 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, finally paired up with Stu Miniman. Hey, Stu. Lisa, three days, wall to wall coverage, and how have you and I not been paired together yet? Did you do the scheduling, Stu? That's okay. I'm glad to be paired up with you. Last interview, saving the best for last. Speaking of the last, we've got two guests welcoming back some alumni to theCUBE, who also seem to be so busy at VMworld that you come to us as our last guest. I like this tradition. We had to be the bookend, you know? Exactly, we've got A.J. Patel, SVP at VMware, and Russ Reader, CEO of OVH US. Welcome, guys. Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. Saving the best for last. The best for last, you bet. So, last year, just, yeah, VMworld last year, VCloud Air acquisition by OVH had just happened. Give us an update on what's gone on in the last year and the momentum that that is giving of the OVH business in the US. So, we're super excited to be here on second year as a diamond sponsor. We, as OVH Cloud, it's coming to the US as a great opportunity. OVH is the largest hosting company in Europe. Everyone knows who we are in Europe. We come to the US a year and a half ago. Everyone's like, who's OVH? We acquire VCloud Air, partnered with VMware, which is old news in Europe. For the past nine years, we've been virtualizing vSphere. Seven of those nine, we've been the award-winning partner in Europe. So, coming to America, the best way to really launch with the VMware partnership is to acquire VCloud Air. All those customers and brought over those employees and with the best news is that we just launched two months ago, starting to migrate those customers over to OVH Cloud. Fantastic. Very exciting. Yes. AJ, so, multi-Cloud been the story of the show. We've seen really the maturation. After, you know, we've been tracking this for a lot of years. It was like, okay, do we have the VMware, you know, Cloud story? Are we happy with it? Things like that. So, first of all, congrats to you and the team. We've had some good proof points. A lot of partners. Absolutely. I'm joking to you. It's like, yeah. OVH. OVH is the one of the important ones. So, you know, put this in perspective for us as to, from the VCloud Air world to, you know, we're talking AWS, IBM, OVH and many others. So, you and I talked about it a couple times now. This is a year number four. So thank you for inviting me, first of all. Our strategy's been consistent. You know, how do we get VMware running on as many destinations as possible? And hybrid for us has been a strategy that's been consistent. Glad the market caught up. Even having Andy Jesse talk about moving RDS and making that available to vSphere on-prem is really the sign of maturity that the world is going to be hybrid for a long time. So, from a strength perspective, hybrid is here to stay. And we're really focused on what we've been calling this cloud verified partner. So, OVH is a handful of partners that have reached that highest level achievement of delivering a full stack VMware STDC and kind of a consistent infrastructure experience that customers can deliver. So, we're at a point where the strategy's being realized. Strategic partners like OVH are delivering a full stack of VMware and customers are seeing the value of delivering cloud, whether public cloud or on-prem on vSphere. Yeah, Russ, as I said, multi-cloud, it's matured a bit. You know, one of the big questions we had coming into was that AWS partnership. How much of it is the one way? Well, things like RDS, really interesting. I've spent a bunch of time digging into understanding it. The other thing is, you know, AJ said, the strategy was VMware everywhere and partners like yourself, okay, where do we play? You know, public cloud's not the enemy. What do we do? What do we partner with? How they help fit in the landscape as to, you know, how OVH and, you know, how do you play in that larger ecosystem and differentiate? Yeah, I think that the third generation of the cloud here are coming to multi-cloud. It was kind of going in the first generation of, hey, someone needs to do it for me. AWS, I'm going to do it myself. Now, hey, I want to do it myself, but I need multi-cloud. I'm not going to put all my eggs in one basket. I need a true infrastructure partner where I have predictability on billing. I don't have ingress or egress charges. I have a true infrastructure partner with the automation that can scale globally. And so 20 years ago when we started OVH in Europe, the opportunity there was wide open. Coming here to the U.S., now it's a perfect opportunity in multi-cloud where all customers are saying, I need to get out of my closet. I have this, I have seven year old machines in my Colo facility. I'm all in one, whether it's AWS or IBM or another partner out there, they need to put different workloads where they would work best, or DR. And so coming in with, as a true infrastructure player with all of our automation, it's actually perfect timing for OVH to come to the U.S. and launch OVH Cloud. Yes, so I'm curious, obviously in the European, their legacy as we've transitioned, and it's a spectrum, but from kind of the traditional hosted environment to, you know, you're almost full-sacified when you go this. The U.S., do you still have the spectrum, or are you more, you know, built the modern with the V-Cloud Air being the foundation? You know, what spectrum of services are you offering customers? Yeah, so we offer the full spectrum. We had the opportunity to take OVH, all of our experience and systems, take the next generation of OVH in Europe, launch it in the U.S., and then bringing that back to Europe. And so what we're launching in the U.S. is a full spectrum, the initial launch with VMware, a fully hosted suite of the VMware products. So we have the VMware, the vSphere, vSAN, NSX offering that we've just announced, and having nine years of experience with vSphere as a service is a great opportunity to launch that. Well, we also have a public cloud, and that's the open-source, open-stack public cloud, which is a different unique opportunity for a lot of companies that don't want to go the traditional public cloud. We also, being one of the largest dedicated server providers, it's all built on dedicated server, even serverless compute. And so you have to find an infrastructure partner that doesn't want to provide solutions first, and how do we rack and stack and second? I mean, we understand the infrastructure and the network globally to help our partners succeed. Yeah, AJ, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the