 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back. It's theCUBE live at VMware Explorer 2023 from Venetian Expo. This is theCUBE's 13th year of covering VMware conferences and knobs. You've probably been following along. It's evolved. This is the second year that it's been VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here with CUBE Analysts Rob Stretching. We've got a couple of great guests next. As you know, we've been having conversations all morning. This is day one of our coverage. Two more days to follow. Please welcome our next guests. Anand Swamy, the executive vice president and global head of tech and ISP ecosystems at HCL Tech. And Monty Bhatia, one of our alumni rejoins us, vice president of global systems integrators at VMware. Gentlemen, great to have you back on the program. Oh, pleasure being here. Thank you for having us. It's a pleasure being here. It's great to be back in person. The keynote this morning was star studded. It was actually standing room only. I think there was an overflow room. It's a lot to unpack there, but I wanted to start by talking about cloud chaos. Imani, I want to start with you. I saw that there was a recent multi-cloud maturity index research report that was commissioned by VMware that said about 70% of almost 6,000 organizations find themselves in this category that's known as cloud chaos. That doesn't sound fun. What is cloud chaos and why are so many organizations in it? Absolutely. I think there is a general tendency of our customers to adopt something that's brand new. So what happened was when public cloud and hyper skillers were coming in, there was a tendency to move towards public cloud. Sometimes it was one public cloud. Sometimes it was multiple public clouds. And customers didn't even realize at times that they were multi-cloud inherent. They were running Microsoft Office and they were running another public cloud. And what happened was the cost started going up. There was privacy issues. There was data compliance issues. More importantly, there was skills issues because you have all these multiple clouds and people are managing that. And it just became a chaotic environment for them. So that's really what cloud chaos was. And working with partners like HCL and working with VMware, we created this cloud smart approach. And I know you guys call it cloud smart and we call it cloud smart but we have hyphen in between. But it's all trademark. But that's really to address that problem for our customers where they're trying to do so many things and they don't have handle on it now. And so working with HCL, we've kind of figured out a way where we're trying to help our customers get a better handle on this chaotic nature of how their applications are running the cloud. That's really what cloud chaos is all about. And just adding on to Monty, what we've seen is that when enterprises kind of started on this cloud journey, lot of them did not really ask the question why. Why am I doing this? And where do I want to kind of learn? And so this was an industry friend, everybody jumped on the bandwagon and said, I'm just going to do it, right? And then when you kind of start the transformation, you realize there's a lot of things. There's a platform aspect of it. There's a people, there's a process, right? And then when you're in the middle of the journey, you've already invested a lot of money. And then we've seen what we're speaking about cloud chaos. And now you got to take a step back, you got to really figure out what's the right way to do it. And that's where a lot of organizations are finding themselves right now. Yeah, I think what's interesting and knowing a little bit about not unhyphenated cloud smart, I've heard of it before with HCL. And I think what's interesting is it's really outcome based, right? And it's driving it outcomes. And I think VMware is very outcome-based as well. How have you found that to really, in that partnership to really be a big piece of that? Yeah, a couple of things. When we kind of started engaging with our customers and partners around what's the right way to do this, right? And I said, the first thing is ask why. And second is how, all right? How are you going to kind of achieve what you want to achieve? And the third is aware, right? The biggest challenge that most of the organizations have today is where should these workloads run, right? You know, multi-cloud, multiple public cloud, you have private cloud, you have on-prem data centers, right? You have edge locations, that's a big thing, right? So why, how, where? So we started with that. Second, we kind of said, you know, what do you want to drive with the why, right? Are you trying to drive business activity? Are you kind of increased revenues? Are you going to increase, you know, just the velocity of things? And that's when we came up with the cloud smart strategy. Unhyphenated cloud. Unhyphenated cloud smart strategy. Tomato tomorrow. No, we kind of constantly go back and forth on this, whenever I say, you know, cloud smart. So came up with a strategy with primarily kind of focus on three things, right? Product, process, people. And also, about 18 months back, what we did was, we created a VMware dedicated ecosystem, you know? So Hetzel, VMware created the ecosystem. But we wanted to kind of focus on, how do we take the stack, the whole VMware stack, right? Across the board, you know, whether it's, you know, VCF, you know, or, you know, VMC, AVS, GCV, whatever it is. Look at it holistically to drive a transformation for our customers. The dedicated business unit, you know, has been a phenomenal success. You know, I believe for both our organizations and, you know, driving transformation across 100 plus customers, joint customers. You know, and I'll just say this from a, he talked about the products also there, right? And the, how do you call it? The Hetzel, VMware, business unit, or ecosystem unit is structured in such a way that all of our products from VMware side are actually categorized into the different offerings that are all bundled under the unhyphenated Cloud Smart, right? So whether it's for multi-cloud, whether it's for hyperscalers, whether it's for app