 Okay, welcome back everyone, Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Two sets, three days of live coverage. Dave Vellante's here, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all hosts of theCUBE, 12 interviews today. We're rockin' and rollin', getting down to the end of the show as we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Stephen Jones here, he's the general manager of the VMware Cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon Web Service, Stephen Jones. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Welcome back, CUBE alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah, pleasure to be here. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously, 10 years at AWS, what a ride has that been? Come on, tell me, it's been crazy. Wow, learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of the cloud. And we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that, Adam will say that, but it really is, right? If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on clouds, and the billions, right? And the amount of spend in IT is still in the trillions. So there's a long way to go. And customers are pushing us hard, obviously. It's been interesting. A lot going on with VMware, obviously around with them. Obviously changing the strategy with their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at AWS, we've been, this will be our ninth year, no, 10th year at Reinvent coming up for us. But it's 10 years of everything at Amazon. 10 years of S3, 10 years of EC2. So if you look at the marks of time, now the history books are starting to be written about Amazon Web Services. It's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like hardcore. For sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC2 instances back in the day. And the maximum amount of memory you could bridge into one of these machines was, I think 128 gig of RAM. Fast forward to today, you literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of RAM. Just insane amounts, right? My son, who's a gamer, tells me he's got 16 gig in his PC, and he thinks, that's a lot, right? So we're excited about that. That's not even on his app, it's a graphics card. I mean, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just does all the hard, I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done. I mean, look at, everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS, Nitro, Dave Vellante, and I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantis. These guys are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the level. I mean, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, in the advances on the silicon and the graviton, performance-wise, it's crazy. I mean, so what does that enable it? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side. We think that's enabling another set of new, net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw Snowflake come on, a customer of AWS, refactor the data warehouse. They call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs, you see Capital One, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx. It's exactly right. And so you mentioned gravitons, graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. At Reinvent, Adam announced that we're working with SAP to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a database as a service offering. HANA, flagship, to graviton as well. So it's definitely changing. And I think, we're going to circle back to VMware because this is kind of a point to this conversation. Is that if you look at the trends, right? Okay, VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it. V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot of the stragglers try to do cloud, they fell off the road, open stack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't want to get into that. But the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem. You have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what? Pat Gelsinger said, and I was there, let's clear up the positioning, let's go all in with AWS at that time, 2016. Yeah, this was new for us for sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How's that going? I would say it's worked. It's working well, very well. And we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement about five years ago at this conference, at 2016. So I mean, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And what's been different, I think, about this relationship, and it was new for us, was that we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't, hey, we've got a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a joint offering together. And that's the main difference. Yeah, and that's been working. But now here at this show, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is just, I think, positioning for what could happen in a post-Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction. They're Tanzu, customers we're leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic IT mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm going to go on continued accelerate in the public cloud, but I'm going to have hybrid on-premise as well. You guys have that solution now. They're going to need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware's probably not going to be able to get them all of it. And that there's a lot more cloud native options. As customers want more cloud native, how do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. Yeah, there's probably two ways I would look at this. So one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS and then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers, they're like, I've got to think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some new application. More and more we're actually seeing customers, they've got their assets. A lot of them are still on-premises in a VMware stay, right? They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this idea of migrate now. You need to get the benefits of TCO and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took it a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now, AWS native services are for use right alongside any asset a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just that. And that's how you guys see the native and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's important because, I mean, I always joke about being here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff. You know, on the bus to the event last night, walking in the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets. There's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top and I want to get your reaction to this, Stephen, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference. There's conversations around ransomware and storage and D-Doupe and recovery. It's all a lot of those happen. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air-gapped and a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations. And then the other one is, okay, I got to get the cloud story right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud? I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now, not IT serve some sort of back office function. It's like my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental silo. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you see that evolving? Because VMware customers are now going there and I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. I think it's an interesting way to put it and I would completely agree. I think it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted and they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company, right? I mean, if you look at where not too many years back there were big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud, right? Airbnb, they're disruptors. There's, that's the app. Right, that's the app. So I would exactly agree and that's who other companies are competing with and so they have to move quickly. You talked about some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the generally availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware on-premises still. There's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp filers and the same enterprise features like replication, DDoop that you were talking about and snapping clone, those types of things can be done now within the VMware estate on AWS. What's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these filers from on-premises into AWS, this NetApp service, and then connecting that up to the VMC option. So it just allows customers much, much better. You guys have always been customer folks. Every time I sat down with Andy Jassy and then last year with Adam, same thing, we worked back for them. Now I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customers, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I've observed, we talked about it here yesterday on theCUBE, was the observations of re-invent versus say VMworld now explore, is VMworld's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware and the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements. Compare that to the past say eight years of re-invent where there's so much Amazon action going on. The partners, I won't say today as a second, as a backseat to Amazon, but the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS because there's always new stuff coming out and it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or change between like the VMware ecosystem and now Amazon. There's a lot of our interviews are like they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show, they're here. So you start to see what I call the maturization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at re-invent this year as you always do. But the partners are much more part of the AWS equation. Not just we're leasing all these new services and look at us, look at Amazon, we're growing because you guys were building out and the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How is Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or I'll stop the problem addressing the need and this next level growth. What's your reaction to that? I