portfolio that your partners get access to from VMware. I was just interviewing Millen Desai. You know Oso well, and the SaaS piece is, so it gets lost, infrastructure as a service is one piece, but it's applications and services, and yeah. Yeah, so for our cloud provider partners, what we've done is we've introduced something we call a cloud provider platform. It gives them all the tools they need to send up a cloud, as Russ talked about in a dedicated cloud. We give you a multi-tenant cloud. We're also now with our cloud hub announcement, taking the VMware IPO cloud services and making them available to our partners. And when you think about a partner on MSP, he's no longer just the asset heavy like OVH, but he's also the asset like like a DXC. So we're now opening up the aperture for anyone who wants to either build clouds or use clouds to offer managed services on top. And I love the fact that OVH is economics, their efficiency, and the customer support with the full VMware value proposition. They've always been the leading kind of vSphere hosting. Now they're offering a full private cloud built on VMware and the managed services go with. So it's really about that choice, which really uniquely makes up provider program, so compelling to our end customers. We've heard choice a lot. We hear it too at every show. Customers need choice, companies like VMware, OVH need to build for what the customers want, not what you guys all think is great. Another thing that we've heard a lot at this show is that the seamlessness of the message, starting with Pat Gelsinger's keynote on Monday morning with people saying, you know, the structure is in place. I also thought it was one that was very cohesive in terms of the messaging and how the technologies are working together. I'm curious to get your feedback on what are some of the things that you've heard around the show from your customers who have, need the choice, are in multi-cloud environments for many reasons, right? Applications that derive, kind of dictate which direction that needs to go in or through acquisition and, you know, have multiple cloud solutions. How are they taking this message, especially with what you're doing with OVH in the US, and being able to digest this so they can really figure out, all right, here's what I can do with my infrastructure so that my business succeeds, whether I'm a bank or my hospital, tell us about that. So I can go first and then Russ can add. So I think one of the things, we've done a really good job this time is clarifying the message. I'm hoping to the market, we're now becoming a very relevant and strategic platform that spans beyond the traditional VMware data center and hybrid cloud. So the first message is VMware is providing you the solutions where you're building on VMware or you're building on native clouds. And the cloud health acquisition is a good indication of VMware's commitment to kind of pure native public cloud. The second I would say is hybrid and this kind of consistent environment for runtime, if you will, and this hybrid control plane that gives people a sense that I will lift and shift my workload first to an OVH and then transform leveraging the power of the public cloud. So it's become very easy to say, look, I don't need to change for change's sake. I can move and get the economics of a public cloud, a dedicated or even a pure multi-tenant, but then I can now refactor using public cloud services. So the power of VMware is giving them the flexibility to start to leverage cloud without having to make a lot of upfront investment just for change's sake, but more for the business transformation they're trying to drive, right? Yeah, and so what we've seen from the OVH side is really coming here and looking at all the partners. So we have Veeam for backup. We can now offer Zerto for disaster recovery. You know, obviously the VMware partnership, we just launched early in the week which David Wigglesworth, our Chief Revenue Officer was on talking about our partnership strategy and we have an amazing opportunity to bring partners in. Fusion Storm's one of those partners, IT services. So OVH cloud, we don't compete with our partners. True infrastructure partner with, they can leverage our 28 data centers and our 15 terabytes of network and no charges for ingress egress. So what we're seeing here, our customers are coming and saying, hey, I just used you for DR but I'd like to actually take my on-prem full production system and bring it to the cloud now. So the customers we're migrating, they're, there's more comfort going to the cloud. There's more understanding of the partnership ecosystem and now instead of just saying, oh, we're going to just put DR or backup, we're going to come and we're going to migrate our entire production system because we've tried it out, our foot's been in the water and now we're going all in. So that's exciting and it's talking to all the customers this week. I love, it's so exciting to talk to our customers that have migrated OVH cloud and in the US and now they want to bring over those production workloads and that's where it's really kind of that multicloud and I think VMware has been a huge asset to the cloud market and in their strategy and a great partner. So you're getting that validation from your customers that the momentum that OVH is carrying is working. You've done a lot of education, especially in the last year. They're getting it and you're seeing your technologies and your partnership validating what it is that they're. They're hardening almost all the technology that's in place now. Like we had to migrate from the kind of V-Cloud Air into the OVH data center. Those tools, those best practices, the skills now are available to the end customers. So the compelling value here is you want to take your entire data center, move it to OVH, we know how to do it. We have the tools, the people, the skills. And so just that kind of reference, they're very kind of saying, I'm not the first one to do it. It's been done before. That confidence is building in the business. Yeah, we had the opportunity. I mean, I'm not, I don't want to say that there was a bleeding edge, but we were on the bleeding edge of ATX and it's working seamlessly now. Hybrid cloud exchange or extension is going to have the technology. The extension to bring without any downtime from on-prem to over to the cloud with OVH cloud or from the V-Cloud Air cloud over to ours. And so it's working. And the customers are super excited. They get that trust. They can go back to their management team and say, hey, now