 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Normally we're in person this year. It's a virtual event. It is re-invent and CUBE virtual here. We've got a great interview here segment with VMware and AWS. Two great guests, both CUBE alumni, Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud Services, Business Unit, VMware, and Dave Brown, Vice President of Elastic, Compute Cloud, EC2 from Amazon Web Services. Gentlemen, great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Great, thank you. Good to be back. Thanks, yeah, great to be back. So Dave, we love having you on because EC2 obviously is the core building block of AWS once the power engine, it's the core product. And Mark, we were just talking a few months ago at VMworld, the momentum that you guys have had on the business front. It's even more accelerated with COVID and the pandemic. Give us the update. The partnership three years ago when Pat and Andy in San Francisco announced the partnership, it's been nothing but performance. Business performance, technical integration, a lot's happened. What's the update here for re-invent? Yeah, I guess the first thing I would say is, look, the partnership has never been stronger. As you said, we announced the partnership and delivered the initial service three years ago. And I think since then, both companies have really been focused on innovating rapidly on behalf of our customers, bringing together the best of the VMworld portfolio and the best of the entire AWS set of capabilities. And so we've been incredibly pleased to be able to deliver those, that value to our joint customers. And we look forward to continue to work very closely together across all aspects of our two companies to continue to deliver more and more value to our joint customers. Well, I want to congratulate you guys at VMware. We've been following that story from day one and a lot of people were skeptical on the partnership. We were pretty bullish on it. We saw the value. It's been great synergy. Dave, I want to get your thoughts because I've always been riffing about enabling technologies. And the way it works is enabling technologies allow your partners to make more money too. So you guys do that with EC2 and I know that for a fact because we're doing well with our virtual event cloud but our EC2 bills are up, but who cares? We're doing well. This is the trend. You guys are enabling partners and VMware in particular has a lot of customers that are on AWS. What's your perspective on all this? Yeah, the partner ecosystem is so important for us, right? And we hear that from our customers. We have many customers who use VMware in their own environment. They've been using it for years and years. True for many other software applications as well and other technologies. And when they moved to AWS, they very often want to use those tools and those services on AWS as well. And so we partner with many, many, many companies and so it's a high priority for us. The VMware partnership I think has been sort of the role model for us in terms of setting our sights on a goal. Back in 2016, I think it was and delivering on that and then continue to innovate on features over the last three years, listening to our customers, bringing larger customers on board, giving them more advanced networking features, improving the instance types that VMware is utilizing to deliver value to their customers. And most recently, obviously with Outposts, AWS Outposts and partnering with VMware on VMware enabled Outposts and bringing that to our customers in their own data centers. So we see the whole partner ecosystem as critically important. We spend a lot of time with VMware and other partners. It's something that our customers really value. Mark, I want to get your thoughts on this because I was just riffing with Dave Vellante about this heightened awareness with that COVID-19 and the pandemic has kind of created which is an accelerant of the value. And one of the things that's apparent is when you have this software driven and software defined kind of environment whether it's in space or on-premise or in the cloud, it's the software that's driving everything. But you have two kind of components. You have the, how do you operate something? And then how does the software work? So it's the hand in the glove, operators and software in the cloud and really is becoming kind of the key things. You guys have been very successful as a company with IT operations and now you're moving into the cloud. Can you share your thoughts on how VMware cloud on AWS takes that next level for your customers? So I think that's a key point that needs to be called that. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think you hit the nail in the head. And I think, you know, look every company is on a journey to transform the level of capability they're able to offer to their customers and to their employees, right? And a big part of that is how do they modernize their application environment? How do they deliver new applications and services? And so this has been underway for a while now, but if anything, I think COVID has only accelerated the need for customers to be able to continue to go down that path. And so, you know, between VMware and AWS, you know, we're looking to provide those customers a platform that allows them to accelerate their path to application modernization and new services and capabilities. And, you know, they've talked about the ecosystem and the importance of the ecosystem to AWS. And I think, you know, together what we've been able to do if you sort of think about it as, you know, bringing together this rich set of VMware services and capabilities that we've talked about before, as well as new VMware capabilities, for example, the ability to enable Kubernetes-based applications and services on top