 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're here at VMworld 2018 where one of the most interesting topics, definitely the most talked about topics at the show this morning, Pat Kelsinger, CEO of VMware, up on stage with Andy Jazzy, the CEO of AWS. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer and happy to welcome back to the program Sandy Carter, who's a vice president with the aforementioned Amazon Web Services. Sandy. Such a pleasure to be here, guys. Yeah, always great to talk with you. We were joking, you've been on theCUBE so many times, you're just going to be a host before you know it. I think I might be, you never know. Watch out, John. We always have, it's a community, it's a network, we always have a room for more. So, look, the VMware partnership, a lot has changed in the last year. Give us a little bit of insight as to what you've been seeing and the partner feedback you're hearing from customers and the like. So I think the biggest thing for us as Amazon is the customer response. You know, we love customer obsession and working backwards from the customer and our customers have just been thrilled with the results. So we talked with MIT, not only did they migrate over 550 terabytes of data, but they did it with no downtime, one person. I mean, it was incredible. Nathan was telling me his story and then Brinks. We loved talking to Brinks yesterday, Dan, and he was telling us not just about how many people and how many VMs were migrated over, but just the cost savings, you know, 15 to 20% of their OPEX, they actually self-funded it to start with. So really, that's what we're most excited about. That's what Andy started off with today is what is our customer reaction? It's so powerful today. Yeah, there's some distinct use cases. Andy mentioned moving some things to the cloud. Pat talked about the on-demand capabilities of the public cloud, but what's been interesting, the pundits are always like, oh, that Amazon, they're really talking about, they talk of VMware almost as a part of the cloud, the hybrid cloud message, as Amazon starts doing more things on-premises is a little bit surprising to a lot of people with the RDS announcement and things like that. So, you know, we've talked to Andy and Amazon, Amazon's not dogmatic about things. It is listening to the customers, that feedback loop and the like, maybe give us a little insight. Yeah, and so, you know, we've been hearing from customers about the hybrid cloud and how that's a great on-ramp, how customers are starting with hybrid cloud before going to the public cloud. And so as we were listening to our customers, one of the biggest items they were interested in is, how do I manage my database? Databases are hard, right? And you need great security. So this is really a natural progression of leveraging RDS, Amazon RDS on VMware, because what it enables you to do now is to manage the database from AWS, but to manage the database on-prem. So it gives you a lot of extra protection. We'll be doing a SQL Postgres, MySQL, Oracle database. We'll be previewing here in the next couple of weeks. So it's really exciting. It's exciting just to hear the excitement from our customers, you know? So the service is going live in a couple of weeks. Is it still in beta now? Is it going live in a couple of weeks? It'll be preview in a couple of weeks. So we'll be previewing it in a couple of weeks, yeah. Everybody at the keynote this morning stood up a little straighter at that announcement. Yeah, and we were cheering. It was a great customer-obsessed message for us. And I know that especially, because this is doing it for VMware customers and there's what, 20,000 of our best friends here, I think that's why it was so exciting. Yeah, I think they'll be interesting, also enable it learning opportunity, right? Cross-training, I'm always looking at, you know, how are the IT pros? Sure, they might start with an, they have a VMware cert, they might start with an AWS cert, but now there's a bunch of data services now that are now going to become relevant to more use cases. And I see like a big interest probably coming up from the bottom end on that. Yeah, absolutely. We believe at AWS that skills are so important. And so we've already done a lot of certs with VMware and AWS, and we now have our VMware cloud on AWS. So we'll see a lot more certs and training there as well. I think that'll be important. And the community, which I know you know about from your old days at VMware, I guess I should say past days at VMware, but the community is so important. And I think this announcement was really embraced by the community. Well, Sandy, one of the things we always love talking to you about is culture and community. Pat had a really nice piece. Pat's always talked a lot about doing good and charitable things. He's very upfront to his faith and beliefs and shared that, I've read his book. But he talked about doing right and doing good and that you have to do both. It's not just about the money or the business side, but doing good. Tell us your reaction to that. What are you seeing? Oh, I absolutely love that. You know, if you think about it, it's not a choice between people and business. It's really, you choose people so that you have a great business. I'll never forget a session I did with Ritz Carlton. And the Ritz Carlton gentleman told me that they really focus on employee engagement because they know if they have great employee engagement, they'll have great customer engagement, which they do, obviously. So that's always been first and foremost for us. And I love Amazon's approach as well, which is always thinking about the customer. What do we need to do right for the customer? Which is about doing good. One of the startups we work with, for instance, that's based on AWS has a safety ring. It's got IoT in it, it's back-end by AWS, and you can press a safety ring. So if you get in trouble, then you can actually call the police or call someone to come and help you. Just doing little things like that makes all the difference in the world, right? Yeah, that's great. I don't just press it if I need, you know, more dryer sheets, you know, shipped to me in two days, there's some interesting use cases. Yeah, I have to tell you though, I was demoing it once and I kept pressing it too many times. One of my key notes, the police actually came in to the, yeah, it was not a good, they every thought it was like a skit, but it wasn't, so. So Sandy, also it's been very, very interesting looking at the community overlap, VMware here in this ecosystem, AWS ecosystem, and also kind of looking at some of the diversity in both the practitioners on up through the, you know, through the executive ranks. It has looked like it's, I mean, things are changing. We're all working on both, on a lot of broadening the spectrum of training and the pipeline and the people coming in. I mean, can you talk a little bit about Amazon? I think it's really interesting, and I think it's a great message to talk about blending the community because AWS has such a strong developer advocacy community and VMware has a strong administration community. So one of the things that we've been working on with VMware is creating an admin community who understands the AWS, and AWS who understands the admin. Almost that dev-op statement, you know, becoming alive. So I do think that blending of the communities and the partners is going to have a big difference, especially with some of the announcements we made today too with EBS and storage. We have a lot of partners who are really interested in storage. They've been using vSAN, now they're going to get introduced to EBS. So I think that blending will be really important. Yeah, Sandy, I want to give you the final word, talk about how important this relationship between VMware and Amazon is from your side. Well, this is the way I would say it, is that this is a very strategic partnership for us and it's not just a marketing brochure, right? We've seen a lot of marketing brochures. This is a true engineering interlock, right? We're, I mean, you saw today, we're actually developing things that has to be integrated together. It's not just something that's written on a piece of paper. We do, you know, weekly team meetings. I talk to the VMware team almost as much as I talk to my own team. So it truly is a strategic partnership and of course VMware is just such a pleasure to work with. They, you know, just like the do good, they're just good people, you know what I mean? So it's really a great relationship for us to take forward to our customers. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that the proof points there, I think everybody's been very impressed as to the announced that were made. I've heard some of the underlying, this wasn't just, oh yeah, we put some stuff there and it was really, no, there was some heavy engineering work that happened from both side, development side, I heard, you know, late hours, a lot of work by both teams. So Sandy Carter, always a pleasure to catch up. Thank you so much for sharing with us all the updates. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here of theCUBE at VMworld 2018, as always, thanks for watching.