 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we're getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote, for most of you saw, Simon Koskin, Hansen, Chief Technology Officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. All right, so obviously, we know IBM quite well. We had theCUBE at the virtual events, both Red Hat Summit and IBM Think, not too long in the past there, talking a lot about the open hybrid cloud, many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments, it's multi-cloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we need to, of course, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with cloud. So Stu, yeah, the Chief Technology Officer of VMware Solutions on the IBM Cloud, primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically providing automated solutions for our clients and automated secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there. Maybe you might remind our audience, I remember at VMworld before there was a big partnership that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw correctly, I'd love you, Fredia, be able to provide the data behind it, there are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe the data I saw at Think. So bring us in a little bit more, explain that relationship. So yes, we were as IBM at the beginning of all of this. I mean, VMware and IBM have had a long relationship and in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on premise and have done for the last 10 plus years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and a codified experience from dealing with these client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product set to align this automated SDDC stack on cloud platforms and first to market with that automated SDDC stack called VMware Cloud Foundation, first to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. All right, well, Simon, one of the most important pieces of that VMware SDDC message is that I have VMware, I know how I manage that environment and it's got a really robust ecosystem. So of course, Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but the comment I've made on some of these interviews for Veeam on is wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, you can just go along for the ride really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware's doing and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. Well, particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best product sets out there, which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in these particular space. Obviously, we chose Veeam for backup. I mean, Veeam's reputation out there is the backup. It's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem and it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning, getting the backup products out into our platform. And as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. Yeah, so Simon, you're CTO. So bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even having to move my data between different data centers, there are the physics challenges. And sometimes I can get closer, I can put high bandwidth, low latency connection through there. And then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that. What is data movement in 2020 and what considerations do we have to have here and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? So I'll answer your first question. I'll answer some of the last questions first. What is data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents and what is used in on-premise state over in the cloud, enabling Veeam or people who have existing investments in Veeam to use that tooling for multiple different use cases, not just backup or not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back as 2010, I feel as though I look at that, that's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data, but I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IBM perspective is, I would say, is our openness and how we're dealing with the openness in the community and our commitment to open source, our flexibility, our security and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core, actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure that data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us. And particularly when we look at the regulated industries with a heavy focus on the financial services sector and Veeam with its capabilities and ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two for one deal in these days where they're trying to cut costs and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. Excellent. Well, Simon, you laid out really the imperative for enterprises today and how they're dealing with that. Bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM Veeam relationship versus just, IBM is open and flexible. So there are a lot of options. What particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers, but maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, backup and DR, because of the heavy data requirements, are still one of the most important, if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam and not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers and bare metal by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vice versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand and keeping both clients, it's happy. Both IBM and Veeam, it's challenging at times, but I guess what makes the job interesting and exciting. Yeah, Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the, you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course, from Veeam standpoint, when VCR seven rolls out that they are being supported in, you know, one of the first to work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together, what should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progress? So I would absolutely watch this space, particularly as we move into this, containers and VMs living very much side by side with VMware's announcements around project Pacific and Tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly created a for all around the market and we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of Red Hat and its containerization platform, all while maintaining our ability in the open shift community around Kubernetes. So, Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information, which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle, but just to say that watch the space, there's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the collaborations between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape. Interesting times ahead. Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe, right, don't want to get you in trouble as to looking too much in the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having a lot to conversation with customers. What's their mindset? You talked about, there's bare metals, virtualization containers, application modernization. I've always said a longfall in the tent of any transformation and modernization we're doing. So, what are some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? So, well, one of some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization is taking a lot longer and it's taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So, the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications or all their VMs over a six or 12 month period is just not reality. So, we're living in this hybrid platform way where you have VMware, you have virtual machines and containers coexisting certain parts of the application, namely, if I take the three tier web app as an example, consisting of a HTTP server and application server and a database, when you containerize that or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the HTTP server which turns into the ingress egress service on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So, what are many enterprises? The data migration or the way that the database is transformed is the thing that takes the longest. So, we're seeing out there in the enterprises, people who are running their apps both with the ingress egress service, the application server containerize, but the database still living on a virtual machine for an extended period of time. And until they've made the final jump or shown their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime, VMs will actually disappear because we're seeing that in some cases, it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing processes. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So, having tools and partners like VM who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have, like the one we have with VM. All right, well, Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims is, IT is always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything. We just keep adding to it and changing it. And as you said, data is that critical component. And I think you highlighted nicely how, Veeam fits in very much for that story. So, Simon, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure having you on the program. Glad to have you in the CUBE alumni ranks at this point. Thank you, Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from Veeamon 2020 online. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.