 Hi everybody, we're back at Veeamon 2022. We're winding down coverage to theCUBE day two. This is, we've done a lot of Veeamons. We're at the Aria Hotel, smaller physical audience, huge hybrid audience, a little different program, great keynotes, really loved the keynotes yesterday and today, kind of product day today. Sean Smith is here with myself and David Nicholson. He's the staff solution architect at VMware. Sean, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Take the time with us. It's great to be here and great to be in person again. Yeah, it sure is. Hoping to see Veeamworld is no longer Veeamworld, right? It's VMware Explorer now, yep, yep. Okay, awesome, looking forward to that. That was one of the first shows we ever did. It's kind of got that same vibe, I hope. I hope you don't lose that, you know, the core of Veeamworld. What we've been told is it's still gonna be, you know, the core of what we do and it's gonna be the showcase of VMware. Which is the ecosystem, great vibe. You always know a million people there, which is great fun. How's it going at VMware today? I mean, let's start there. It's been a while since we've talked physically with... Yeah, VMware is, you know, we've come through the pandemic fairly well, relative speaking to what others have done. I'm part of the VCPP program, the VMware Cloud Provider Program and I look after, you know, Cloud Service providers, Cloud Builders, people who are actually building out networks for customers and environments that are very specialized and focusing on their needs. And VMware is, you know, forefront with Cloud Service providers these days, doing really well. The last time we were physically proximate to VMware executives, I think Pat Gelsinger was still the CEO. Dell still owned the majority of VMware. So that spin happened. So that's good. I think a lot of, I think the ecosystem in particular is probably really happy about that. Yep. Does it have any effect on your world? From a day to day business perspective, not really, right? You know, obviously we still have a very tight relationship with Dell. We still do a lot of innovative solutions and products with the Dell team. We have a tight integration there. It really gives us the opportunity to also work with many other vendors as well and, you know, focus on solutions that our customers are looking for really is where VMware is trying to focus. Yeah, it's funny, we were at Red Hat Summit last week. IBM, I think, was right across the street. There was very little mention, if any, I think they talked about an IBM mainframe at Red Hat Summit, that was it. I mean, IBM fully owns Red Hat. But a lot of people said, you know, we hope that it's going to be like VMware. And you guys have always had that independent culture. Fiercely independent. Fiercely independent, yes. Yeah, it's like when you coach, I don't know, me anyway, when I coach my kids in baseball, I'm tougher on them than him or the other kids. I think you guys were sometimes tougher on your owner. Rightly so. You have a huge ecosystem. We do. That is epic. And so you have to look out for that. VMware's always done that. VCPP, the V is for VMware. What's the acronym? So, CPP is Cloud Provider Program. It's a program that's specifically aimed at our cloud service providers. There's several solutions within the program which are really focused on helping them build business. Helping them go to market, helping them with, being able to, for certain, part of it compete with the Harper Scalers. And our support several cloud providers mostly out of the Northeast. And they're doing really well. They're doing well against the Harper Scalers. They very often provide solutions that are not easy to get on a Harper Scaler when you wanna have customer interaction and things like that. So, the VCPP program, as I said, is really tailored. It has solutions which are very much focused on allowing them to build their businesses as a cloud service provider. Just a follow-up, if I may. So, the history of VMware cloud has been really interesting. At one point, vCloud Air, we know what happened there. This is not vCloud Air. This is different. This is not vCloud Air. It's got nothing to do with vCloud Air. It's really a program where we provide solutions that the cloud builders build with. So, it's software solutions. There's no hardware involved. There's no VMware having the environment. It's really cloud providers building solutions. It's interesting, Dave. This has come full circle. You used to work at Virtue Stream. There was one point, Rodney was like, bring it on, AWS, you know, correlation back to it. We can't lose to a bookseller and all that was just, you know, fun marketing talk for media people like us. But the interesting thing is, well, so VMware cloud on AWS, huge success of VMware cloud foundation, doing really well. And obviously you've got momentum. Everybody thought, not everybody. It's in Google, it's in Azure, it's in Oracle. Yeah, yeah, sorry. It's in IBM. Yeah, IBM, of course, IBM's on. Yeah, so. Number one in IBM, yeah. And so a lot of people thought, I shouldn't say everybody, a lot of people thought, oh, MSPs, the cloud service providers, non-hyperscalers are cooked. Yep. 2010, 2011. The exact opposite happened. It's growing like crazy. We want to understand why, but it's come full circle. Yeah, it certainly has. I mean, you know, the industry has changed considerably and especially over the last few years with COVID. I will say that the cloud service providers that are supporting, by the way, Virtus.Tree was one of them when I first joined VMware, I supported Virtus.Tree. And, you know, they have had to adapt their businesses. The hyperscalers have, you know, come at them with everything that they've got. And honestly, the cloud service providers that are support of phenomenal growth. They're growing, you know, on a par with what some of the hyperscalers are doing. So there's definitely a place for cloud service providers. They've got great business. They've got great customers, great relationships. And it's, you know, as I said, it's growing a huge business. So we've talked a lot about the theme from the perspective of the idea of a super cloud. Something that can overlay a variety of on-premises and off-premises providers and provide sort of a unified view, unified management methodology. How much is what at least was formerly known as the SDDC stack, the software-defined data center stack still a part of VMware's vision that is right in line with that from what Veeam is doing. How much of your business is deploying SDDC stacks that are then customized in one way or another? 