 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host Keith Townsend. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program. Two guests, we're going to dig into what's happening in the cloud space. Big, big hot topic of the show. Dave Shakoshis, who is the Vice President of Product Management at Centrelink. Adjaye Patel, SUP and GM of now Cloud Provider Software at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. See you again, Stu. All right, so Dave, here's a question we asked coming into this week. VMware was doing this vCloud Air for a bunch of years. Oh, they're a competitor. No, they're a partner with the vCloud Air Network. vCloud Air now went over to OVH. And I think they waited 48 hours before they made this big deal with AWS. So tell us how the relationship's been as one of, not just one of the 4,500 service fighters, but you're sitting on panels with VMware. You're one of the larger partners. So, yeah, we were on a panel discussion and we were talking about this earlier today, right? And I think when vCloud Air launched, we'd had some of these same conversations and there were probably CUBE discussions where almost the same question was asked. And what I said back then and what a lot of us in the service provider community said back then, and we say it again now, is that, and this is true, not just of VMware, but this is true of any enterprise architect, you run a better system. You build better software when you're running it 24-7 as a live service. It's just better, right? The software is better. The user experience is better. You're thinking about integration angles and availability issues. Think the software gets better when you run it operationally. And VMware's technology got better when they launched vCloud Air and figured out that their virtualization technology, what they had been working with the service provider community around for years, it improved when they went and launched it and lived the life of a service provider. So we're actually excited about that. We're aligning to the same architecture. What's nice is that what they're running in the cloud and around VMware Cloud Foundation is the same thing we're running in our cloud neutral facilities inside of the Centrelink data center footprint. So it's very interoperable, all right? I'll just, yeah, Ajay, please, yeah, bring us up to speed, yeah. So my response would be, you know, a few things that have changed. One is, you know, there wasn't a cloud provider software business unit. I am dedicated to make likes of David successful, right? Taking that IP and commercializing that, that's fundamental to our strategy. Second one is, we rebranded this to VMware cloud providers. The idea is you can get VMware cloud in one of three ways. You can build it yourself, get it on VMware cloud on AWS, more importantly, but get it through our partners. Your choice based on the best cloud that fits your needs. So it's that level playing field both on go to market in terms of Jeff Waters now as a cloud sales leader over all of the different programs, technology, IP being made available, compensation neutrality. These are all the things we're quote unquote learned from our VMware VCA experience, if you will, to do this right, so that we continue to drive a multi-cloud strategy. It's certainly about the center on customer choice, right? Yeah, go ahead. So, I'm sorry, can we talk about the basic difference between those three delivery methods? Absolutely. From a customer perspective, what's the difference in looking and feel of those three? So I think at the end of the day, it's about getting VMware value in an integrated fashion, but that's not just sufficient, right? So when you go to cloud, it's no longer going to say, give me a virtualized environment. That's the quote unquote, the hard bit of just packaging stuff infrastructure, but that's not enough value. On top of that is the application is really the value, managing that application, the lifecycle of the value. This is where the likes of CenturyLink really come into play. So we believe, you know, we're kind of democratizing in terms of the consumption of a cloud stack in one of three ways. It's really customer preference and how much burden they want to take on. On the private cloud side, they're building it instead of buying it as a service. If they prefer to go on AWS for whatever reason for their cloud strategy, they now have a VMware choice, or they can go to a partner like CenturyLink to help them manage the entire journey, including manage multiple clouds, right? So it's really about that customer choice, what's right for them, which is putting them in a silo, right? What's really been good for us around, especially around the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture is that it starts to make the private clouds react predictably. And our offer now that has now been architected and based around VMware Cloud Foundation, it stands up with the software-defined data center architecture at each of the layer of the stack. It's allowed us, we don't have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets in order to make a private cloud happen. We've been running hosted private cloud for as long as there have been hosted private clouds. CenturyLink has been managing as part of the cloud service provider program and all its earlier naming variants. But what this latest architecture allows us to do is not only remove the number of things that we need to integrate against them, the integration code we need to write and all the different vendor technologies we need to orchestrate against it, it pulls it all into one scale-out software, a divine stack, which makes our customer experience better. It drives better self-service and more reliable self-service into the hands of our customers so that they can move faster. And it allows our private cloud to become more predictable so that we can start managing it with our multi-cloud cloud application manager product. So we launched that earlier this year. It was the combination of some of the managed hosting tools and capabilities that we've had back in the Savas days. It combines in the abstraction software we got from a company called Elastic Box that we acquired last year. And we weave that together into one multi-cloud layer. So it now looks at private clouds and other public clouds as just another deployment destination on that multi-cloud manager journey. Effectively, competition is moving above the S2DC layer. What kind of making S2DC common? Let's compete on the value and the solution that we