 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios with our ongoing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, the digital experience. We can't be together this year, but we can still get together this way. And we're excited for our very next segment, really talking about one of the big leverage points that the Dell VMware relationship can result in. So we're excited joining us. Our next guy is Guy Bartram. He is the Director of Product Marketing for Cloud Director for VMware. Guy, great to see you. Where are you coming in from? Thanks for having me on, Jeff. Where are you coming in from today? So this is, yeah, this is for me. This is from London. Excellent, great to see you. And also joining us, Doug Lieberman. He is the Global Solutions Director for Dell Technology. Doug, great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? Well, thanks for having me. I'm calling in from just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the United States. Excellent, love Philly. Live there for a couple of years, and man, there's some terrific food in that part of the world, I tell ya. So let's get into it. G-State, are you Pat's or Gino's? Actually, I'll eat or the one, but I think I prefer Pat's. Okay, I get one of each and eat half and half and piss people off that we're the purists, but that's the difference. That's the right way to do it. All right, so let's get into it. Before we turn on the cameras, you guys were talking about this exciting announcement that you've been working on for a really long time. So before we get kind of into the depths and the importance, why don't we just go ahead and tell us what is the big announcement that we're sharing today? Go to you guys. Okay, so VMware and Dell really have worked together and we both have partner programs that are focused on service providers, cloud service providers, and systems integrators and systems outsourcers, strategic outsourcers. And what we've done is work together to build a solution that is really targeted towards them in the cloud arena. So taking our cloud capabilities and solutions and optimizing it for cloud providers and doing that through what we call leveraging our Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and putting VMware Cloud Director on top of that. So that's pretty amazing and really, to you guy, what does that enable cloud service providers to do that they couldn't do so well before? It brings a whole lot of benefits to a cloud service provider. I mean, for cloud providers, historically, they've had to have infrastructure services that have been quite heavy for them to build, taken a long time to get the market and really had a high burn in operational cost. And this solution VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is going to bring them the multi-tentancy aspects of Cloud Director and all of the speed and efficiencies in application and infrastructure delivery to enable them to address the common need now around hybrid cloud management and hybrid cloud operations. And you talked about before, I'm sorry, go ahead Doug. Yeah, I was saying, I think that the big key piece is that there are special requirements that cloud providers really need from their infrastructure and from their cloud that makes it special to their business model. And what this aims to do is to provide those capabilities in an easily consumable and rapid implementation format so that they can get to revenue faster and they can get to higher level services faster. It's funny, you talked about getting to revenue faster. Back in the day, I worked at Intel and Craig Barrett was famous for TTM. TTM, everyone used to think it was time to market, bringing a new product to market. And he said, no, no, no, it's time to money, right? How fast can you get operational so that you can basically get this thing to start generating revenue? I always think of that when you look at a 737 sitting at a gate, you know, how do you get it operational? So Doug, what were some of those special challenges that they have in their market and how are you helping them solve them? So it's a great question, Jeff. As we work with service providers all over the world, they've given us a consistent message that the days of the value in their service being how they build the underlying cloud and how they do that orchestration automation are really behind us, right? They're expecting today an end-to-end capability delivered as sort of an appliance for that underlying infrastructure for the cloud components so that they can focus on the higher level services and the things that provide more value and more margin for them. And so, you know, the as-a-service offerings that run on top of the underlying cloud. And so what this joint solution does is really provide a validated design so that they can redirect their engineering resources from figuring out how to make that base cloud work in a service provider format with multi-tenancy, chargeback, showback, portals, et cetera, and get that up and running faster and not have to worry about how to automate all that themselves so that they can focus their engineering efforts on those higher level services that provide greater value to their bottom line, to be honest. Great, that's great. And Guy, I want to go back to you. You know, the cloud service providers probably don't get as much of publicity as we hear all the time about the big public cloud providers. You know, the big three or four you want to count them and we hear a lot about data centers and stuff migrating between those two. We don't hear a lot of conversation in kind of the hybrid of the multi-cloud discussion about the role of, you know, the smaller cloud service providers. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about how they play in the market, you know, why this is a really important segment for everyone's, you know, kind of architecture and ability to deliver applications. Yeah, it's a great comment. I mean, one of the things we tend to call our partners internally is the fourth mega cloud that, you know, you really haven't heard of. There's over 4,000 partners in our partner program and all of them are providing, you know, very valuable cloud services. They provide cloud services though in all areas of cloud. So this could be into Azure, Google, AWS or in their own data centers. And many of them have come from infrastructure rich environments or what we call asset heavy environments and delivering services into those environments. The recent kind of drive to cloud adoption and digital transformation has meant that there's been a growing demand for cloud service providers to deliver valuable managed services and professional services to help customer do that digital transformation and, you know, really help the customer identify where their customers workloads would be best apt and running. And, you know, cloud providers specialize in delivering these services like Doug was saying, they're looking at that higher value and they provide a lot of skills and capability in those areas. That's great, because it's really good to keep in mind. They pay a really important role in this whole thing. And Doug, I want to go back to you in terms of working together with VMware in the solution space, right? So it's one thing to talk about a relationship between two companies. It's, you