of this core VMware platform with Tanzu, right? And so customers can get access to all of that as they go down this modernization path. But, you know, right next door in the same AZ is the 175 native AWS services that they can use together in conjunction with that environment. And so if you think about accelerating that journey, right? Being able to rapidly migrate those VMware based workloads into the AWS cloud, when you're in the AWS cloud, be able to modernize that environment using the VMware Tanzu capability, the native AWS services, and then the infrastructure that needs to come together to make that possible. For example, the network connectivity that needs to be enabled to take advantage of some of those services together. You know, we're really, we're trying to accelerate our delivery of those capabilities so that we can help our customers accelerate the delivery of that application value to their customers. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on the trends. Have you speak to the customers out there at VMware customers that are on the cloud? Because, you know, vSphere, for instance, very popular on AWS cloud with VMware cloud, as well as these new modern application trends like Tanzu Project Monterey is coming around the corner that was announced at VMworld. What trends do you see from the EC2 perspective that you could share to the VMware AWS customers? What's the key wave right now that they should be riding on? Yeah, I think a few things. You know, we definitely are seeing an acceleration in customers looking to look into utilizing VMware on AWS. You know, there was a lot of interest early on. Really over the last year, I think we've seen more than 140% growth in the service, which has been incredibly exciting for both of us and really shows that we're providing customers with a service that works. You know, I think one of the key things that Mark called out when he was talking previously was just how simple it is for customers to move. You know, often moving to the cloud gets muddled with modernization and it takes a long time for customers to kind of think about how do they actually make this move or are they stuck within their own facility or in data center or they need to modernize or move to a different hypervisor. With VMware and AWS, you literally get that same environment on AWS. And so whether it's a migration because you want to move out of your on-premise facility, whether it's a migration because you want to grow and expand your facility without needing to build more data centers yourself, whether you're looking to build a DR site on AWS and whether you're looking just to, you know, maybe build a new application stack that you want to build in a modern way, you know, using VMware and Tanzu and all the AWS services. All of those are parts that we've seen from customers. You know, I think as the customers grow, the demand for features on VMware and AWS grows as well. And we put out a number of important features to support customers at really, really large scale. And that's something that's been exciting. It's just some of the scale that we're seeing from very, very large VMware customers moving over to AWS. And so I think, you know, a key message is if you have a VMware installation today and you're thinking about moving to the cloud, there's really a little that needs to stop you in starting to move, but it's very simple to set up and very little you have to do to your application stack to actually move it over. Mark, that's a great point. I want to get your thoughts on that and reaction to what Dave just said because this is kind of what you guys had said many years ago and also at VMworld when we were chatting, disrupting operations just to stand up the cloud shouldn't be in place. It should be easy. You heard what Dave said, right? It's like, you got a lot of customers that are operating large infrastructure and they want to move to the cloud but they got a mandate to make everything as a service is more cloud native coming. So yeah, you got to check off the VMware boxes and keep things running, but you got to add more modern tooling, more application pressure there. So there's a lot of pressure from the business units and the business models to say, we got to take advantage of the modern applications. How do you look at that? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, look, making this as simple as possible is obviously a really important aspect of what we're trying to enable for our customers. Also, I think the speed is important, right? How can we enable them to accelerate their ability to move to the cloud but then also accelerate their ability to deliver new services and capabilities that will differentiate their business. And then how do we kind of take some of the heavy lifting off the customer's plate in terms of what it actually takes to operate and run the infrastructure and do so in a highly available way that they can depend upon for their business. And of course, delivering that full capabilities of service is a big part of that. One of my favorite customer examples is a company called Stagecoach to the European based transportation company. And they run a network of buses and trains, et cetera. And they actually decided to use VMC NWS to run one of their most mission critical applications which is involved with basically scheduling, scheduling those systems, right? And the people that they know the bus drivers and the train conductors, et cetera. And so if you think about that application, right? It's a mission critical application for them. It's also one that they need to be able to iterate, involve and improve very quickly. And they were able to take advantage of a number of fairly unique capabilities of the joint service that we built together to make that possible. The first thing that