 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days. We're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware. It's our 12th year covering VMware's user conference, formerly known as VMworld. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future, multi-cloud, vSphere 8, and a variety of new next-generation cloud. We're here on day three breaking it down. This is day three, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on theCUBE, Keith Norby with NetApp. He's the worldwide product, partner solutions executive at NetApp. Keith, great to see you, industry, veteran, CUBE alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's good to see you again. Yeah, I wanted to bring you back for a couple of reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with VMware as that's evolving and is changing and with Broadcom and the new next generation. But also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. I've been an analyst, we've been in the industries for a long time, been commentating on theCUBE. VMware's an interesting spot right now because I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it, a little bit too multi-cloud, not enough cloud native. But I see the waves, right? I get it, virtualization, kicked ass, tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud and now this next gen is a clear cloud native, multi-cloud environment. I get that, I can see that, I can get there. But is it ready? And is the timing right? And do they have all the piece parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. Yeah, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this is that not just the NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem. And Vidya's here as an example, who is thinking the kings of AI are going to be sitting at a VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's not over complicated. There's a set of primary principles that organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, that's part of the landscape. You know, I got to ask you, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and going to happen. It's interesting, 12 years covering VMworld and now Explorer. NetApp has always been such a great company. I've been following that company since 1997 days and certainly over the past decade of the cloud or so, the moves you guys made have been really good. But NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at VMworld or now Explorer? Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days. We're talking ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there. But yeah, it was great seeing a day one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just be in AWS would be in all the hyperscalers as first-party services and having a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance in cloud, data management in cloud, cloud backup and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on the previous CUBE session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You know, I can say, because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 2011, 2012, the then CEO, Georgians, and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed. EMC kind of was dear in the headlights at that point. They were poo-pooing AWS. Oh yeah, no, that'll never work. AWS will never work. It's just a fluke for developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. Yeah, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first-party service, but it's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you want to talk about the technology capabilities in this offering, the funny part is the intro conversation is how much money you save so it unlocks all the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they're a hell hell back. And the number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're going to go and unleash this. All right, so what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update? It's been a while since we had a CUBE update with you guys. What are you guys showing at the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? Well, for us, it's always a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities. Within our partner ecosystem, the way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. One is on the hybrid cloud opportunity. People taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud just like we're delivering here at this VMware World Show. Also the AI and a modern data analytics opportunity. And then public cloud because really in a lot of these situations at apps, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys. The data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And that's exactly who we target this in is NetApp I think focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our Instacluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant as we can in data management. And whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's where we're there. You know, I was talking with David Nicholson because we have, you know, we joke together, I say the Holy Trinity calls it the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, I don't know what his denomination is. But storage, networking and compute, I'll say the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now and I want to get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if you look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the IT ops is not IT anymore. It's basically security and data. I'm over simplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call IT work in the CSE pipeline. But the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful, you got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops and AI. So like, storage is back and never left, but it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyperconvergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this? And how is NetApp modernized to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and obviously enable and great security and or defensibility? Yeah, and that's why no one architecture is going to solve every problem. That's why when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer, and there's also the FinOps buyer because all of them have to work together. What we're focusing on isn't just storing data, but it's also things around how you discover and govern data, how you protect data, even things like in the EDA workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do with NVIDIA or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, what we've put together is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. Tell me about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night, I did a fly by, a NetApp event. It was NVIDIA Insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the front line. On the front lines, you've got partners and you got big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like NVIDIA. What are you actually selling? What's going, I guess, what's being put together? Not selling, I mean, I'll see you selling. Yeah, well. Like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer? What is NVIDIA fit in? What are you guys and what's the winning formula? Take us through the highlights. Yeah, and so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not be trapped in anyone cloud or anyone on-prem. So having a little more elasticity. But if you extend that out like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to go drive AI with NVIDIA, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals because no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring them on-prem once the data sets get to a big enough scenario and then they want to build it in a multi-cloud over time. And that's where NVIDIA has really led the charge. So someone like an Insight or other partners could be Kindrel or Accenture or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that and we provide not just data storage, but a really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got it. And where's the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrid's a steady state right now. Multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next. But hybrid and cloud, what's the key configuration for NetApp, what's the hot products? Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in any one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric as you know, and it's built from there up into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to complement to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacent to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the FinOps space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models once you're working with NetApp and allow it to redeploy it in the places that you want to spend it. So it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. You know, I was walking around the hallways yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story there? Yeah, it's funny because that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show and every other show is security. For us, it's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned Insight and there's others, you know, CW ahead here and the GSIs, hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you got to work this with the ecosystem, as we said. You know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players, because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block, remediate, and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we try to do is really be as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's the least story in the hybrid clouds. Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug because you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that are customers or potential customers? What's the NetApp story for this year? Well, the NetApp story for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you're coming from an AWS show or the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew NetApp from the on-prem, you're going to see us massively relevant in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure show or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we're relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective to be able to solve those problems. But by the way, do it with partners because the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves and we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies, and that's why we leverage it that way. Great stuff. Now I got to ask you, what's going on in your world with partners? How's it going? What's the vibe? Just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners. Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the high order bit news items or trends going on at the front lines with your partners? Well, I think, listen, the challenges, pitfalls, the objections, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs. You see these cloud-native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them. Just consulting partners alone, like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP and a lot of them don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You got to put together an offering that says, we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's a combination of these partners across the different ecosystems. Yeah, and I want to get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out on the limb and put NetApp in a position, an official position. But I've been saying on theCUBE that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean, like, you'd think when someone gets bought out or intention bought out that'd be like this dark cloud that would hang over the company. And this is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I got to tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing, it was packed, the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings. It's all in growth. So I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom because no matter what happens, that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. It's not going away because they have such great customer base. So assume that Broadcom is going to do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels, they'll keep all the customers. But still, that wave is coming, independent of VMware. That's the whole point. So what happens next? Well, I think, you guys are going to get mop ups in business, Amazon is going to get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it, all going to. Yeah, I think we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them. And we have a great relationship with VMware. It's the best it's almost ever been now. And together, I think that will all just rationalize and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year. And I think what you'll see is probably, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from. But ultimately, these solutions that they have to come forward with, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that VMware tried to do VMware Cloud and AWS. They realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us. That made total sense. I think you're going to see more of those things that are very common sense ways to solve the barriers to modernization, adoption, and maturity. That's just going to be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. It's going to be very interesting. When we interviewed AJ Patel yesterday, he heads up. He's SVP GM of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots. We're kind of going with this. Assume there's a nice middleware layer developing. Everybody wins in this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens with Broadcom, from this show, my assessment is all steam ahead. No one's holding back at this point. Yeah, it's funny, the most mature partners we talked to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story. And the upper story is all about that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into? Versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side. They want to make that as nascent as possible, like infrastructure as code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application in middleware space and work on that side of the house, you're not going to be relevant. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. You know, we're supposed to take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was in the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity is all. You got hardware, essentially cloud, and you got applications, right? So it's all kind of the same, but not. Yeah, in a lot of cases it could be conceived as even like pipelining. You have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a much different architecture. The whole deal is how you're relevant there. How are you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving security, as you mentioned, all those things are relevant and that's where you have to place your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage, compute, networking, never goes away as just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you for the day. Thank you again, man. Day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it and congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay, more CUBE coverage after this short break. Day three, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm John Furrier, host. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.