 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Two guests join me next, Matt Morgan is here, Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware, and Steven Jones joins us as well, Director of EC2 Services at AWS. Gentlemen, that's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure to be here. Glad to see everyone's doing well. Here we are virtual. So we are just around the four year anniversary of VMware Cloud on AWS. I can't believe it's been 20, 17, four years. Matt, talk to us about the VMware AWS partnership and how it's progressed over that time. The partnership has been fantastic and it's evolved. We announced VMware Cloud on AWS General Availability all the way back at VMworld 2017. We've been releasing new features and capabilities every other week with 16 major platform releases and 300 features as customers have requested. So it's been an incredible co-engineering relationship with AWS. We've also expanded or go to market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resale VMware Cloud on AWS. We did that back in 2019. And in 2020, we've announced that AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere based workloads. And VMware is AWS's preferred service for vSphere based workloads. So as you said, Matt, a tremendous amount of evolution and just a short four year time frame. Stephen, talk to me about the partnership through AWS's lens. Yeah, you bet. Look, I agree with Matt. The partnership has been fantastic. And it's just amazing. You see how fast four years has gone. I really think that AWS and VMware really are a really good example of how two technology companies can work together for the benefit of our mutual customers. As Matt indicated, VMware is our preferred service for vSphere based workloads. And we're broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go to market functions to help customers derive business value from the investments they made over the years. And then also as they work to transform their businesses into the future with cloud technology. Let's talk about digital transformation. Matt, as a term, we've been talking about that for many years on this program and at every event we've all been at. What we've seen in the last year and a half is a massive acceleration. Matt, talk to me about how VMware and AWS are helping customers facilitate that digital transformation. So our customers see modern IT infrastructure as the core pillar of a digital transformation strategy. And public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations. And that's because they have so many benefits when they embrace the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure as required, the ability to employ a pay as you go financial model and the ability to reduce operational overhead which helps save both monetary costs but also provides more flexibility. But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services. And those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management. VMware cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering which not only provides these benefits but enhances them with operational consistency working the same way their IT architecture works today, giving them familiarity and enterprise robustness that VMware technologies are known for but being able to maximize the power of the global AWS cloud. And every year from a customer adoption perspective that's doubling. You even walked through a couple of customer examples that really highlight the value of VMC on AWS. Yeah, I've got a couple here. I think Kiko Malamo is a good one. They're an Italian company. They sell cosmetics and beauty products through about 900 retail stores in 27 different markets, so quite large. They found that their on-premises data center and outsourcing partner was just too inflexible for the changing needs of their company. And within four months, Kiko actually migrated all of their core workloads to Amazon EC2 and were particularly surprised how easy it was to migrate over 300 servers to the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And this is key because they're actually leveraging the same platform that they were used to, which was VMware. The Kiko team actually didn't have to perform any new testing or modify any of their existing applications. They also didn't have to actually train their teams again because again, they're already upskilled with being able to leverage the VMware technology. So again, we think it's the best of both worlds. Customers like Kiko can come and use VMware cloud on AWS, consolidate their server footprint, and also take advantage of a hyperscale platform. It's pretty cool. Another customer, S&P Global Ratings, their company provides a high-quality market intelligence in the form of credit ratings research and thought leadership to help educate market participants to make better financial decisions. Who doesn't want to make a better financial decision? So in order to accelerate their business growth and globalization really, and to meet new business capabilities, they knew they needed to move 100% to the cloud and wanted to know how they were actually going to do that. Now they also had an aging data center system outages which becoming more frequent, which to them actually concerned that they actually might face in the future some penalties from the SEC. So they didn't want to do that. So over the period of about eight months, think about this, eight months, they moved 150 financial apps to AWS leveraging VMware on AWS. Pretty impressive. They reduced technical debt from legacy systems that were hosted on Sun Solaris Oracle Exadata and AIX, and they're now actually able to meet the global demands of their business. The fun part here is they're actually meeting their uptime needs, 100% uptime, since they've actually moved these workloads to the VMware cloud on AWS. So pretty excited to see customers make this kind of journey. Absolutely, impressive journeys. Also short time periods to do a massive change there. It sounds like the familiarity with VMware and the console is a huge facilitator of the speed of migration and folks being able to get up and running. Stephen, talk to me about some of the trends that you were seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned. Yes, so there are some emerging trends for sure. And it's a lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models but also in their own data centers so they can take advantage of agility and innovation of cloud, while also meeting requirements that they sometimes have that keep them from adopting cloud. You can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements, right? Or they need to process large volumes of data locally. Other times customers tell us they really need the flexibility to run data workloads in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements. And so, and as we talk about customers, they tell us that not only do they want to minimize their needs to actually manage and operate infrastructure and focus on business innovation, they sometimes need to do this in a data center that's close to them, if that makes sense. So we're looking for the best to get into both worlds. Got it, the best of both worlds. And Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? So today we're announcing the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. Awesome, congratulations. Tell me about that, let's dig into it. So for customers looking to extend their AWS centric model to an on-premises location, a data center or edge location, VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS Cloud but on-premises. And VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is based on VMware Cloud, a jointly engineered service. So together we're delivering this service on-premises as a service. This gives us the capability to integrate VMware's enterprise class, architecture and platform with next generation dedicated Amazon Nitro based EC2 bare metal instances. It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer's data center to these particular services running on-premises either in the data center of the edge or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. A unified control plane is absolutely critical. Steven, go ahead, Matt. We have a detailed plan to offer integrated AWS services and that capability really enhances the innovation angle for customers as they embrace the modernization of their applications. Another great example of how deep the partnership is. Steven, AWS Outposts was announced at re-invent, I think 2019, which was the last time I was an event in person. So coming up on a couple of years here when GA talked to me about some of the key use cases that you're seeing where it really excels. Yeah, so Matt highlighted a number of these, right? And you're right, it was 2019. We were all together back then and hopefully we can do that very soon here. Quickly on Outposts though overall since we're talking about Outposts and VMware Cloud on Outposts as well. So the thing here, and Matt highlighted this, is that with Outposts, we actually leverage literally the same hardware and control plane technology that we leverage in our own data centers. And so the customers have come to know and love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS is the exact same thing that we'll be able to get with the Outposts technology. I'll give you a couple of custom examples. I think that actually speaks to the use cases best. So remember, I talked a little bit about data locality and residency requirements. So first, ObbiW Bank is the largest bank in United Emirates, right? And they were offering corporate investment and personal banking service. And they wanted to deliver digital banking service including E-wall and mobile payments but they had to follow specific residency and data retention requirements. And they had to do it in the UAE. And so what they've done is they've actually leveraged multiple AWS Outposts in the UAE to allow them to provide business continuity while also leveraging the same APIs that they had to come to know about and love about the AWS services in region, right? Phillips Healthcare is another really good example. You can imagine that what they do every day is very important, things like predictive analytics for preventative treatments. And so with Outposts, Phillips has actually taken those and they've developed cloud applications. Again, deployed on the same infrastructure they were used to within region but now they can actually do this in clinics, at hospitals and they're managing them with the same tools providing the same end-to-end view and to their own providers and IT administrators. And so they actually estimate they have over 70,000 servers now distributed across 1200 locations, excuse me. So that's an example of again, just two use cases that really broaden the reach and the flexibility of customers to run workloads in the cloud, but in an on-premises fashion, that makes sense. Yes, it does. And you mentioned two great stories there. One in financial services, the other in healthcare, two industries that have had to massively pivot in the last 18 months amongst many others. But let's talk a little bit more Stephen about some of the things that you're hearing from some of the early customers of VMCL on Outposts. What are some of the near-term opportunities that you're uncovering? Yeah, I've got to say here too that customers, our VMware customers have been asking us for this for quite some time. I'm sure Matt would agree. So from a go back to some of the use cases we've discussed low latency compute requirements. So one of our higher education customers today who has migrated workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS is looking at extending the same capability to an on-premises experience specifically for school applications that require low latency integration from a local data processing perspective. Again, one of our VMware and AWS top biopharmaceutical companies here again in the US is planning to use VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts for health management applications and patient records that need to be retained locally at hospital sites. And then finally, kind of going back to the story around data residency. We have a large telco provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on-premises to meet regulatory requirements. And so again, we're just super pleased with the amount of interest, not only in VMware Cloud and AWS, but also in this new offering that we're announcing today. And we're really excited to be able to support the VMware Cloud experience really on the AWS Outposts platform for a variety of these use cases. One of the things we've talked about for many years with both VMware and AWS is the dedication to listening to the voice of the customer. And obviously this is a great example, Steven, as you said, VMware customers have been asking for this for a while. So while customers have a ton of choice, I want you guys to unpack what the differentiators are of this service. And Matt, if we can start with you to bring you back into the conversation, we'd love to get your input on those differentiators. Yeah, absolutely. So people have to look at this through the service that's delivered. And on the VMware side of the equation, we're delivering the full VMware Cloud infrastructure capability. This is delivered as a service, as a cloud service on-premises. So why is this valuable? Well, it relieves the IT burden of infrastructure management and fully maximizes the value of a fully managed cloud service, giving an organization the capability to unlock the renovation budgets and start to invest truly in innovation. This is all about continuous life cycle management, ongoing service monitoring, automated processes to ensure the health and security of the infrastructure. And of course, this is backed by expert VMware site recovery and reliability engineers to ensure that everything works perfectly. We also enable organizations to leverage best in class enterprise grade capabilities that we've talked about in our compute, storage and networking capabilities for best in class resiliency, auto scaling and intrinsic availability. So there's no long procurement cycles to set up these environments. And that means it's developer ready right out of the box. We're also deeply integrated with what customers do today. So end-to-end hybrid cloud usually requires end-to-end hybrid processes. And with this, integration into those processes is instant. No reconfiguration, no conversion, no refactoring, no rearchitecture of existing applications using VMware HCX or VMotion, organizations can move applications to leverage this cloud service instantly. It allows you to use established on-premises, governance, security and operational policies. And it ensures that workload portability I mentioned goes both ways. It's bi-directional as customers need to have portability to meet their business requirements. As we mentioned earlier, there's a unified hybrid control plane with a single pane of glass to manage resources across the end-to-end hybrid cloud environment. And we're giving direct access to 200 plus native AWS services. And that enables an organization to truly modernize their applications starting where they are today. And so that gives you the real capability to deliver a unique service. One that gives you an organization the ability to migrate without any downtime, have fast, cost-effective capabilities and a low risk to their hybrid cloud strategy. Excellent. That's a pretty jam-packed list of differentiators there. But one of the things that it really sounds like, Matt, from what you said, is how much work has gone on to make the transition smooth for customers, give them that flexibility and that portability that they need. Those are marketing terms you and I know are used very frequently, but it really seems like the work that you've done here really demonstrates that. I want to ask you, Steven, that same question from AWS's perspective, what really differentiates this solution? It is a good question. I'll just, I'll agree that there's been a ton of work first that has gone into actually making this happen, right? And to all the points that Matt made, you know, I would just add that, again, AWS Outpost is built on the same AWS Nitro system and infrastructure that customers have already come to love in the cloud. And so gone really are the days where customers have to worry about procuring and racking and stacking in their own gear, layer on all the benefits that Matt outlined from a VMware perspective. And again, we really believe the customers are getting the best of both worlds here. With, specifically with the compute that comes on the AWS Outpost rack, customers actually getting kind of built in redundancy, resiliency, hard security, all those things that customers don't know they need. Sorry, things that customers know they need to pay attention to, but also want some help with. And so we've put a lot of thought and effort into this. If I could, I've just explained a little bit about the customer experience. When a customer orders an AWS Outpost rack, right? AWS actually signs up to do a fully managed experience here, like we'll bring people in to actually do site assessments. We'll manage the hardware setup, the installation and the maintenance of that gear over time. Well, VMware also manages the software defined data center construct as well as the single point for support questions. And so together we really thought through how customers of Matt put it get an end to end experience from hardware all the way up through application modernization. It's pretty exciting. Very deep partnership there, and we're out of time, but I do want to ask you guys, where can customers go who are interested in learning more about this new service? So at VMworld, there are a collection of VMware Cloud on AWS sessions, including sessions dedicated to VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. We encourage everyone who's attending VMworld to look up those sessions and you'll learn all about the hardware, the service, the capabilities, the procurement and how to get started. In addition, on VMware.com, we have a web portal for you to gain additional knowledge through a digital consumption. That's VMware.com slash VMC dash Outposts. Awesome, Matt, thank you. I'm sure folks will be just drinking up all of this information at the sessions at VMworld 2021. And I hope to see you in person at next year's VMworld and crossing my fingers. Great to see you guys. Looking forward. Awesome, thanks Lisa. For Matt, Morgan and Steve Jones, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021.