100% of it, right? Yeah, so, you know, when you're talking about having that single view of everything in the cloud provider program, there's a product called VMware Cloud Director. And it is the multi-tenant view of, you know, the infrastructure and the environment that the cloud providers are building, right? So VMware Cloud Director has gone through many iterations and we've recently launched the Cloud Director Service, which is a SaaS offering of the product. But what it actually does is you put it on top of VMC on AWS. You put it on top of GCVE. You put it on top of the cloud service providers, SDDCs, right? All of these are SDDCs underneath. AVS in Azure. AVS in Azure. I was associated with that, so I must have it mentioned. Exactly. They're all SDDCs, software-defined. Yeah, exactly. And as well as your on-premise environment, right? So all of these federate together through the VMware Cloud Director and you end up having a single pane of glass across all of those environments. So whether it's running in the hyperscaler, running on your premises, running, you know, in a cloud service providers environment, you have a single view, a single interface that you log into and you can see everything that's going on inside your environment. So it really brings that holistic single view of everything to reality. How about from a licensing perspective? So from a licensing perspective? I'm an on-premises customer. I'm running VMware on-prem. I have been, I was at VMworld 2004 and enjoyed BattleBots. So hopefully it'll start bringing BattleBots back. You'll have to. And now I'm dealing with a service provider that is one of the partners that you're working with. How does that licensing work? So the cloud provider program actually has a slightly different licensing model to what you would have on-premises, right? They have a rental model with VMware. It's a Pego model, right? One of the great things about the program is that it's consumption-based. So it makes it easy for cloud service providers to build a consumption-based business, which is kind of where everything is moving, right? For sure. So whether you have an on-premise environment that's licensed through what we call perpetual or ELA licensing from a VMware perspective, you can still layer on top that cloud service provider solution VCD, right? And you would obviously have a financial relationship with the cloud service provider in terms of the environment that you have with them. And they will be able to hook up that environment to your on-premises environment and get that single view. So the licensing is not a restriction, right? You can still continue to have your traditional licensed environment in your data center, as well as being able to connect into these seamlessly, right? That's the great thing about it. And that's where VMC, AVS, GCVE, the OCVS, the Oracle version, the RBM one, you can bring all of these together and really look at it from a holistic perspective. Bring in things like NSXT and other solutions like that, VM as well. It works seamlessly across all these environments. I am talking about SuperCloud. I asked Raghu last year, who's virtually at VMworld, I kind of explained that concept of hiding the complexity, the abstraction layer, being able to hide the underlying primitives and APIs, you know, blah, blah, blah. It seems like it's evolving. One of the things he said was, yes, but if developers want to go there, we let them. And that was a key point. Because you're getting more into that DevOps world. Correct, 100%. And I would imagine the cloud service providers really oftentimes need for their reasons to get to those underlying primitives and APIs. And actually, VCD is the enabler, right? So VCD allows you to provide a container-based service sitting right alongside your IaaS in the same SDDC, right? We're not even talking about segregating them out. You can have it inside the exact same SDDC, all linked together, all taking a common security approach to what's going on, and providing you with that ease of use. So, you know, from a end-user perspective, the DevOps type of people, VCD is an awesome solution because they can go in, fire up a new VM or fire up a new container or whatever, without having to go through, you know, the rigmarole of asking IT for a VM or asking somebody's permission, you know, as an organization, you would give your DevOps teams a certain amount of resources, how they use it, it's up to them, right? Whether they put containers in there, they bring VMs, it's all there, and it's all in one single solution. You mentioned that your community is doing very well, growing at, let's call it, 35, 40% a year, and it's a market that's quite large worldwide. Yep. There's a lot of local, you know, regional CSPs, a lot of big country CSPs, and you said- There's four and a half thousand of them, so. There you go. It's huge, yeah. Versus four hyperscalers. Yeah, exactly. They include Alibaba. They might be individually smaller, but collectively, they're larger. But you said that the hyperscalers coming after them with everything they had was a comment that you made. Are customers choosing CSPs over hyperscalers? If so, when and why? Sometimes they are choosing CSPs over hyperscalers, but not always. Very often they're choosing CSPs and hyperscalers, right? And it really depends on what their needs are. So historically speaking, it's been, you know, everybody rushing to the hyperscalers because, you know, that's the flavor of the day. Let's move out of our data center. It's much cheaper to run everything in these hyperscalers and they do it and then the bill comes in and reality suddenly hits, and it's definitely not as cheap as they thought it was gonna be, right? So there's many aspects that cause tenants to not only rethink that, but also repatriate, right? Repatriation is a big thing for our cloud service providers. Things like egress costs. Most cloud service providers have no egress costs, right? They encourage movement of things amongst themselves for their tenants because that's what they want, right? So egress costs are a huge problem for many, you know, tenants who come into these environments. And that's sometimes why they would choose a CSP over a hyperscaler. But really it's more about choosing the right place for your workload. There are workloads that belong in hyperscalers, right? And if you have a solution, you know, with a CSP-like VCD that allows you not only to, you know, be able to connect your on-premises and the CSP but also the hyperscalers and actually have a much more holistic solution where you can determine where you wanna put stuff and put it in the right place. But it's more about that than it is about choosing one over the other, really. And sometimes it's more of a business differentiation than a technical one. Is it a hyperscaler or is it a CSP if you're licensing the STDC stack and you're running it on IaaS in Amazon or in Google or Azure? I think the other thing too is the CSPs are, they're managed, oftentimes they're managed service providers, right? Is that true? The relationship, right? And that's one of the things, you know, if you talk to a cloud service provider and yesterday I was, I had a session when I was talking to a bunch of people about VMware stuff and I said to them, you know, how many of you have tried to pick up a phone and talk to somebody at AWS? You know, and there was laughter because the reality is that what AWS does is, you know, a kind of one-size-fits-all approach, right? There isn't somebody on the end of the phone that you can pick up and call. If they have a major outage, that outage is affecting thousands of different customers and you, one of those thousands really means nothing to them, right? Whereas a cloud service provider, generally speaking, has a very tight one-on-one relationship with both from an engineering perspective, right? With their tenants but also at a higher managerial level. So, you know, they create those relationships and those relationships often drive these things. It's not always financial. There is a financial component to it but very often it's the relationship. Have they got somebody that they can talk to? You know, if they're getting many different solutions, can they get all those solutions from one provider? And if they can, you know, it's much easier for them to manage from it. And I think so, does that manage service? There's also, there's a lot of things that, you know, despite their breadth and portfolio that the cloud service providers don't support. You know, you can't do Oracle Rack in the cloud, right? But you can in a service provider. And Oracle, look, you can negotiate with Oracle so you can get similar pricing in AWS but this price is 2X. They're either on-prem or in your Oracle Cloud. So I could take my Oracle instance, stick it into a managed service provider, a cloud service provider, do whatever I need to and there are, I'm sure, thousands of configurations like that that aren't necessarily identically supported. Security edicts that aren't necessarily exactly the same. So many specials that managed service providers say, welcome to your point. AWS is, as long as it's black, it's good. Yeah, exactly, and that's the thing, right? Those cloud service providers are doing exactly that. They have Oracle Racks in there. They have all sorts of those solutions that are there in their data centers and proximity is also an issue, right? Very often the people who are using those systems need their ancillary things to be close by. They can't be tens or 20s or 30 milliseconds away. They need to be some millisecond connectivity and those are the areas where the cloud service provider is really shunned. They can offer those solutions that really enable their tenants to get what they want at the end of the day. Again, to your point, you can negotiate with Oracle but these cloud service providers do it day in and day out. Who wants to do that with Oracle anyway? Their lawyers are smarter than yours. Veeam, what are you doing with Veeam? In resilient architectures and cyber recovery. We're a sponsor here at the event and Veeam is a great partner with VMware and we're a great partner to them. A lot of cloud service providers actually use Veeam as their primary backup solution for their tenants, right? VMware Cloud Director that I was talking about just now, the thing that gives you a view of everything over the top. Veeam was actually one of the very first vendors to integrate with VCD and you can use your Veeam environment directly from the screen. You right-click and you say, you know, do a backup and that's as easy as that from a Veeam perspective. So we have a lot of integrations with Veeam. We help the cloud service providers, you know, ransomware is a big talking thing around this event but all over the place, right? So a lot of the solutions that Veeam brings to the party, these cloud service providers are also deploying into their environments to help with ransomware. You know, they have so many solutions that help those cloud service providers provide a holistic solution. Well, Veeam was basically founded saying, hey, we're going to better our business on VMware. I first saw Veeam at a Veeam mug I think in Boston. And I was like, who is Veeam? VMware, is that their product? It was just so, you guys have a long relationship. Even though initially Veeamware was probably saying the same thing. Who the heck are these guys? Well, how do you like them now? Sean, thanks so much for- Thank you, it's been great to be here. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back shortly. We've got a couple more segments left. Dave and I are going to wrap up later in the day. You're watching theCUBE at Veeam on 2022. Be right back.