have. Ironically, this was the promise of open-source projects to make this common platform across private, public, and multi-clouds. So use the term that not a lot of people may not be familiar with, cloud-neutral facilities. What is that term? So a cloud-neutral facility is one that can basically get you connected to a number of different cloud deployment form factors. It's not a one-note show, a one approach kind of model. And so it's really about a service provider that from a, when you said the term facility, I mean that can really just be a service provider environment that basically gets the particular workload to the best execution venue for that individual set of runtime conditions. So to us, being in a more of a cloud-neutral posture certainly means we're bringing some parts of our hosted environment, whether it's private or we have a multi-tenant environment that we can provision to as well. We use that multi-tenant environment to actually speed up our own development of higher-level services. And then we partner across the different cloud portfolios, the different cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. We tie into that. It's really about looking at the data center as an extension of all the potential runtime venues, both ones that you might build on your own and then ones that are available to you. Dave, why you'd expand on that some? Because one of the things I've been getting out of this week is that maturation of how we've been talking about cloud. So a couple of years ago, I was critical of VMware. It's like any device, any application, one cloud, I'm like, wrong, no. Amazon, absolutely 100% public cloud. I think they understand it's not 100%. We'll see where Amazon goes in the future. You said you're tying into the likes of Amazon and Azure. I'm assuming that's direct connect and those kind of services. Where, how do we think of CenturyLink? Where do you add value? How do you make money in these various pieces? I remember, Savvis was one of the vCloud Air data centers and boy, margins were going to be real tight on something like that. So, yeah, I mean, the, so our multi-cloud posture and the direction we see things going is really one that it starts and the largest sort of anchor point for CenturyLink strategy is the strength of our network, right? It's all the places that that network can take us. And a lot of the investments that we've made in virtualization management, a lot of the investments we've made around managing workloads, inside data centers we control has really been a precursor to how we need to evolve the core of our network and how our network is becoming more software-defined. We built and we launched, as I said before, CenturyLink Cloud, which is a multi-tenant hosting environment. That's been a huge IT accelerator for us. As we've started to advance and start to figure out how do we manage virtualization inside the core of our points of presence on the network? And as our network starts to expand, we're, as most folks know, we're in the sort of the closing stages and the announced acquisition of level three. As that transaction completes and the whole network gets even stronger, now we have more software assets to be able to drive even further into the core of that network. So it starts from the network, everything we do from either a cloud neutral or a multi-cloud perspective is really around helping customers at the workload layer to really thicken that network value proposition. I'm actually most also excited about the whole notion of computing on the edge. And once you have a network of this scale and the ability to then distribute compute either on the edge, consult in the back, or even leverage third-party public clouds seamlessly with a high bandwidth, low jitter network, I think that's the foundational infrastructure that's needed. And these guys have really done a good job of kind of bringing that to bear. So pretty excited about that opportunity. I wonder if you can give us a little color on service providers. When I go to most service providers, most of them, networking, key strength, obviously we know CenturyLink, Telco, all that kind of background, management layer, most service providers built their own. So there's a lot of pieces now when I see the cloud foundation suite and they're embracing it. How did you work through some of those, you know, hey, no, we've got our way of doing things we know better as opposed to embracing them or where's that give and take? I think what's happening is, you know, depending on the sophistication of the service provider, the larger ones have the ability to kind of create a bare metal service, kind of drive higher automation, have the infrastructure spend to drive that. As you go a little bit of the down market, they're really looking for, quote unquote, a cloud in a box. You and I spoke about it last year, right? They want an easy to type experience for the end customers without the cost and complexity of building one. So my opportunity to service provider businesses, how do I give them that platform, that multi-tenant platform that can cover resources? But in the future, elastically leverage a VMware cloud on AWS, right? As an endpoint that they can start to use for geo-distribution, DR, or simply new capacity. So we're going to see a world where they're going to start mixing and matching what they build, what they buy, right? And how they drive that. And the management solution around that, around a high performance network is going to be the future that I see together. So one of the buzzwords over the past few years in industry has been the invisible infrastructure. This concept that infrastructure should be something that people use and don't see. How does CenturyLink help support, not necessarily making an invisible infrastructure, but this concept that, this is something we use and don't see from the network to the software layer that we're now talking about. Where's the differentiating value that CenturyLink brings versus me rolling my own? Yeah, I think where we've been making most of our investments and where we've been driving and focusing on success for our customers has been up at that managed services and application layer. And the way we view the infrastructure layer of the stack and when we think of stacks, we think of the network at the base level of the foundation, data center infrastructure at the next tier up, and then workloads and applications. It's not a groundbreaking tiered model, but it's how we think and organize a lot of what's in our business. And when it comes to the