modernization, whether it's for digital workspaces, they're all categorized in such a way that's a clear alignment with our product strategy and their services strategy all matching together for the benefit of our customers. And that's an important piece because at the end of the day, it's all about how are we serving our customer needs, are we solving business problems for them, right? And I think that even in today's opening keynote, there was a discussion and, you know, Haktan came up and said there's going to be an investment in ecosystem. I mean, again, we've been hearing this strongly being in the analyst side of the things where I heard some of your discussion yesterday and I think that it makes a lot of sense. I guess, how has your approach been different and then how have you guys been feeling? Because I heard, I mean, building a business unit out is a big deal. Yeah, my phone hasn't stopped ringing since Haktan made that announcement, right? There is a significant investment that he has said openly now that is going to be making in what he calls R&D as well as the partner professional services, right? What we really want to accomplish from my standpoint and from VMware standpoint is, we really want to make sure that we are using the right set of partners with the right set of skills to scale our business models, basically, right? One of the things that VMware as a software company has done in the past is, you know, we have sold licenses to our customers. We've sold credits to our customers when it comes to our cloud consumption. And we really need to, you know, our professional services organization as great as they are, you know, they're not ready to scale to all the customers that we serve, right? And so we really need our partners out, you know, by aligning our metrics correctly, by aligning our strategy correctly with partners like HCL, we believe that it is an opportunity for us to scale and embark on that sub-insass transformation journey that VMware is on right now, right? Yeah, you know, I'm just going to piggyback on Monty's answer, I think the big challenge is around consumption, right? Ability to drive consumption is becoming a huge issue. And, you know, ability to collaborate, trying to kind of help customers, like, you know, address that problem has been one of our big focus areas. And, you know, I believe- I think we're making good progress. I think we're really making good progress. And I'm very proud of the partnership and the VMware HCL ecosystem business unit and the work that they have done. It's really showing results already so far. So let's talk about results. Can you share maybe a favorite customer story or example that you think really shows the value of what HCL tech and VMware are doing together to help customers go from that chaos to smarts so they can accelerate their cloud transformation. Any particular story come to mind? Yeah, absolutely. A large manufacturing customer, you know, one of the things that they really wanted to do was, the most of their workloads were running on-prem, you know, data center. And they really wanted to kind of figure out what should be their, how do they reduce the data center footprint, you know, not fully exit out of data center but reduce the footprint. And we started off and it's a great story because it's an example where we've kind of gone in all in with VMware, okay? All stack, you know, the full stack adoption of VMware, running VCF, you know, ability to kind of cloud burst, you know, into some of these hyperscalers, okay? And it's about a 24-month journey. We are about 12 months into that transformation, driving significant cost savings, you know, the end result. You know, we believe it's going to be about 20-plus percent, you know, in terms of, you know, the overall cost savings. Yeah, you know, we're excited about that journey that we're kind of in it together. Yeah, I think you actually, you just hit on something that I seem to remember as well. And I think part of that journey and with the cloud bursting, it's cloud went right, right? And I mean, I- Cloud done right. And I think it's, I think cloud done right is actually a better way of putting it because I think on-prem is cloud as well. It's an operating model. It's not a place per se. And is that what you're seeing with the customers? Is that, hey, with this, we can, because there's AVS, there's VMC, there's all of these different sort of GCVE, you know, all the different acronyms for Google and everything, I think you're supposed to say it out loud or something like that with them. Some legal things tied up. Is that, are you helping them decide which ones are right for the right time, right purpose, right application? Yeah, couple of things. One, customers are leaning in on organizations like us to deliver something as a service, right? You know, even if it's in a private cloud, right? You know, like your RUs as a service. So that's number one. And second is, and I alluded to this earlier on, I think there is the where. Where should I run the workload? It's such a huge topic of discussion today. And therefore, ability to kind of truly adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Like today, if you really look at organizations, yeah, 70 plus organizations, 70 plus Fortune 500 organizations, 70% run multiple, you know, at least two hyperscalers. But it's all silent, right? You know, it's not like, you know, a true rationalization around platform engineering and how do you kind of really leverage multi-cloud? I think those are some of the topics that we're working with our customers on. Yeah, and in addition to that, I think we often confuse multi-cloud with multiple clouds, right? Yeah. Not just the fact that you, we have partnerships with AWS, with Microsoft, with Google, with Oracle, with IBM. Those are all hyperscalers. But then there is the edge cloud, then there is the private cloud, you know? All of these are there. And what really happens is that we need to, we need to create a cohesive decision framework for our customers of what applications can run best on what cloud, or what kind of cloud, right? There are certain, I mean, Sumit talked about in our keynote this morning about offense versus defense, for example, right? And they had a very good example of a customer who said, you know, there are certain legacy applications. You know, they run fine. We can't do anything about it. So, you know, we need to continue to run those on-prem or wherever they're running. And then, you know, there are these born-in-cloud applications that are probably better off in a modernized cloud. So, you know, we have to manage all of that. And, you know, with the cloud smart approach from HCL, I think that's something we've done very well. At least we're doing, we're trying to do very well with our customers and trying to identify where the applications are best suited to run. Really helping them to identify where they can dial down the risk as they modernize, which is- Dial down the risk and optimize the cost also. That's a very big feature of, you know, what we're trying to do with the customers. I was going to say, it's about, I mean, many of the customers that I've talked to, and I was out with a few last night very early to bed, but still, you know, out, it is Vegas. So, you know, walking around, people watching and having discussions about tech, which is kind of weird in Vegas, but at the same time, it's about ROI. And it's about how do they get to that ROI and understand that I get that ROI. The customer value. The value created. That's the most important piece now. And are you- Oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, another thing that we've seen is just because of the ROI and we've learned that no single company can solve this problem. That, and that's the reason why we, at Hetzel Tech, you know, when we started the ecosystem strategy is kind of bringing that ecosystem to drive that value, right? And pre-engineered solutions, you know, across, you know, whether it's VMware, you know, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, bring all of them together to drive a solution. And I think that's been a journey that, you know, we embarked on about six, seven years back. I've had the privilege of kind of, you know, being in the front seat, you know, through that journey and it's been a phenomenal journey. And I think that's something which is very important point that Anand brings up is the whole ecosystem. And you heard me talk about it yesterday as well. You know, this is the spider web thing, right? In order to solve our customer's problems, we can't solve, we can't do it alone, right? It has to be with our hyperscaler friends. It has to be with our system integrators. It has to be with our software vendors, you know, SAP, AWS, HCL, VMware, we can all come together and solve those problems, right? And that's the ecosystem approach that we're also trying to instill in our culture here at VMware, as well as talk to our customers in a joint way. And the ecosystem was brought up this morning during Ragu's keynote where he was talking about as things evolve over the next few months and year, the significant investment. He mentioned R&D and the second one was partner ecosystem. And we already knew how important that was to VMware, but to hear that from the CEO, I'm sure, was music to your ears as a technology alliance partner. It was. And I asked this question to Sumit yesterday and the conviction behind the importance of the partner ecosystems is true music to my ears. And second is with all of those investments, we expect a lot of these initiatives that we already have in play is going to accelerate. And that's fundamentally game-changing in my opinion. Definitely. And from my standpoint, because I run the system integrator business for VMware, we're trying to position our system integrators in a way to leverage that investment that drives not only their services, but also our products, right? Typically we focused on our products and how do we sell our products through system integrators. I'm more interested in driving the services for our partners because I know once they drive their services, it'll drive our product adoption as well and consumption too, right? So a big part of what we're trying to do is, get ready for a consumption model, right? How do we partner with HCL under their offerings to create more consumption of the products that we are selling through, through their offerings as well as the direct sell that we do with our customers? Right, and deliver much more value to the customer, allowing them to really maximize the insights from the data to allow them to be competitive. Last question for you guys. As things change and evolve over the next few minutes, what are you most excited about in terms of this long-standing partnership going forward? I think one of the things that I'm most excited about is two things actually I'm more excited about. One is we've already started on a journey that I think will accelerate significantly with the level of investment that's coming through. And the second piece that I'm really excited about is the services notion that has been attached to it. Let me explain to you in a minute. What I really mean by that is, we have our own professional services, for example, right? The metrics that we are driving through our professional services doesn't always mean that we're working and scaling through our partners because sometimes we end up competing with each other. You know, in the new world, I fully expect that our metrics to be aligned and be using partners as a mechanism to scale our own business. And that's what I'm really excited about. Now, everything Morty said and just helping solve some of the problems, technology problems across a customer landscape. So yeah, I think it's going to be a phenomenal next few years of the joint partnership and more. But yeah, really looking forward to what we can do together with our partner ecosystem as well as customers. Sounds like you've generated that flywheel from cloud chaos to cloud smart. So we can't wait to keep our eyes on that and hear the successes continued from both companies. Guys, thank you so much for joining Robin. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much for having us here. Thanks. For our guests and for Rob's Dutch A, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.