mean, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are, you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS. And partners are big stories. By the way, you sell out every re-invent. So you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that there's no partner network there. But partners are critical. I mean, naturally we want a relationship with a customer. But in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the needs of customers, we need partners, right? We can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to, right? And so partners have long built teams and expertise that cater to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And we love partners for that. Yeah, I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side. You don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon. But for the most part, you let competition come in even on AWS. So you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more of the maturation of partners within the re-invent ecosystem. Because we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there. It's sold out as big numbers. But it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition at AWS because of the rising tide. And now their enablement, because now they're part of the value proposition even more than ever before. They really are. And they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right? We all do better together. Okay, so let's talk about the VMware Cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show? What's your main focus? Because a lot of people here are doing sessions. What's been some of the content that you guys are producing here? Yeah, so the best part, obviously, is always the customer conversations, the partner conversations. So a lot of sessions there. We did keynote yesterday in Orion and I where we talked about a number of announcements that are pretty material now to the offering. I joined an announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like, how do I take what I've got on-premises and easily move it into AWS and technology like HSX, HCX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re-IP applications. I mean, you know, it's super difficult sometimes to move an application if you've got to figure out where all the firewall rules are and re-IPing those things of a source. But yeah, it's been fantastic. A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action, you guys have probably seen an uptake on services, right? On the native side? Yes, yes, for sure. So maybe I'll just outline some of the announcements we made this week. Absolutely, go ahead. We announced a new instance family as a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I4I. You mentioned Nitro earlier. This is based on our latest generation of Nitro which allows us to offer, as you know, bare metal instances which is what VMware, actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nitro done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I4I instance, it's based on the latest Intel Isolate processor with more than double the RAM, double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabits per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the NetApp storage solution that we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your vSAN array that was on VMware cloud, you had to add another note. You might not need more compute for memory, you'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers, I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move now. We were waiting for something like this that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads into VMware cloud. It's like the alignment, you mentioned alignment earlier. I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with hybrid story that's seamless or somewhat seems, it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you guys have that, they're talking that big here. You got vSAN 8, vSphere 8 out, it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services. And the horsepower, they have their stuff, you have yours, that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's the motivation now to go faster? Look, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together, and so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. What is that vision, real quick? So that vision has to actually help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay, so you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on-premises, and why is that? Well, it used to be, there was a big need for data, and migration, right, and the speed. And so we continue to iterate this. And that, again, is a joint thing instead of, say, VMware just building on AWS. It really is a tight partnership. Okay, the lift and shift is an easy thing to do. And by the way, that could be a hassle, too, but I hear most people say, the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle, making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that? We are doing that, absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options. So if a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They want to buy from VMware. For a similar reason, they can buy from VMware. So. Are they in the marketplace? They are in the market. There are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tanzu. There's a Tanzu offering in the marketplace. So, yes, customers can contract. Marketplaces, I'm telling you, that's very disruptive. I'm really bullish on the AWS marketplace. I think that's going to be a transformative way people how they procure and deploy and how channel relationships are going to shift. I think that's going to be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation. And we haven't even seen it yet. We're going to be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're going to be documenting that. Steven, final question for you. What's next for you? What's on the agenda? You've got re-invent writer on the corner. Your OP ones are done, right? I know it's doing all that. Internet, that's an internal Amazon joke, FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the VM world? Actually, they're going to go, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is going to be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? Yeah, so both of us are hyper-focused on adding additional options, both from an instance compute perspective. VMware announced some additional offerings that we've got to fully complete. So they announced things like VMware Flex compute, VMware Flex storage. You mentioned earlier there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware-based offering. So we're hyper-focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice. Real quick, John, they made me think about the ransomware. We were at Reinforce, Steven Smith's now the CSO. Now you've got a CISO, AJ's the CISO. You've got a whole focused huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. There's been more gloom and doom. What's the security tie-in here with VMware? Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like, you don't have anything to give you enough security. And so one of the things that we're excited about, specifically with VMware, is the latest offering that we put together. It's called this ransomware offering. It's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today. Just air-gap it, right? No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this option where we can be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, and a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up. Super easy. This is cloud, remember? Yeah. We can spin up a copy of this environment, take a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX, firewall it off, and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a little bit of scanning. We had Tom Gillison yesterday, and one of the things Dave Vellante had to leave taking the sun to college, his last one in the house and being nested there now. But Tom Gillison, we were talking about how good their security story is in VMware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could after a year. I thought they could have done a better job. But this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something that is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for customers. Okay, now the real question I want to know is, what's your plans for AWS re-invent? The blockbuster end of the year, Amazon, Sir Show, that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's going to be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really to come back and still had massive numbers. AWS Summit in New York had 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting re-invent to be pretty large this year. What are you going to be there? What's your role there? We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously, we're planning on some additional announcements obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP and you should look for some things there as well. Yeah, really looking forward to re-invent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think- It always ruins my head. I always get an article out and like, why are you, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I got to write this article. It's got to get, Adam Sileski, exclusive. We, every year, we do a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event. To me, I think it sets the tone and it's going to be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscale scalers, now multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the capex goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone, you get paid because it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network. GSIs, other companies. Yeah, I mean, we're really scaling. I mean, we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service. The sovereign clouds right around the corner. We'll talk about that soon. Stephen, thanks for coming. I know you got to go. Thank you for your valuable time coming in. We're going to put Stephen Jones, who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business for AWS here inside the Cube. Day three of Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.