know, one thing to see Michael Dell and Pat Gelsig on stage together. It's a whole nother deal to get together and put in the investment in these joint solutions. So I wonder if you could share a little bit more color on not only today's announcement, but what this really means for you guys going forward and more importantly, your customers and ultimately your customers. Absolutely. So Dell and VMware are both committed to really driving the success of our cloud provider partners all over the world. And to do that, we recognize that there's an additional level of capabilities that we need to bring together and jointly do that. And so we work, we agreed to work together to go build a series of capabilities that are really targeted at going beyond just the basic HCI market and the basic cloud market and extending that for capabilities that are targeted specifically and built specifically for service providers. And so this solution that we're announcing today is the first step on a journey, but we've both committed to and made investments in continuing that and adding more and more capabilities as we move forward and really addressing that very specific market and working with our cloud service provider partners to figure out what is the next step? What do they need from us? At the end of the day, we're looking to jointly help them be more successful and accelerate their time to market and their go-to-market capabilities. Right. That's great. And Guy, back to you. You actually had some numbers, some IDC numbers that you can share in terms of some of the real measurable benefits of this. That's right, Jeff. Yeah, we have IDC did a recent analysis for us with about 12 partners interviewed across the globe. And some of the results that came back were pretty astounding actually. This paper is available on our VCD product page on VMware.com. But just to kind of summarize, we talked about getting to revenue faster. They found that on average, service providers were able to onboard customers, i.e. migrate them into their environment, into their cloud environment around 72% faster. 57% faster delivery of new services. We all know that portfolio and construction of services takes a long time. You've got to get business units to buy in together to support the services. So 57% faster delivery of services is incredible. And then obviously getting to revenue, 32% more revenue from VCD services than without VCD and 51% overall more growth with VCD from things like more efficient operations, which are also marked at like 31%. So significant advantages to having cloud director bringing those economies of scale, bringing that capability to migrate from a customer premise into a service providers cloud and then obviously be able to utilize multiple provider clouds across multiple regions. That's great. And Doug, I wonder if you could share, are there some specific applications that are driving this more than others? Is there any particular kind of subset of the solutions that you can highlight where you're getting the most demand and where you see kind of the, the short-term opportunity as well as mid and long-term opportunity? The great question. I think it really evolves around a couple different aspects. So one is from a pure security standpoint and things like data sovereignty, we're seeing an increased demand for the service providers that are our partners as in the ecosystem of cloud, there will always be a role for the hyperscaler clouds as well as the role of these independent cloud service providers that are at the next tier down, both for the data sovereignty issues, things like GDPR, but as well as kind of that personal feel, that personal touch and specialty in applications. Some of the specific areas we're seeing are things like business process management capabilities, database as a service, VDI as a service, but even more critically, things like cyber recovery and backup as a service. We're seeing, especially in the current situation that we're in, a really an uptick in the cyber attacks and the ransomware, et cetera. And so solutions such as our cyber recovery are critical and those capabilities and those higher level services tied into an integrated with an overall service provider framework are key. And so in the area that we're really seeing uptick are really the business critical mission functions that enterprises are looking to run in a trusted partners data center. And that's what we're seeing where we're a lot of traction for this Dell Technologies Cloud Platform combining VCD and VCF together to give you all those features and enterprise reliability. Right. And I didn't ask you guy kind of the partnership question about having the opportunity to put your capability on the Dell Cloud Platform opens up a whole new set of field resources, a whole new set of technical resources, a whole different resources, not that VMware is short on resources by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly an additive, kind of one plus one makes three opportunity. Yeah, I mean, it's great to be doing this and we've actually already been doing this on a couple of other initiatives. So from my perspective, I managed Cloud Director portfolio and we've already integrated Dell data domain, Dell AFMR backup solutions, data protection suite into VCD as self service. And we've already put quite a bit of work working together with Dell on that. As we go forward, we're going to be putting more work into supporting VCD on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and integrating more services from Dell and from other vendors into the solution as well. So all we want to really provide is the capability for a service provider to have the easy to consume hardware model, easy to consume subscription software model with our program, and then the extensibility of services over and above just the infrastructure layer. So looking at things like object storage and as Doug said, data protection, migration services, container cluster services, there's a myriad of services that VCD provides today out the box, and then there's a whole extensibility framework which we use when we work with partners like we've done with Dell to deliver things like data protection. Yeah, I want to go back to you Doug in terms of a kind of a higher level, this whole transition to as a service. You've been in the business for a long time, you've been in the solutions a long time, but switching everything to as a service as often as we can and as frequently as we can and as broadly across the portfolio is really a terrific response to what the customers now are looking for. So I want to share some color on this philosophy of trying to get to as a service as much as you can across a broader solution set as you can. Yeah, if you look over the last decade and a half there has been this increasing trend to moving to as a service offerings and the public clouds really drove a large part of that and then tier two service providers around the globe. The key piece, especially in the current business model then going forward is how do you optimize your CAPEX versus your OPEX and how do you really leverage the IT infrastructure to the maximum extent possible based upon current business conditions? And that means the ability to grow and shrink and the ability to only consume what you need. In the past, when