it's time to go more. Where there's, I can go to the cloud and the cost efficiencies, the savings, the redundancy of the network and the power and not all this cap X. Like that's why they're all moving to the cloud now. Yeah, final thing I've, you talked about some good high level things. Any specific customer examples, I know you might not be able to mention names, but vertical or things like that as to how businesses are helping to transform themselves after they've done these sort of solutions. Yeah, sure, I mean, first of all, it's all about the customer. And so I can't mention any specific names. We will have some, we filmed some customer testimonials in the booth that we'll be announcing. And maybe the next time we can bring customers up here to talk about it. But whether it's really education or high tech or especially on the high tech, the tech guys love OVH, right? I mean, they really love it, but from a infrastructure provider, people that are looking to lift and shift their existing applications without having to rewrite their applications for a public cloud, that's where OVH really comes into play. I've got all of these systems. I've got VMware on-prem. I need to move it, but I don't want to rebuild it. And so that's where we see the excitement of, of course I'm going to build some new stuff in the cloud, but how do I take all of my thousands of applications that we have that we're never going to refactor and just move it over to the cloud to have that security? And so that's where I think customers are saying, wow, I can actually be more in the cloud than I thought I could. Yeah, for me, I think one of the, I just walked out of a customer meeting. So I want to name them, but just kind of give you a sense of what they're doing. They have four clouds. They believe they have monolithic applications. They don't want to be locked into this particular cloud. So you're hearing the consistent view is, you know, we're trying to figure out how do we change our development practices? You know, how do we leverage container, whether it's PKS, whether it's Pivotal Pass, what's my development methodology? How do I make sure that deployment gives me a choice of running across clouds? You know, how should I set up my IT operations to operate in the cloud? So consistency, portability, how do I manage the complexity of running on multiple cloud? What's my cost profile? And how do I do it effectively? So those are the kinds of questions we're getting. And they're starting to look to VMware as a trusted advisor, that safe choice as we talked about, to say, you know, one thing I can bet on is, if I bet on VMware technology, it runs on more clouds than I can, you know, when I need them, it is portable. I can take a workload that traditionally I'd run on different hardware, now we'll run on different cloud. So we're seeing a tremendous momentum around this notion of VMware is kind of the pathway or the hybrid control plane that we can bet on. And then partners like OVH, et cetera, provide a destination that's safe, that's secure, that's consistent with what they're running today. So pretty exciting in terms of how customers are starting to take in the message and start to put in the strategy as they go forward. One more thing I'd like to understand, that you talked about the tremendous capabilities that OVH and VMware have together with BCloud Air. You can enable customers to do a lot, to transform IT, to facilitate digital transformation. They're comfortable with this. But one of the things that that absolutely requires is cultural transformation. I'd love to get your final thoughts on how is OVH and VMware together helping your customers to understand and really impact the cultural changes that are needed to take full advantage of the technology. That's a great question. Yeah, so on our side, what we're starting to do is, we as a company are going through the same transformation. We're a perpetual company becoming a services company or SaaS company. So the lessons learned, I spent some time where our CIO actually talks about how we're operating our internal cloud. We're talking about the best practices of how we're moving to a service first, a mentality. How we're creating a CI, CD development methodology and practices. How are we leveraging public clouds and how are we managing costs? So those internal lessons learned, we're starting to make available to our customers and our partners. We're also packaging some of the capability into products that we make available through VCPP, our proud provider program. So the products that we're building are much more suited to run a services organization versus when we started five years ago with VCloud Air, we took enterprise products and tried to force fit them. Now we're much more delivering our own service, eating our own dog food if you will, have to incorporate that capability into our platform. So it's a combination of product improvement, best practices and lessons learned that we're making available to the market. Yeah, and I can talk from a specific example. Acquiring VCloud Air, so a great customer base and all of the personnel from VMware in VCloud Air to come over. So not only was it cultural from a customer perspective, but also from an employee perspective and you build culture and trust. And so what's interesting is that our employees and our customers that were over in Europe and our UK data centers and our German data centers, they're growing much quicker than the ones over in the US. And the US after a year of working with us and seeing that, hey, we're gonna say we're gonna do this and now we're actually doing it and I've migrated and that was really easy. And I can point and click and actually expand my compute and my storage and add more hosts in a matter of minutes. That builds trust, that has a great culture and that spreads. And so from an education perspective, we have a lot of higher education customers and now they're like, I'm gonna go talk to this school and this school and that word of mouth is golden. And that validation of we've been in your shoes, VMware has been in our shoes, they've done it successfully. Guys, I wish we had more time, but thanks so much for helping you, Stu and I wrap up the day on this set. It's great to talk to you both. And I think it might be fair to say that we'll probably see you at the next VMworld on day three. I brought the same time. Yeah, perfect. I'll put it earlier, thank you. Maybe, AJ, Russ, thanks so much for your time. Thank you so much. For my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be back to wrap up the show.