 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 2022, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not going to want to miss this segment. Please welcome Narayan Bhardwaj. I probably, did I do okay on that? Great. Thank you. VP and GM of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Phil Brotherton is back, our alumni, VP Solutions and Alliance is at NetApp. Phil, great to see you in person. And Steve Jones, GM, SAP and VMware Cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. So we've got VMware NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day and I saw a tagline that said, two is the company, three is the cloud. But I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Narayan, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. With these three powerhouses. We're super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware Cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware Cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap via AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. And we are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS, as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the long standing partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. Yeah, you bet. So first of all, maybe I'll start with Narayan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware has been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware Cloud on AWS offering. And now that we've got NetApp at the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that has been known and trusted in the on premises world, now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware Cloud. It's just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility. Right, Phil, talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. Yeah, you know, it started, it's interesting because NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since, gosh, 2005, probably some time like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 2013, 2014 when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace, ahead of what's now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed on tap onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work, you're really looking at about, I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today. So to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. Yeah, it's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together on hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals, things like cloud migration, transforming your entire data center and moving to the cloud, things like, you know, modernizing your apps, disaster recovery, now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage, decoupled from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. Let me give you an example. I was walking over here, just before I walked over here, we were with a customer talking about exactly what Narayan's talking about. We were modeling, using a TCO calculator that we've all put together as well, on what we call data intensive workloads, which in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The case study modeled out a 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. Then just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big a votes you have. But that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money. And it's exactly as Narayan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. I was just going to say, the reason for that is it used to be with VMware Cloud and AWS, if you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get, on the compute node, you would get the compute, you'd get the memory around the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. So it's a lot more flexibility that customers had. Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that, they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rearview mirror behind any business waiting to take over if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes. I wanted to get your perspective, Steve. What are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about field to TCO, those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility we talked about. Customers absolutely want to be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshotting, cloning, rapid cloning, right, and even replication of data. Given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from the storage in combination with what they already had with vSAN and VMC. Steve earlier mentioned, the word we used, we kind of took it from Amazon was friction, is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is, move them to Amazon, makes cloud adoption just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've got all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. It just brings speed. I was just about to say, it's got to be at the speed, it has to be a huge factor here. Yeah, yeah. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as a customer value because when customers are thinking about complex enterprise apps moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less. VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them in this model. So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency workforce productivity across the stack? Absolutely. And that's definitely true that IT just, as IT gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, everybody talking about this, right? So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in management complexity which then gets back to speed, how do I grow my plant faster? I mean, really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiates them, obviously, versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those things that are still critical, but exactly. But for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition that's like I said, right back here. That's, especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it said that is critical for businesses across every industry. No industry is exempt from this. None. Just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, this solution, you can move an app as is, modernize on the cloud, you can modernize and then move, the flexibility that this enables, so it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. And we've seen so many customer examples of migrate and modernize is how we like to summarize it where customers are migrating, modernizing at their own pace. And the good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines, containers with Kubernetes, backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense and that drives down your TCO even more. From a target customer perspective, Noreen, talk about that, who is the target? Obviously, I imagine it's VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but are there any targets kind of within that that are really prime candidates for this solution? Yeah, a great question. First of all, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that? And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution as they're considering use cases such as cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out. Obviously, there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution as well as they're considering AWS. And we provide a whole range of consumption options for them, right? And I think that's one of the sort of the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware, can purchase this from AWS, and all of these different options, including from our partners, really makes it very, very compelling. Talk a little bit about, from each of your perspectives, about the, what's in it for me as a partner of these companies? Steve, we'll start with you. I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we have a long history, I think of providing managed services, again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in a non-premises world and now they're moving those workloads. Being able to satisfy that need that a customer is asking for is awesome. We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession. And I know NetApp and VMware well and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. Hey Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers, this is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit I mentioned. That's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk about those customer conversations, Phil. Where are they happening at what level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple of years? Oh yeah, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers are cloud developers and Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down, VMware getting in the game. A lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down, a lot of people are cross-connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction, I hear data, all in and around data center reduction, the cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We're talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's everybody though, it's small companies, it's big companies, they're all sort of moving into this, they call it at least hybrid world, and that's why, when I say we're getting really excited about this because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions at the rate the customer wants to do it. One last really quick thing is, I was using that up as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads, we want to move to the cloud too, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most the world, and so this solution looks really good to us and we're going to do the exact, I was just out with our CIO, we're going to, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move, which do we refactor, and how do we do that? In fact, Ryan was out to dinner with us last night talking about this. It's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, I've been with Amazon for 10 years now, early days it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects, now it's top level CIOs. I heard two mandates today, talking to customers. I think of reinvent as an IT conference now, in the way some of these top down mandates are driven. But listen, I mean, we got great customer interest, we've been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of TCO, data intensive workloads, et cetera. We've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them, and we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. So there's a pretty healthy TAM I'm hearing. Absolutely. I think so. It's interesting, another just both like WWT and Presidio channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We just say, hey, we're doing this and they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is, it's easy for people to see why this is a cool solution. The value prop is there. There's no having to peel the onion to find it. No, the money savings is just what Narayan said. A lot of people have seen an obstacle of cost. So the TCO benefit I mentioned removes that obstacle and then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? Yeah, sure. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase. And for reasons before that, already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution now, the service is a much better candidate for those workloads in those business units that had not considered VM workloads. We're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer. Given this particular solution, and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. Is there a shadow IT elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? Not really, not intentionally. I wouldn't say, yeah, not intentionally. It was funny with the customers, I was thinking as you asked the question, the customers that are in the preview were seeing the benefits that we're talking about. One of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution. Prior to this, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of view, it drove us to VMware and AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out? And I think that's what we've seen in the previews. And that's what it meant. It's so exciting to go from having states, I don't know, we have about 20 previews right now going to the globe today is the exciting news today. And is the solution here in Booz that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it? Yeah, they can go to the VMware Cloud Boot at the expo and they can get their hands on the demo and they can take it for a test drive. Excellent. You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're going to, all that's integrated today. We also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. Yep. Excellent. Is there a joint website that you guys have we should drive folks to? Yeah. It's actually yours. It's yours. It's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware Cloud. It is on VMC.vmware.com. But we also have the other corporate marketing websites that have this VMware.com is a great starting point. And we feature the solution prominently. Customers can get started today. And they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. All right. Last question, Narayan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superhero that's running around? Cause I really feel like there should be. How is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, manage secure applications in any cloud, right? And Ragu has been talking about this at the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO cross clouds. And so it's a really good story, I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications and the TCO value that they get. Awesome. Guys, you got to come back next with a customer. I would love to dig it, maybe at re-invent. Sounds good to play. We can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. Thank you, awesome. Thank you. All right, fun conversation. I told you, power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. Keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.