 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are at VMworld 2018, day one. I'm with Justin Moran. Hey, Justin. Hi, Lisa. How are you doing? Good, this is VMware's 20th anniversary and we're very excited to welcome two new guests to theCUBE. We've got Scott Brendemore, the senior director and U.S. architect team from CenturyLink. Hey, Scott. Hello, how are you? Good, and we've got Jeff Thompson, the senior director of VMware Cloud Provider Program. Welcome. Thank you very much. Hello. So 20th anniversary of VMware. You've been with VMware a long time. Lot of momentum kicked off this show. Not just this morning. You guys said you were in here yesterday. Just curious to get your perspective, Jeff, on the buzz and the opportunity that you're hearing. Not just from your customers, but from your partners as well. Oh yeah, yeah. So I remember the first one I went to. Way, way back, even before I joined VMware when I was at Hewlett-Packard. So then it was a little small event back in, I think it was Los Angeles. And now here we are, like 20, something thousand people in Vegas for the end of the year running. So the buzz is amazing. And this year, I think more than ever for us because cloud is just becoming more and more of a focal point and a discussion and topic area for everybody. So the buzz is incredible. And, you know, working with CenturyLink here and with Scott, it's just like an opportunity to dig deeper in all these relationships, you know, find new opportunities to, you know, go all in on the strategy that you guys have really sort of already adopted. Look at cloud verified and take that to the next step. So yeah, great so far and looking forward to more. So talk to us about, Scott, about the partnership that CenturyLink has with VMware. VMware has a massive amount of partners. I saw a stat this morning on stage. What is it about CenturyLink's offering and VMware that's really better together for end users? Yeah, I think it's really in our approach and how we really listen to our customers and try to understand where they are in their journey and what they need and not just throw a widget at a customer but really design a solution that meets their needs. And VMware having a, you know, flexible architecture and a vision for the future enables us to not only plan to see today, but where we're going. A lot of co-development with VMware, a lot of partnership with VMware, a lot of making sure our teams that operate the environments and my team on the front lines work with customers are trained and ready for the next technology. So I think I've seen a remarkable change in VMware over the last several years in accelerating their road map and working with AWS and a lot of the other partners. So it's refreshing. A lot of our business is private cloud on VMware. We've been a big partner for a long time and the VMware verified is something we hold dear and we look forward to the relationship ongoing. Yeah, so that focus on cloud came through loud and strong in the keynote today and you mentioned it here that private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. So CenturyLink has a rich heritage in networking and networking is vital for managing cloud. So tell us a bit more about how CenturyLink's networking skills helps customers to understand how they can manage this multi-cloud universe that I have to live in now. Sure, yeah, and maybe I should even talk about the viewers that don't know what CenturyLink is is they've acquired, I worked for, I've been with the company for 15 years, a company called Savis, but we've made a number of different acquisitions over the years to gain different technology areas, whether it be ERP, whether it be DevOps capabilities in the public cloud, whether it be cloud management platforms, et cetera. And now we see customers, more data is being moved outside of the data center, more data is being originated outside the data center. So customers are really saying, what do I do with all this data? Where do I put my apps? Where do I, I can't put it in my four walls, I want to move it to the cloud. Not every customer is on the same path at the same rate and can accept the change. So I think the biggest thing we do is helping customers manage pieces of that portfolio, but it's not just a takeover kind of old ITO play. It's a co-sourcing kind of play, a co-management model where they may have some skills in one area, but deficient in another, we can help them with AWS for instance. We can help them with the new software-defined V CloudFormate Foundation technology is that VMware is going to as well and bring the network components as well so that a workload that's running on-premise can work and perform just as well off-premise as well by providing that private network connectivity or public network connectivity to those end users as well. Yeah, you mentioned that partnership idea. So I'm keen to understand that the partnership that you can provide is centrally as a service provider. Customers rely on service providers a lot to help them manage their own infrastructure in conjunction with the vendors. So should you tell us a bit more about how you partnership with VMware works for customers? Yeah, I mean we work a lot with, I mean VMware at its roots was a software company so lately selling services and selling services to clients that are not just a software skew in a software package. So a lot of interaction with VMware client teams and doing strategic discussions of some of our key clients about how we can bring them to the next generation and buying a private cloud as a service, right? Instead of just selling them a VMware license and have the customer try to figure it out, right? So how do we get a customer on the same path and working together to do a lot of that together with our clients and really making sure we're a partnership and our sales teams are going out to customers together is a big part of that. Brian. Yeah, I think from our side, Central Link's a strategic global partner of ours so that means several things. The most important thing is we get an opportunity to have more and more briefings together, go deeper on our global strategy as a combined unit so we can look at new technologies that are coming down the pike. You can assess them and decide if there's a customer opportunity there. And if there is, we'll bring our cloud practice team in, we'll look at how we take that opportunity and make it a go-to-market strategy together and then we'll go and do sell with. We'll go out to our field teams, we'll educate them on what the offering is and then VMware and Central Link is co-selling that solution. Yeah, I think a lot of the VMware sellers are, you know, the public cloud threat that they have and the move to the public cloud, you know, how does that still coexist with customers, right? And I still strongly see that there's a lot of legacy apps. You know, we were talking earlier about only 20% of workloads have moved to the cloud. There's still a lot of legacy apps that are on VMware that are their crown jewels that are running their companies, right? They just need to deliver that in a new model and that's where a partner like Central Link can help to move it out of their data centers, to move it into VMware on AWS and help a customer understand what are the right workloads to move there? Do I need to re-platform it? When is it ready? How do I migrate it and how do I disrupt your operations, right? And then manage it if the customer doesn't have the capabilities to do it off their own premise and the skill sets, because it's a totally different mindset managing it off your premise than inside your firewall. Absolutely. So when you're talking to a customer, sort of the outset of an organization that has multiple clouds, maybe driven by application type, maybe driven by that in a combination of acquisitions, where does that business conversation start? Are you starting at the C-suite level? Are you starting there to really help the business owners leaders understand how to extract the power of their data? Tell us a little bit about how do you help them with a multi-phased approach? Sure. So we definitely talk to the C-suite, CIO, whoever's leading the strategy, but it depends on the company. A lot of that's actually done in the line of business, the more innovative lines of business that are transforming their business and have done a first mover. And you hear a lot about shadow IT, where the business is going around IT because IT can't move fast enough, right? So CIOs who are transformative, we're typically working with them. And we're trying to figure out where they are in their strategy. Are they an early adopter? Are they a laggard? Do they not have a strategy? And then understand what are, do they want to take a lot of risk and move quickly? Do they want to do it slowly and not disrupt their business? Depending upon the culture and the risk nature of their organization and what is actually running on the infrastructure that they're going to move, you got to make those decisions. So we call it, in century length terms, my team talks about what's called best execution venue. The ability to, we're agnostic, right? We're obviously a big VMware partner, but we also do resale solutions on Azure and AWS, right? As well as we're a data center provider and we can put it in our four walls on old legacy dedicated server environments as well. So whatever the right venue for a customer is, which is typically going to be hybrid, some on public cloud, some on private cloud, some on premise, some off premise, and even more moving out to the edge that customers want to do workloads in smaller quantities and kind of a dynamic nature spinning up and spinning down, that we work with the clients to figure out what's the right execution venue, cost factor, who's going to manage it, what's the best place to locate it, doesn't need to be secure, govern it as their data sovereign to your compliance regulations on it, right? And then ultimately, how they're going to scale their business and what their vision is to automate as much as possible and standardize it. You heard it today this morning, it's all about automation, right? So how can they automate and how can they reduce the labor, the individual persons on the keystrokes and automate the infrastructure and make it look the same? And I think the software-defined data center model that VMware has is a step in the right direction and there's a big uptake on customers in that environment today. Yeah, we're hearing a lot today, I think, Lisa, for people saying that it's customer choice. Yes. And the ability to automate things, but in the way that I choose to do it, transforming at the speed that I need to do it. It's coming up quite a lot. Sure. Yeah, so maybe you could tell us a bit more from the VMware perspective about how you're enabling that customer choice and we heard a lot about the automation. So how does the automation work with partners and enabling customers to be able to transform their business? Yeah, I mean, for us it's about, we give choice and flexibility. So within our program, it's all about making sure that we give everything that we build for ourselves and our end user customers giving that to our partners. So in terms of Scott and CenturyLink, we give them the tools to go and build the cloud and then set up the automated operations for them to expose their end user customers. And then we also leverage VMware, Cloud and AWS. So we make that available through the program as well. So our partners have choice and flexibility and ease of operations and then they expose that to their customers as well. So it's win, win, win I think there. Yeah, and the key to this morning, it was, you know, SDDC, Software Defined Data Center from VMware was talked about a self-driving data center, right? Yeah. And that's ultimately what we see as well in partnership with VMware that a lot of customers understand that VMware tool sets extending that to a new platform that's software defined and enabling automation that it can ultimately one day drive itself, right? So that customers can automate the deployment of applications and running on something that can be spun up on AWS very quickly. Applications can be migrated over automatically with tools managed. And then no one responding to an alert that a VM or an application's down, it can auto correct itself. And it's really could be automated in the future. So we see that and certainly all the tools and capabilities that VMware puts in place that enable that is something that we subscribe, we use ourselves and we have our customers use it as well. I'm curious what your take is, Scott, on the announcements that Andy Jassy made this morning on stage with Pat Gelsinger. They announced VMware Cloud on AWS a year ago at this same event. There's been a lot of momentum. They talked about the different M releases now going everywhere. What does that, from a partnership perspective, what does that mean to CenturyLink and how do you think that will positively impact our business? Well, we see, so there's two sides of our business. We have a very large obviously networking business and we have a hosting and cloud and data center business. So we see the two of them coming together. Now I talked about the data center dying and everything moving off. How do you network that all together? But customers, we have a very large retail customer in the, I'd say fast food chicken business. I'll keep it at that level. We started off hosting a lot of their critical applications that run their stores and understand what's the best place to put stores and store operations. We also, from the networking side and acquiring level three, they had a lot of the networking capabilities. They now want a single platform to run store operations from a network, from a virtual desktop, from an email, from a order fulfillment, supply chain management, all to be contained in a particular region that you can manage it locally without all the data going back. So the ability to have a software defined smaller component that can run it that can not only have the data center and the cloud components private to keep the data safe and not in public, but also software defined and the network software defined on one platform together with one provider that can manage the whole thing, right? Now you're distributing your data out, the network becomes more important, the performance of the network, the resiliency of it has become more important too, that if that environment goes down, you don't sell any more chicken, right? So that's the biggest thing that customers are seeing is converging of those capabilities together. And I think there's very few providers out there that can speak both those languages and provide both of those to clients today, so. So taking those benefits all the way up from what the infrastructure enables from a constant speed perspective, the board of directors that said chicken chain, what are those people wanting, what are they actually benefiting from? It might be this individual or invisible software, but from a business perspective, how is this going to impact their business? Selling more chicken? Yeah, it's basically they have a strategy to continue to be in more markets. And the more markets they do, the time to set up and deploy infrastructure and have that ready, that's the biggest enabler, right? To have the storefront, to have the store ready, and then all the infrastructure that supports the store, especially now you have people that can order chicken on their phone, loyalty, right? They can place their order ahead of time and pick it up. You don't have to go through a drive-through anymore. Things of that nature, everything becomes digitized in the I want it now generation that we live in today. You know, they need to, that'll accelerate their ability to deliver services to the store and then react to the changes in the market as they happen, everything's digital now. So that's the biggest thing is growth through stores and growth through being able to meet the demands of the stores as they change going forward. So very dynamic. Awesome. Scott, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. You're now a CUBE alumni. We'll give you some stickers. Stickers, great. Thank you. We appreciate you guys sharing what's new with such a really good VMware. Thanks. Appreciate it. For Justin, more on my co-host. Thanks, girl, thank you. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from VMworld, Las Vegas, 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.