they did is they took advantage of something called stretch clusters, VMware Cloud and AWS stretch clusters where we basically take that VMware environment and we stretch it, we stretch the network across two AWS availability zones in the same region. And then they can basically run their applications on top of that environment. And this is a really powerful capability because it ensures the highest levels of SLA for that application for four nines in this case. If anything happens to fail in one of those AZs, we can automatically fail over and restart the application in the second AZ. And so it provides this high level of availability. But they're also able to take advantage of that without on day one, and talk about keeping it simple, without on day one requiring any changes to the application itself, right? Because that application knew how to work in vSphere. And so it knows how to work in vSphere in the cloud and it can fail over on vSphere in the cloud. And so they were able to get there quickly. They're able to enable that application and now they're taking the next step, which is how do I enhance and make that application even better, leveraging some of the VMware capabilities, also looking at taking advantage of some of the native AWS capabilities. So I think that that sort of speed, that simplicity that helps customers down that path to delivering more value to their employees and their customers that, you know, we're really excited that we're able to offer that to our customers. I just love the philosophy that both companies work back in from the customer driven kind of mentality, certainly key here to this partnership. And you can see the performance. But I think one of the differentiations that I love is that joint integration, the engineering that you guys are doing together. I think that's a super valuable differentiator for VMware. Dave, this is a key part of the relationship. You know, when I talked to Pat Gelsinger and Andy, again, back three years ago, and he had Raghu from VMware was like, this is different, we're engineering together. What's your perspective from the AWS side when someone says, yeah, is that real? You know, is EC2 really kind of tied in there? And is Amazon really doing joint engineering? What do you say to that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's very real. I mean, it's been an incredible journey together. Right from the start, we were trying to work out how to do this back in 2016. You know, we were using some very new technology back then that we hadn't obviously released yet, the NitroSystem, right? We started working with VMware and the NitroSystem back in late 2016. And we only launched our first NitroSystem enabled instance that re-invent 2017. And so we were, you know, for a year, having VMware run on the NitroSystem internally, making sure that, you know, we would support their application and that VMware ran well and VCR ran well on AWS. And that's been ongoing. And the other thing I really enjoy about the relationship is learning how to best support each other's customers on AWS and on VMware. And Mark was talking about stretch clusters and our VMware's utilizing the availability zones. We've done other things in terms of optimizing placement with across physical racks within data centers. Mark and the team have put forward requirements around different instance types and how they should perform and best in the VMware environment. And we've taken that back into our instance type definition and what we've released there. So it happens at a very, very low level. And I think it's both teams working together frequently, lots of meetings, and then pushing each other, you know, honestly. And I think for the best experience so at the end of the day for our joint customers. So it's been a great relationship. It helps when both companies are very fluent technically and pushing the envelope with technology, both cultures I know personally are very strong technically, but they also customer centric. Mark, I got to put you on the spot on this question because this comes up every year, this year more than ever is the question around VMware on AWS and VMware in general. And it's more of a general industry theme, but I want to ask you because I think it relates to the AWS VMware cloud on AWS. The number one question we get is how can I automate my IT operations? Because it's kind of a no brainer now. It's kind of the genes out of the bottle. That's a mandate, but it's not always as easy as it sounds to do. You still got a lot to do. Automation gets you level set to take advantage of some of these higher level services. And all customers want to get there fast, AI, IoT, a lot of goodness in the cloud that you kind of got to get there through kind of automating the base up first. So how are your customers, how are you guys helping customers automate their infrastructure operations? Yeah, I mean, as you articulated, right? This is a huge demand and requirement from our customer base, right? Long gone are the days that you want to manually go into a UI and click around here and click there to make things happen, right? And so, obviously in addition to the core benefit of, hey, we're delivering this whole thing as a service and you don't have to worry about the hardware, the software, the life cycle, all of that. At a higher level of the stack, we're doing a lot of work to basically expose a very rich set of APIs. We actually have enabled that through something called the VMware Cloud Developer Center where you can go and customer can go and understand all of the APIs that we make available to, that they can use to build on top of to effectively automate and orchestrate their entire VMware Cloud on AWS based infrastructure. And so that's an area we've invested a lot in. And at the end of the day, we want to