 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host Keith Townsend, and this is one of the interviews, we've been really excited. Of course we've got about 60 interviews, we love all of them, lots of good excitement, lots going on at this ecosystem, over 43,000 in attendance here in Las Vegas, but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf, who is the Vice President and CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware. Chris, great to see you. Thanks Stu, thanks Keith, great to see you guys. So for the last year, the whole VMware on AWS, been a hot buzz discussion, we've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE about partnering and how does that work and who gets the most benefit out of it, but let's start, Chris, I'd love to hear your viewpoint. You talked to a lot of customers, I've talked to some customers that are really excited about, especially at VMworld, that were there testing it and doing it, give us the customer viewpoint, what's really exciting them, what's interesting them, and I know there's a lot of new news we want to get into. There's so much that I think is exciting to customers because they're struggling with being more agile, being more software defined, being able to have more flexibility in their environments and to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS allows them to go through data center consolidation easier, it allows them to get applications to the cloud to take advantage of cloud services. One of the things people, I think kind of falls between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS is the fact that if I want to modernize an application or a traditional application, refactoring an application is enormously expensive, and it's very hard to do, it's very time consuming. If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud on AWS and then start to integrate that with other native AWS services, I get the benefit of modernizing that application without having to touch any of the application code, which is a huge benefit to customers. We've spent the last couple of years at this show, it's, well, do I lift a shift? Do I just replatform it? Do I refactor it? Do I totally rewrite it? The number of customers I've talked to at this show, their advice that they give to their peers is like, we'll go faster, and how do we go faster? So, is that, does it? Do I just take my VMware stuff that I was doing in my own data center, stick it in VMware on AWS, start using all the cool stuff? Is that kind of the path that you see? That's part of it. I think there's a couple threads here. There's the notion that, I want to go faster, but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT, where I have to change my mindset. I can't say I want to be more software defined and more agile, and then have specific hardware requirements in my architecture. Of course, that's not for all applications, but that's part of that shift in mindset is how can I go faster? And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers, if I can get into that operational model by getting on Amazon quicker, then that's good for my business. Let me just poke at one more thing on that, and I know Keith wants to jump in here, but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago, it was like, oh, my Windows operating system's going into life, I'm going to stick it into VM and keep it there forever, but boy, that application had, it was all the technical dead. My users hated it and everything like that. How does VMware go from, I've managed what you had to enabling your future? Yeah, the thing that we're really focused on here in terms of enabling the future, when you think about programmatic, compute and networking and storage and security, all applications need them. I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function or whatever, but at the end of the day, somebody has to do it, and that part of the fabric becomes really important for things like having a security audit trail. The other thread there, where VMware is strategic to customers, is they say, you know what, I might want to start this in the cloud, but I want to maintain full control of all of the intellectual property. So I want to use Kubernetes, I want to use containers, I want to use a variety of open source projects, I want to use their native APIs for my software engineers, but I want to have flexibility to build these applications without predestining their future. Maybe it runs in the cloud today, maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow, maybe it runs out at the edge, maybe I do an acquisition and it has to run in that facility. The bottom line is, I don't always know what the future holds for my apps. And for the aspects of the apps that are core to your business, there's a lot of value in running them on VMware because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility and independence, just like we had done way back in the past with your traditional enterprise applications. So Chris, that's a great setup for the next set of questions, which is VMware has been known to move at the speed of the CIO. We're at AWS re-invent. These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO. The question is around, what's VMware's focus? You know, there's VMware cloud on AWS, there's PKS, there's Vic, there's still, you guys came out with OpenStack, VMware integrated OpenStack 4.0, and then even VMware cloud on AWS, the promise innovation, three and a half months after the release, iteration on that, that's much faster than what the CIO is used to have. How those conversations balance between the CIO and the new business user here at AWS. Yeah, that's a way to sugarcoat Keith. That's a good question. Look at CIOs today, right? There's very innovative CIOs. We have NFL CIO up on stage in the morning keynote, right, and I thought that was highly dynamic, really talking about how you have to transform business. But what we're really focused on in terms of helping customers is making sure that that fabric that runs our business applications is just as fluid and dynamic as their business is. The security has to be as fluid and dynamic or more dynamic than the threats that you face. So these are areas that we're focused on, but your point is, how can VMware continue to deliver quick innovation? You know, I think VMware integrated OpenStack actually is an example of VMware integration or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up. You know, we don't talk about OpenStack that much now, but VMware was the very first OpenStack distro vendor to make upgrades of OpenStack versions a feature of software, where our competitors in that space were making it a professional services engagement. You look at us what we've done in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere. You know, we announced PKS and we were very quick to embrace Kubernetes. We announced Greengrass preview that we're bringing to market very soon as well on vSphere. So you're absolutely right to give us the feedback that, you know, in the past, you could say VMware was a bit conservative of a company. We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations. They were important, and we were deliberate