infrastructure layer, as I said before, we're in a highly interoperable posture with a lot of the other partner clouds because our network can link us there pretty seamlessly and because we still know how to orchestrate enough at the infrastructure layer. But the investment has really been inside the core of the network as we start driving that virtualization capabilities into the core and then up at the workload layer, what we really try to work around is creating as in all computer science problems, an abstraction layer where, but the trick about an abstraction layer in our part of the world and in our part of the industry is not creating one that creates a new layer of lock-in, that allows each of the individual underpinning infrastructure venues to do their thing and do what they're good at. So we build that abstraction layer with the idea of a best execution venue mindset that lets each of those individual underpinning infrastructure offerings, whether it's the VCF architecture hosted up on AWS or whether it's one of the other particular software platforms because of geography or performance or service capabilities that they're good at, the trick of creating an abstraction layer is not locking anybody in or reducing those platforms to lowest common denominator. So with our cloud application manager offering, being able to manage our private cloud based on VCF, as well as manage other environments down the road, that's really where we try to make that infrastructure invisible is to sort of create a lightweight abstraction layer that they can think more at the workload layer than at the individual nuts and bolts layer. Yeah. So the great thing about creating an abstraction layer when you own the underlying infrastructure, it makes it a lot easier to support. So I want to make sure that I understand this concept from the ground up. You talked about the network as being the glue or the foundation that ties all this together, especially with the level three acquisition from an IoT perspective. If I need those far flung services, I have the physical network capability to get it there. If I need to put vSAN at the edge, we just had guests on talking about vSAN at the edge and get that data into a CenturyLink data center using VCF to get it there and consistently have that same level of abstraction. And then I can build cloud native applications on Azure, Google Compute, or a set because I can go back with or AWS and it's a consistent experience across that whole abstraction layer. Right, right. And so going back to that idea of what we call the hybrid IT stack of network infrastructure and workloads, what we're trying to build is a platform that spans those layers, that doesn't try to own or be one or differentiate at one of those layers is build a connective tissue that spans them. So a workload running on the right infrastructure venue connected to the right networks. We're investing in orchestration on the other crosses all of that. And it's really some of the great conversations we've been having this week with VMware about what they're thinking and some of the we think PKS is interesting because container based deployment models are going to be what makes the most sense as you get further into the core of the network and out towards the edge. We think Pulse is interesting, right? As we start to do more things in our smart cities and smart venue type of initiatives that we're doing at the internet of things solution space as well. Yeah, Ajay, last thing I want to get to is when you look at your partners how do you see them, you know, both there's that similarity that they're going to have but how do they differentiate and also how will they participate in the VMware on AWS piece that we've been talking about? Yeah, so I think I'll break it into two parts, right? As I talk to a customer the consistent feedback I get is we've made resource consumption ubiquitous, right? And we're hoping to standardize that with VMware Cloud Foundation and other approaches. What's hard is the experience skillset and knowledge of how to use this technology. So increasingly we're constrained with the folks who know how to take this complexity put an organized plan together and drive the set of value or on applications. So I believe the cloud provider program and the partnership is really about moving up from trying to build infrastructure to build solutions and offer value to our partners and the differentiation is really moving up stack in terms of managed services value. The second part is they themselves now have a choice if I'm a regional player I have a customer who is everyone's a multinational nowadays, right? You always have some customer who happens to have reached beyond the boundaries. How do I now go into a new market? I can leverage VMware Cloud on AWS as a another data center and so the management technology we're trying to provide is we will probably manage your endpoint, customer endpoint or even VMware Cloud and you mix and match where it makes business sense and then abstract that complexity, right? As we talked about the cloud is a new hardware. How do we take that infrastructure and really make it easy and the issues are on security management are going to be different. Traditional smart kind of the perimeter synchrony we talked about. So application usage, value added services, being able to leverage resources, build or buy is really the basis of our strategy. Yep. And so we're excited to, you know, as we know that that platform, you know, that program starts to expand a little bit more in 2018 and we've had some, you know, early discussions with the VMware team around what that starts to look like. But at a most foundational level because what we're already launching and what we launched here this week at VMware is just, you know, what we call our dedicated cloud compute product which is now based on the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture. It's going to look the exact same as the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture that runs in AWS. And our approach towards managing both is to let their own individual, you know, control panels do what they do best but then manage over the top of it with our cloud application manager service. Dave and Ajay, thank you so much for sharing us all the updates, look forward to watching the continued maturation and development of what's happening in the cloud environment. Great chat, thank you. Thank you. Keith Townsend and I will be back with lots more coverage here of VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE.