a next level. Never before has VMware sold Dell EMC product, right? So that's... It's pretty groundbreaking. Yeah, this is the next step in better together. And for our customers, I mean, there's been an incredible response. We had service provider roundtables on Sunday. A lot of excitement about this. And actually, I heard two service providers have actually decided to go with this based on the fact that we have this partnership. So that's amazing for us. Awesome. And then in terms of the evolution of the partnership of the technology, what's the customer feedback loop, if you will? How are they helping to influence the direction that the technology goes? I think that... Evolving the catalog and making the customer's life is in providing the new functionalities, the new features in a seamless mode is very valuable to our customers. As more than providing the years in platform as a service, we've more added value of service to the customers, the management services, the multi-cloud environments. So what are the goal is to make it put all together, providing the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud solutions to our customers. This is valuable. This is what our customers asking to us and claiming to us today around the world. Well, you mentioned your presence in 80 countries. Our virtual data center are present in 80 countries, seven in Americas and none in Europe. Was this possible before the VMware, Dell EMC, Telefonica? No, no, you are evolving together. It was not easy before. It's not possible to do it alone before. So a lot of growth, what's next? Where do you go from there? You got 80. Where do you go from there? I believe that our strategy should still evolve in the catalog, increasing the partnership until the EMC and VMware, and increasing the, putting together this new ecosystem and the integration between the VCloud Director API, if the Clogic stations in Avamar and data protection software, I think that is the way, this is the goal, this is our, the process that are moving now to do in that the other, manufacturers in the big parts of our ecosystem is the VTC 4.0. So you've got a couple of breakout sessions tomorrow? Yeah. Give us like the top three takeaways that the attendees will glean from your session. Oh gosh, the tendences? So, kind of the key takeaways. What are they going to learn? So I think at least one of the sessions that Sandra's participating in is actually a data protection session. So it's a general session covering all of our recent announcements, our technology, kind of a thought leadership type of thing, and using Telefonica's experience with the VCloud Director extensions as a testimonial, an example, to share with the other customers. Bringing together some of the hot topics at the show, obviously Cloud, data protection, is walking around the floor here, everybody's talking about data protection. That's what it's all about, yeah. So, great, congratulations. No, thank you so much. Colin, Sandra, thanks so much for joining David and me on theCUBE and sharing with us what you guys are doing with this partnership. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you so much, thank you. Thank you, Dave. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are continuing day two of VMworld 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Stick around, we'll be right back.