because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality and that's what our customers expect. But at the same time, it's very good feedback to say that we have to work quicker. And that's the model that we're in. And I think that the AWS partnership for VMware is one example of how we've had a couple of companies learning from each other in terms of AWS and interacting with the enterprise in VMware in terms of innovating at cloud pace. And you're starting to see the benefit and the fruits of that labor now. So ironically, I ran into the Vmug president, Ben Clayton, on the show floor. It's amazing to see the crossover between the VMware community and the AWS community. I think VMware cloud on AWS has been, I think a boom, a realization that cloud is coming into the enterprise in a great way. Let's talk about the community and the users. How do you help move that traditional community of, I think Vmug is 200,000 users? How do you help move that membership forward to this new speed of IT? Yeah, it's a terrific question. There's definitely some challenges with getting folks, look, I mean, part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart. We love building everything. We love the pieces and parts and we can understand how they matter. But even if they matter like this much, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should build a snowflake for my business because everybody, some of the problems that VMware solves, you can say every business in the world has to solve the same problems. So why focus on some of those smaller nuances? So what we've been really after is providing much more content into the Vmug communities around transformation, around how more modular IT architectures are important. Even beyond the Vmug community, if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners, where their core focus was on some very tightly integrated hardware based solutions. Those partners, the more innovative ones are now building hybrid applications across VMware and AWS components and modernizing enterprises that way. We're trying to encourage our Vmug community to do the same thing. I've had talks with the Vmug events this year talking to them about edge compute and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like. So part of this is, I think all of us in IT, we have to have that point in time where we say, I have to let go. I know the market's shifting. I know I have to do something different. If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known for being a certified Novell engineer, right? Times change and we have to change too. So it's really important to be prescriptive and give our community all the tools they need to evolve with us. Chris, you've mentioned the green grass thing that you have in preview for a bit. I want you to talk about that a little bit. And when I heard Andy Jackson this morning, he talked about the continuum. Instances, which underneath that virtualization from VMware, there's containers and there's serverless. And Andy says, if he was to build AWS today, he'd build it all serverless. So we know it's not a zero-sum game and nothing changes overnight, but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight and containers doesn't go away now that serverless comes out. But I want you to talk about the green grass and how that spectrum fits into kind of the customers you're talking to in the VMware journey. Yeah, I think it's really, really exciting. And certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless. My 14-year-old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom. And he likes to program it to do really fun things. My favorite example is he had it talking about who the ugliest person in the world is and he wanted Alexa to name his sister. There's a part of me that's like, no, don't do that son. But then the other part is like, I'm so proud of you. It's awesome. Right, so, but if we step back, there's this huge press to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics and the intelligence to either where the data is being created or to where the data is being consumed. So we've had a lot of customers come to us jointly saying, look, I can't move the data to the cloud to do deep analytics or machine learning. It's just, it defies the laws of physics or the networking costs are just too much, right? Or there's latency considerations. I need a faster transaction execution time. And we have a customer, a joint customer, where they're monitoring the heat of the brake pads on a train and they're trying to understand in real time how that impacts the train's maintenance schedule and when they should take it out of service. All right, so they need to get the intelligence of the cloud closer to where these things are occurring. So let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere. You heard an announcement of machine learning on Greengrass today. To do machine learning, I need some considerable compute horsepower to really make it effective. Most of our customers already have a lot of that horsepower already out at the edge. And one of our customers has six to 10 servers. This is very common of a lot of retail organizations. Six to 10 servers per store times 10,000 stores. They're trying to do more with IoT and more analytics. They want to leverage the investments that they already have in infrastructure. The other part that's strategically important to VMware is this. We want to have cloud services be able to execute where the data's being created. That's a natural use case for virtualization. And then second, we also want to have a platform that can allow the most popular open source technologies to also run there to give customers all of that choice. So for us, it's all about promoting heterogeneity at the edge. We see those cloud services as really that new generation of application platforms that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint of a cloud data center to say, this is where it has to run. I want it to run wherever the business requirements say it needs to run. And that's what's important and that's what we're doing with this announcement. So Chris, we talked to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs. And even looking at VMware, a trusted partner that has been very stable in the environment for years, the products selection can be overwhelming. CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment and their strategies in a certain area. Conversations, where are you telling CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment? Yeah, it's a really good question. You know, you definitely have to have a focus area. And for us, it's about a platform for rapid agility and innovation that's really key to, we don't know what the future's going to be. We can guess, right? And you are both two very visionary guys and you have a general idea of what's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. But there's things that are just unexpected, especially in the business context. Like we can understand technology, but business dynamics change very quickly, right? So helping CTOs and CIOs understand how to build a fabric that can make them more agile and flexible is really key, that's one. So greater automation, greater