both enable our customers to take their existing automation tooling that they might have been using on their VMware based environment in their own data center. Obviously all of that should continue to work as they bring that into the VMC and AWS. But now once we're in AWS and we're delivering this as a service in AWS, there's actually a higher level of automation that we can enable. And so everything that you can do through the VMware Cloud Console, you can do through APIs. So we've exposed refful APIs that allow you to add or remove instance capacity, APIs that allow you to configure the network, APIs that allow you to effectively automate all aspects of sort of how you want to configure and pull together that infrastructure. And as Dave said, a lot of this came from some of those early customer discussions where that was a very, very clear expectation. So we've been working hard to make that possible. So can customers integrate cloud-native technologies from AWS into apps running on VMware Cloud on AWS? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one example. So we've been able to support for cloud formation, right? On top of VMC and AWS. And so that's one way that you can leverage these AWS tools on top of VMC and AWS. And as we talked about before, everything on the VMware service we're exposing through those APIs. And then of course everything AWS does has been built that way from the start. And so customers can work seamlessly across those two environments. Great stuff, great update. Final question for both of you. Dave, we'll start with you. What's the unique advantages people watching that's going to say, okay, I get it. I see the momentum. I'm now got to think about post pandemic growth strategies. I got to fund the projects. So I'm either going to retool while I'm waiting for the world to open up to, I got a tailwind. This is good for my business. I'm going to take advantage of this. How do they modernize our application? What are the unique things with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's unique? What would you say? I mean, I think the big thing for me is the consistency. The other way that VMware built this between the vSphere on-prem environment and the vSphere that you get on AWS with DMC on AWS. When I think about modernization and honestly any project that I do, we do at Amazon, I don't like projects that require an enormous amount of planning and then tooling. And then there's massive waterfall start project before you do anything meaningful. And what's so great about what we've built here is you can start that migration almost immediately. Start bringing a few applications over and when you do that, you can start saying, okay, where do we want to make improvements? But just by moving over to AWS on VMware on AWS, you start to reap those benefits of being in the cloud. Right from day one, many of the things Mark called out about infrastructure management and that sort of thing. But then you get to modernize after that as well. And so just the richness in terms of VMware, Tanzu and then the, I think it's more than 200 AWS services now, you get to bring all that into your application stack. But at a time, at a cadence or a time that really matters to you, but you can get going immediately. And I think that's the thing that customers really need to do. If you find yourself in a situation, with just how much the world's changed in the last year, looking to modernize your application stack, looking for cost benefits, looking to maybe get out of a data center, it's a relatively easy path forward and just putting a couple of engineers, a couple of technicians on to actually starting to do the process. I think you'll be very surprised at how much progress you can actually make in a short amount of time. Mark, you're in charge of the cloud services business unit at VMware, I see VMware cloud on AWS, successful, more to do, a lot of action, Kubernetes, cloud native automation, and the list goes on and on. What are the most unique advantages that you guys have? What would you say? Yeah, I mean, I would maybe just build on Dave's comments a bit. I think, if we look at it through the customer lens, the ability to iterate and the ability to move quickly and not being forced into sort of a one size fits all model. And so there may be certain applications that they run in a VM and they want to run in a VM forever. Great, we can enable that. There might be other applications that they want to move from a VM into a container, or move into Kubernetes and do that in a very seamless way. And we can enable that with Tanzu. By the way, they may want to actually, many applications are going to require complex composite applications that have some aspects of it running in Kubernetes, other aspects running in VMs, other aspects connecting to some native AWS services. And so we can enable those types of incremental value that's delivered very, very quickly that allows them at the end of the day to move fast on behalf of their end customers and deliver more value to them. So I think this sort of philosophy that Dave talked about, I think is one of the really important things we've tried to focus on together, but on behalf of our joint customers. And that set of capabilities just gets richer and richer over time, right? Both of us are continuing to innovate and both of us are continuing to think about how we bring those services together as we innovate in our respective areas and how they need to link together as part of this end-to-end solution. So I think that's, you're going to see us continue to invest, continue to move quickly, continue to respond to what our customers together are asking us to enable for them. Well, I really appreciate the insight. Thanks for coming on this CUBE virtual segment. Virtualization has hit the CUBE where we have multiple virtual stages out there at re-invent on the site. Obviously it's a virtual event over three weeks. So it's a little bit, it's not four days or three days, it's three weeks. So if you're watching this, check out the site, tons of good VOD, the executive leaderships, check out the keynotes that are there. It's awesome, big news. Of course, check out the CUBE coverage. But I have one final question, is you guys are leaders in the industry and within your companies, and we're virtual this year. You got to manage your teams. You still got to go to work every day. You got to operate your businesses as well as work with customers. What have you guys learned and can you share any advice or observations of how to be effective as a leader, as a manager, and as a customer interface point for your companies? Well, I think, let me go first and then Mark can add some things. You know, I think we're moving to, certainly in the last year, specifically with COVID, you know, we've just passed out, I think we've just passed out seven months of being remote now. And obviously doing re-invent as well. It's certainly taken some adjusting. I think we've done relatively well with going virtual. We were well prepared at Amazon to go virtual, but from a leadership point of view, making sure that you, there have been some positives, right? So for one, I have teams all over the world and being virtual has actually helped a lot with that. Everybody is virtual. We're all on the same stage. It's not like we have a group of us in Seattle and a few others scattered around the world. Everybody's on the same call now and has the same, being able to listen to it the same way. But I've had to think a lot about sort of just my own time, personally in the time that my team spends, I think it's been very easy for us to run a little too hot. We can start a little too early and run a little too late in the evenings. And so making sure that we protect that time. And then obviously from a customer point of view, you know, we've found that customers are very willing to engage virtually as well around the world. So that's something we've been able to utilize very well to continue to have, you know, what we call our executive briefing center and do those sorts of things, customer meetings. And in some ways, you know, without the plane trip on either side, you know, to the other side of the world, you're able to do more of those and stay even more in contact with your customers. So it's been a lot of adjustment for us. I think we've done well. I think, you know, as I said, we've had a look at, are we keeping it balanced? Because I think it's very easy to get out of balance and just from a time point of view. But I think I'm sure it'll change again as the world goes back to normal. But in many ways, I think we've learned a lot of valuable lessons that I'm hoping some cases don't go away. I think we'll probably be more virtual going forward. So that's what it's a bit of from my side. Great insight. Yeah, front and hot, people run hot. You can, you know, misfire on that and burn out. You got to stay tuned. Mark, your thoughts as a leader, customers, leading, employees, customers. What have you learned? Yeah, yeah. I mean, in many ways, I would say a similar experience. I think, I mean, if you sort of think back, right? It's in many ways amazing that within the course of literally a week, right? To think about sort of the VMware experience, we went from, you know, 90, 95% of our employees, at least in the US working in an office, right? To immediately also working from home. And, you know, I think having the technologies available to make that possible. And really, for the most part, without skipping a beat is pretty amazing, right? And then, you know, I think from a productivity perspective in many ways, you know, it's increased productivity, right? Dave mentioned the ability to engage customers much more easily. You think about, in the past, you would have taken a flight to Europe to maybe meet with, you know, five to 10 customers and spent an entire week and now you can do that in, you know, in the morning, right? And the way we sort of engage our teams, I think in many ways, sort of online can create a very rich experience, right? And a way to bring people together across many locations in a much more seamless way than if maybe part of the team is there in the office and some other part of the team is just trying to connect in through Zoom or something else. It's a little bit of a fragmented experience, but if everyone's on the same platform regardless of where you are, you know, I think we've seen some benefits from that. It's interesting. You see virtualization, what that did to the servers, created cloud, you know? Hey, productivity. But to this point, you also have to be careful you don't run those servers too hot, right? You got to have the cooling. You got to have the cooling. So, you know, this is really an interesting, you know, social equation, global phenomenon of productivity. Cloud combined with this notion of virtual changes the workloads, the workflows, the workplace and the workforce, right? The future of work. So I think, you know, we're watching this closely. I know you guys had both had great success from the pandemic with this new pressure on the cloud because it's a new model, new way to do things. So we'll keep watching it. Thanks for the insight. Thanks for coming on and enjoy the rest of the reinvent. Thank you, great to be here. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. And remember, go to the reinvent site, three weeks of great virtual content. Over this month, of course, CUBE coverage for three weeks. Stay tuned, we'll have all the analysis and a lot of great thought leadership in the industry commentary. Stay with us throughout the month. Thank you.