 Hey everyone, welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. TheCube is covering VMware Explorer 2022, first year with the new name. There's about seven to 10,000 people here, so folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning, you probably were too, Dave, it was standing room only. Lots of excitement, lots of news. We're going to be unpacking some news next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us as DDC architect at CDW. And Keith Normie is back, one of our alumni, head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp. Guys, welcome back to the program. Thank you. Reunion week. So let's talk about what's going on. Obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp, CDW. Keith, we'll start with you. Talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago, when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those who remember those days, and NetApp had a really dominant position because some of the things that they delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have, as they talk about today, multi-cloud. And there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in some of the realms of the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the supplemental data store within VMware cloud and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp, it's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner, I come back around, and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners, and they're the real story here with us. Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDW's perspective. What is the momentum that you and the company are excited to carry forward? Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud and AWS story since its inception, so almost four years building that practice out at CDW. And it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need, but that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem. With this announcement, right, we can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size so it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings without sacrificing anything. They're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware Cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost-friendly package. So I have one comment and that is finally, right? Absolutely. We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU memory and storage. And if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage? Okay, here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need. No, no, no, no, no, no, I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course owned VMware for a period of time, kinda owned their stock. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the Filer methodology. and now they're back together in the cloud. And the thing is, if we were sitting here talking about this five, six, seven years ago, an AWS person would have said we were all crazy. Yeah. AWS at the time would have said, nah, nah, nah, nah, we're going to figure that out. You guys are just going to have to go away. It's not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day one VMware keynote. It's amazing. That was great. And so we build off that because the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone wanted simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do so, you know, you freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole another set of workloads and do so, by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud or even if you don't have NetApp on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS and basically give you that data simplicity for management. But again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. As everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking. There's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those. Which ones are ready for the cloud first? You know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload, obviously, that's making his journey to the cloud along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything it can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first-party service and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it and by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of the private previews of working has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are going to need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere 8 and vSan 8 in particular but there's a huge market need for this for what you guys are delivering. Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware, and AWS in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. That's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now in a way we didn't have before and we get the power that's VMware, right? In the virtualization platform and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else and maybe that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud but I want to do it on my terms. I want to do it so it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach where we really look at the entire ecosystem that we're talking. So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below and figure out how that's going to work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services than with their VMware environment living on VMware Cloud and AWS. Leveraging storage with the FSX in so they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already and from a DR use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just it clicks and like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for and all wrapped up in a really easy package. No wonder Dave's comment was finally. Right. Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, I, you know, we talked about the HCI like that made sense and three or four years ago, it may be even a little bit longer, right? That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work and we're just having that same nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost to throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. Yeah, I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of IT spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week, right? There may be something we can talk about when after Explore, waiting for the announcement because we've been working with NetApp and doing some of the private preview stuff and our engineering teams working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like. Where are you having customer conversations? So this is strictly an IT conversation. Has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years? I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to IT administrators, directors, C levels, this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal and that goal is wrapped into that IT solution and typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like and then that can flow down to the directors and the IT administrators and we can start talking about, turning the screws and the knobs. Yeah, and for us it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the customer is all engaged and the reality is there's not just one partner type. There's many. In fact, the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types because you obviously have the extensions of the world that are the big GSIs, you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinex in the middle of that, you've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the design. And so if you look up and down between VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well. But there's this factor with AWS about both born in the cloud partners and partners like CW that have really taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward and that's what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like an FSX-N comes forward in this VMware Cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction, back what they do and get out of the way. Help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS re-invent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with this whole anticipation for this week. It's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just going to fuel that. And I often wonder, we got the t-shirt that says, two's company three is a cloud, maybe it should have been four because it takes the partner for the completion. We appreciate that for sure. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW, in terms of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are going to be eating out of your pocket who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah, I think the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right? This thing could just go. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits. We've got some great go-to-market strategies as we start doing partner and sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story in the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can come together and have that aligned common message to really make this win and make this pop. One correction, though, is technically we sponsor Aston Martin, so it's not a Ferrari, it's an Aston Martin. There you go. That's right. Point taken. Not a car guy. Can you talk a little bit, Brendan, about the routes to market and the GTM that you guys are working on together and even at a high level? Yeah, at a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical, it's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint, so really it's just about how to get our sellers that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week, we've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now, on what's that going to look like? What type of events are we going to hold? Do we want to do some type of roadshow? We've done that with FlexPod very successfully a few years ago where our teams, working with your teams in VMware, we all came out and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC and just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on-person, but we're starting to shift back. But it's just about telling the message and showing, hey, here's how you do it, come talk to us, we can help you and we want to help. Talk about the messaging from a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe. How is the solution from NetApp's perspective and then CDWs, how does it enable customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? Yeah, and I think the big subtlety there that maybe was missed was the private cloud being just another cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of what people kind of deal with on-prem data centers. Just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI, ML, and analytics, but that's what the partner's great at is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, the beautiful part about all this is that the never-ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance. These are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback, and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them. Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud. That's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth, right? We're here in California, I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All right. So it's all well and good that, yeah, the couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there aren't more of those than there have been in the past and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of NetApp and VMware and CDW. There was a time when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships, because who the heck are those people? Now, everything is an ecosystem. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. Sure, I know. Not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated an area as you are. And that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and maybe time is just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more of that and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, Sirius last year, IGNW, our international arm with CalWay and what it became CDWK, we have a premier experience around consultative services. And we talked about that full stack, right? From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts on the pre-sales and post-sales that that's what they live for. It's their passion and working with partners close in hand that we've had great relationships with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years and all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form. And to see how we work together to solve our customer's challenges, it's less about what we want to do, it's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and kind of our partnership. So say we're back here in six months or maybe we're back here at re-invent talking with you guys and a customer, what are some of the outcomes that at this stage, you were expecting customers to be able to achieve? Be able to do more, put more out there, right? To not be limited by the construct of I only have X amount of space and so maybe the use case or the initiative is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's your limit list. Let's have, move what you need and you're not going to have to worry so much about the cost the way you did six months ago or seven months ago or six months in a day ago, that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket and in July we could do 200 VMs, you know? And now six months later we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings, because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I see that being a growth factor and being say, hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked but now it's easy and bigger. Yeah. I think on our end of the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Broden would say. As I said previously, and he was in the previous segment which is, this is going to go pretty quick. Folks that have wanted to do this, now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it, we already know the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this data just to get the announcement out so they can kind of get going. And it's funny because, you know, when we've presented we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI TCO calculator last and everyone's feedback is the same as they said you should just leave it to the calculator. So then you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in IT before and so it's a big wow factor. Big wow factor, big differentiator. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what NetApp and VMware AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meetings. People are just chomping at the bit to get this. It's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally in a public setting. So this has been great. Awesome, guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yeah. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explore 2022. We'll be back after a short break. Stick around.