efficiencies, you know, rapid innovation, but even more importantly for a lot that's very top of mind is security. Giving them a way to do rapid recovery, be able to start to segment some of their resources, be able to dynamically alter and adjust security and understand threats in real time and combat them in real time is key. You know, the traditional model of security is what? I have a dynamic threat, so I'm going to have increased layers of static security to combat it. I'll just add more layers. Doesn't work. You know, we've had customers have massive outages that we've worked with because they've had ransomware attacks and things like that, right? So they want to be more agile and more dynamic. Their VMware environments, they've been able to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching organizations that they have to think differently. You know, so really that security and agility I see is really top of mind for a lot of folks. All right, so Chris, you know, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth, talked to lots of customers that are interested. The elephant in the room when I talked to all of them is cost, you know? We looked at big bare metal, Amazon released that instance. I mean, that's a big honkin' instance, a lot of memory, a lot of networking. I've talked to a couple of customers that said, you know, I did the analysis on VMware over AWS versus heck, just buying a rack and sticking it in my environment and, you know, significant difference in there. So, I mean, one customer was like, hey, it was like three X the cost for me to just buy it and do it myself. And I didn't feel I was going to get any operational efficiencies even doing it because I know VMware and I know how to run it. So what do you say to those customers? What are they missing? And I'd love any other kind of misperceptions that you're hearing out there. I'll give you an example. Let's use the cost analogy. My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas. I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo, but that's actually three X the cost of me buying the circuit board kit, say on Amazon and soldering in the components myself. So, and when you think about that in a practical real world example, we used to buy motherboards and build PCs and servers back in the day, right? We don't even think about doing it anymore. And even if I could save $25 doing it, I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business. So, look, we are, if you look at- I want to poke at that because your partner's at Dell EMC. It's like, I buy one of the VX whatever family from their team. Oh, it's pretty easy to deploy. I do that. I understand how to do VMware. It's not going to take me months to deploy. I know how to do a VMware environment. And it's that type of configuration. They're saying it's not building versus buying. And I understand there's a spectrum there, but just the raw VMware and AWS, they said I'm going to get two bills. I'm going to get one from VMware. I'm going to get one from Amazon. And the price of it just seemed pretty massive compared to what they were doing. So are they wrong about that? I'm really surprised at that. I mean, we're not hearing that from our customers. We're seeing them have very solid in terms of cost savings in terms of running on AWS because, unlike a traditional cloud environment, I can oversubscribe physical hosts. I can run more workloads because it is native VMware. You're also getting additional benefits. I'm getting vSAN storage. I'm getting NSX for networking and security. So to say I'm going to just take vSphere and compare, I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison. There's other aspects that we're providing to operate in the cloud environment. And listen, we had this before five years ago, people were saying, well, cloud's too expensive. So I'm going to stay on premises. And we don't even think that way anymore, right? There's other benefits that you're getting in the cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration. And we've seen VMware cloud on AWS is as price competitive as a lot of the native public cloud services are without all of the added benefits of networking and security and management and other things that we throw in. All right, Chris, want to give you the final word. What's exciting you these days? You used to sit on kind of this side of the table, look at the environment. You're deep in some of the emerging pieces. What's getting you excited? And I'd love to hear kind of any final insights on kind of partnering between VMware and Amazon, which a lot of us on the outside are like cats and dogs living together, you know? Okay, yeah, let's hit a couple of them. You know, first, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring at the edge, I think is extremely exciting. Driving new use cases around augmented reality, more machine learning, you know, how we're looking in terms of moving services to where data's being generated. And instead of moving the data, which is always problematic, right? That's a new wave of innovation. I think that's really exciting. So that's certainly the area I'd say that's most exciting for me, is how we can innovate there. It's also around hybrid applications. It's the integration of things like lambda functions in a traditional file system. I was with a major global financial services organization yesterday, and we were not talking about traditional lambda functions use cases. We were talking about integrating lambda with database and file system events in VMs running on vSphere. So there's this whole new way to modernize applications that we're just at the cusp of, so that pace of innovation is happening faster and faster. And I'll say this about Amazon. You know, we are really committed to working together, and I think what you're seeing in the industry in general, it's not just VMware with AWS, but it's with our partners in the container spaces, and example in containers as a service, and platform as a service, is we're being very pragmatic about focusing on what we're really, really good at. And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge. And there's natural synergies where we can work together with Amazon web services. So in my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner. All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team and the IoT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience. We share lessons learned, we share engineering work together. And it's extremely collaborative because, yes, you know, just like all of our technology partners, there's always areas where we're going to compete a little bit, there can be some overlap, but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together. And that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS. Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate your perspectives, the VMware community engagement. Know you're always open to have some good, real discussions here. So really appreciate you coming, sharing all our viewpoints, and congratulations on all the progress here. We're certainly excited to see where it goes. I appreciate the opportunity. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE.