 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for AWS re-invent 2018, our sixth year covering. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante Dave. It's been a wild ride, a lot going on, changing formations over the years. Cloud is kicking butt. Innovation, growth, partnership with VMware paying dividends, the ecosystems evolving, startups having opportunities, seed change is here, Tom Gillis, Senior Vice President and General Manager, networking and security business unit at VMware as our next guest. Great to have you, Tom, thanks for coming on. Thanks, gentlemen, for having me. Yeah, it's good to be here. I'm glad you're on because one of the things I'm always excited about is networking. If Stu Miniman were here, he'd be like all over the conversation as well. It's hard. It's been, it's part of the holy trinity of infrastructure, network compute storage. It's never going away, but it's changing. There's new abstraction layers, there's new opportunities. You're now living and breathing and working on with VMware and AWS ways to make networking better. How's it going? What's the update? What's going on in networking? This outpost deal is really interesting. You're bringing worlds together in a consistency. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, right? We're bringing the worlds together. And I think one of the things we're seeing is that in the enterprise, enterprise IT is looking at an increasingly heterogeneous data center environment. It's in the next 12 months, you're going to have data center with one rack is running EC2 in your data center, one rack's running vSphere in your data center, another workload's running on Amazon, another one's running out at the edge. So tying us all together creates some challenges. And this is a problem I think VMware is uniquely suited to solve. And networking is the fabric that connects all these disparate islands and lets them talk to each other. Let's them talk to each other in an orderly way, right? So networking is about connectivity. It's also about policy enforcement. Those are the two things we focus on with the NSX team at VMware. And obviously as the landscape changes around how cloud impacts it, no perimeter, but networking still has to move packets from A to B. Storage goes from now to then. So things are moving around. So networking is constantly pretty straightforward and consistent, you got to move packets around. Yes, yeah, this is an important thing that I think people get confused on when they understand they look at the numbers that we're posting in networking. It's all software networking, right? We don't move packets from A to B. We do the policy administration. So something has to move the packets from A to B. Cisco switches, Arista switches, there's a lot of really good networking hardware out there that's not going to go away anytime soon. But I always say use the right tool for the right job. So a product like Cisco ACI is a fabric manager for a switch. And NSX is a policy layer, right? It's a software networking layer. And if it's something we learned from the public cloud is that you can automate network deployment using this software networking approach. How many networking people does it take to deploy a workload on AWS? Zero. Zero. You push a button, it goes. So we're giving you that same capability on-prem with NSX. It's automation that allows you to automatically spin up and deploy a network and a policy to go with that network that makes sense. How does that impact the largest networking vendor in the planet, Cisco? How does that scenario and how do you guys work together? Is it conflicting? Is it together? No, as you pointed out, the electrons have to move from A to B and Cisco's really, really good at doing that. Actually, moving electrons, doing it cost-effectively, efficiently at scale, hard problem to do. And so we work very closely with Cisco to make sure that NSX and Cisco's products are interoperable, that they work together. They solve different problems. The problem that we solve with NSX is the policy piece of it. Web server can talk to app server, can talk to database. That's a very simple policy, but when you try to express that in IP addresses, that could be 5,000 firewall rules, right? In NSX, that's one rule. It's English language. So it's that simplicity of software networking allows us to enforce policy in an increasingly heterogeneous environment. Okay, so let's talk about outposts a little bit. So you've got two versions, if you will. You've got VMware cloud on AWS outposts. And in your piece, which is the cloud foundation for EC2 on outposts. So that's low latency, it's consistent networking. Talk about that piece of it drill down and some of the challenges that you had to solve. So as you pointed out, we think outposts is a industry-defining announcement because it's really blurring the line between private and public cloud. And VMware and Amazon have partnered very deeply to continue to make this just feel like one thing. And the piece of the puzzle that we bring to the table is infrastructure. So policy management, that connectivity, the web server talks to apps, or who gets to talk to who. Security policies, data management, protection policies. These are things that customers expect from us. It's very easy for us to deliver that in a VMware vSphere environment. So I think you talked to my colleague, Mark Lohmeier, about VMC that's going to run on outposts. That's a VMware environment running on Amazon hardware. We also are introducing services that are going to provide VMware capability in a native EC2 environment running on outposts. And that's what we call VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF for short. That's a particular instance of the outpost. There's also the Amazon version. How does it, what are you guys doing under the covers? Explain how it works from a VMware standpoint on the premise piece. Talk about under the covers. As you pointed out, the trick is to get all of these disparate hybrid clouds, these different islands of capacity to talk to each other. And so we've worked very closely with the Amazon team to take NSX networking, embed it into outposts so that it can talk seamlessly to enterprise networks of all shapes and sizes. That's a deep, important part of the relationship. And then in addition to that, we're putting the VCF capability into EC2 to extend consistent policy enforcement, either in a vSphere environment, private thing that you're managing, the hybrid thing that VMware's managing or that Amazon's managing. In any scenario, we're going to give you one set of policy, one set of enforcement across all of this with VMware Cloud Foundation, as well as the VMC on AWS. You know, software engineering and engineering in general from the data center where there's hardware or software, the generations of developers have all had the same kind of language, just changed his tone. Put a wrapper around it. Container. VMs, but now all the same principles. You want to make something smarter and better, like an old mission critical workload. You put a wrapper around it, you kind of put software around it, and you can still run that and have new modern ways to add value to it, connect there, whether it's a microservice or an API, is a trend. In the heterogeneous environment you just talked about, EC2 rack over here, is this kind of like a container for the data center? In a way. My view on this, and I think Amazon is really pioneering this front, the data center is becoming an appliance. When you think about it, every enterprise is building their own data center with their own piece parts. That's nuts. It's like every company building their own furniture. Like, yeah, you could do it, but like, really? Like, wouldn't you just rather buy this desk from a furniture maker? And so Amazon has built an incredibly efficient, incredibly powerful, call it an appliance, this hardware infrastructure that works, and it works with scale, and it's easy to use, and you can get it in two days and ships with Amazon Prime. That is super compelling. And I think a huge amount of customers are going to look for that simplicity that ease of use. What's necessary, and you pointed this out, is an abstraction, software abstractions. What VMware does, we create software abstractions to simplify the administration of these, all the bits and bytes, all the electrons that are flowing from A to B. We make that stuff easier to manage with virtualization technology that is an abstraction. Well, operationalizing it is a very key point too. How do you get it to run? Operating the networks, operating the data center, operating systems that feed developers value and giving developers a programmable infrastructure, that's the vision of software defined data center. Yes, yes. So, when you're talking about data centers and appliance, I always thought Larry Ellison had it right. And with the development of these appliance, like the iPhone for the enterprise, the problem was it was just Oracle, very narrow set of use cases. I feel like in a way that I felt when the Warriors got KD, right? That's what Outpost to me is. It's almost like an unfair advantage. It's changing the game here. So, I mean, look, VMware, your software company, you love anybody who will run your software on their hardware, but- Kevin Durant is a great analogy. But you got to think that the guys who have been playing in this on-prem cloud market are going to say, whoa, what do we do now? How do we respond? How do you think that affects some of your other partners? I think the magic of what Amazon is doing is its simplicity from A to Z, meaning I have a workload, I need to deploy it. I push a button, two days later, this rack of hardware shows up in my data center. You plug it in, it talks to the cloud, it hooks itself like, that's awesome, right? It hooks itself, I don't have to worry about it. The thing you got to remember is that data center is a means to an end, not an end in itself, right? What is a data center supposed to do? It's powering software that powers the business. And companies are spending too much time building the machinery to power the software to power the business. They want to focus on the software that's powering the business. Software is the world. Too much headcount involved in- Just a lot of work, a lot of energy, a lot of bandwidth, a lot of attention, a lot of arguing, a lot of debate. Move that headcount into high value activities. Exactly. That is really, I think, the key point. Again, it became its own cottage industry. Yes. For the wrong reason. Yeah, yeah. But I feel like working with Amazon, we can simplify how you build, deploy a data center. There's an unselling hero in this equation. That is Intel. Intel is just making these processors faster, stronger. And so, we see less and less need for highly specialized servers. And we can go with a more generalized compute infrastructure that can cover a wider array of workloads, including networking. We're using Intel processors and we're running 40 gigs of enterprise-grade networking and line-grade. I got to say, that's a great point to point out Intel. I was reading the news on my phone just in between breaks here. The news articles, oh, Intel's new competition with ARM. But they don't understand, this is a massively expanding addressable market. So, it's not a winner-take-all. Intel doesn't have to get every deal. Because there's specialism at the silicon level now to power these software abstractions. Well, to your point too, a decade ago, Paul Merritt said, we're going to run any workload, any application anywhere in the world on VMware. And a lot of people laughed and said, oh, you're not going to move some of the SAP stuff or Oracle stuff. It all went, I mean, except for very, very few. And that's, to your point, it's a general-purpose system now that can pretty much do any mainstream commercial out. So, with the power of an abstraction layer, now we can optimize. And I think we're still learning the details of exactly what Amazon's done to optimize, but we all know it's powerful. And now, you can get that in Outpost. They got some street cred. They got some street cred, yes. Tom, great insight. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. This is good fun. Great stuff. Senior Vice President and Senior Executive at VMware, breaking down the relationship with Amazon. It's like the Golden State Warriors getting Kevin Durant. They run the table. If they had LeBron, that'd be like, best analogy. We'll be back with more live coverage here at the CUBE coverage. Amazon re-invent after the short break. Stay with us.