you had traditional data centers you basically built for the worst case. And so the worst case was you had an accounting run that happened at the end of the month that required a lot of processing power then you built to that and that's what you use and for the rest of the month it relieved mostly idle. The cloud model really gives you the ability to A, improve your only use what you need and consume when you want to use it but also adds in really shifting the responsibility for the management and the operations into someone, people who are experts in that area so that again you as a business can focus on your mission critical aspects of what you do whether that's developing a drug, building cars, making pizza, whatever it is really the as a service model enables your business to drive their core competency and not have to worry about the IT infrastructure that other people can do more efficiently and with better value than you can do it internally and all that drives to that as a service model with the additional financial models that really align to the business paradigm that really companies are looking for. As you're saying that I'm thinking wow member of those days when our worst case scenario was running a big batch load at the end of the month or the end of the quarter and I would be remiss, right? We are 2020, we're spread out all over the country in the world on both sides of the Atlantic if I didn't say something about kind of the COVID impacts in terms of this accelerant because we hear it all the time in social media who's driving your digital transformation is it the CEO, the CIO of COVID and we've moved from this kind of light switch moment in mid-March to hey, this is an ongoing thing and kind of the new normal is a new normal and it's really shifted a lot of people are talking about kind of shifts in the cloud infrastructure the direction of the traffic, right? From going now from east to west and now it's north to south because it's going to everybody's home. I wonder, I'll go back to you guy in terms of the response that you've heard from some of your customers in a response to kind of a, let's put a stop gap in early March that was interesting and critical and done but now kind of looking forward as to kind of a redistribution of workloads and architecture and users and I think Doug you talked about security how are you seeing any kind of ongoing effects and how is this impacting kind of your go to market and what you guys are bringing to market? Yeah, we're definitely seeing a lot of change in the way that service providers are trying to address this now. At the start of COVID it was really a struggle I think for everyone to get the resources that they required to keep customers up and running. A lot of people started re-examining their disaster recovery contingency planning and realizing that actually what has happened in the last couple of years is workloads have exploded, application workloads have completely gone through the roof and container workloads have grown drastically and what's happened is the contingency plans behind all this stuff haven't changed. They just simply can't keep up the dynamic nature of the way we're doing business. Quite simply put technology is outpacing our ability to deal with it. So service providers need to provide a platform solution that enables them to be able to orchestrate at scale and enables them to orchestrate securely at scale. And really that means they've got to move away from this hardware analog and move into virtual resourcing, cloud resource pooling, elasticity, and particularly hybridity. I know VMware, we talk a lot about hybrid solutions and multi-cloud, but it is a reality when you look at where customers are today in their cloud journey. Most of them have a footprint in their premise, have a footprint in a cloud provider premise and have multiple footprints in public cloud environments. So they need to have that consistent security model across that they need to have data contingency and backup solutions. And someone needs to be in there to manage that and that's where the service providers come in. They need to move away from the kind of infrastructure day-to-day operations that they were doing before and scale it out to now application protection and application development environments. Right, so Doug, I'm going to give you the last word as we wrap up this segment. You know, it's easy for us and pundits and people to write about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud and all these concepts. You guys actually have to make it work on the ground with real customers and real workloads. So I wonder if you could just kind of, you know, share your perspective. You've been working on this Dell cloud platform, you know, kind of how you see this evolving over time. And again, you know, kind of what gets you up in the morning as you look forward as to what this journey is going to be over the next. Six months, one year, two year, three years down the road. Brought a lot of functionality capabilities to the world. Right, the ability to consume things as you need them, the ability to really rely on a combined set of clouds and multi-cloud. And if you look at any enterprise, that by any estimate, any company of any size has probably got 12, 15 clouds that contain their multi-cloud between using hyperscalers, tier two service providers as well as cloud-based services like Salesforce.com or Office 365, and you combine all those together. And what that provides is a lot of flexibility, a lot of functionality, but also an extreme amount of complexity. And that complexity is really where Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud Platform is looking to help and to reduce that complexity. Because ultimately a successful enterprise is going to leverage the best from multiple clouds across multiple different implementations in order to provide the end-to-end IT experience that they need for both their external facing and internal IT operations. And with Dell Technologies Cloud Platform and working with our service providers, what we aim to do is to simplify the implementation of those multiple clouds and how they work together and make it as seamless as possible to shift workloads where they need to be, see your entire virtual enterprise IT environment, no matter where it's running and to really optimize on your business to understand how you're using cloud, where you're using cloud and how those clouds work together. And so the integration of all the different features with VMware and Dell bring together that end-to-end capability to significantly simplify the multi-cloud experience. And then ultimately our service provider partners can help you on that journey to provide that management and orchestration across those different clouds and the data transformation, the digital transformation necessary in order to drive success. That's great. Well, thank you Doug for putting a nice big bow on it. And congratulations to you both for getting this release out. I know there's a lot of hard work and effort behind it. So it's always kind of good to finally get you exposed to the real world. So thanks for taking a few minutes with us. Great, thank you for having us. Absolutely. Yeah, thanks Jeff. All right, he's Guy, he's Doug, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.