 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020. It's a virtual conference this year. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're not in person this year. We're doing it remote because of the pandemic, but it's going to be wall-to-wall coverage for three weeks. We got you covered and we got a great interview, a signature interview here with two CUBE alumni, Matt Garmin, vice president of sales and marketing at AWS, formerly head of EC2, and of course, Sanjay Poonan, COO of VMware, both distinguished guests and alumni of theCUBE. Good to see you, Sanjay. Matt, thanks for coming on. Let's just jump into it. How are you guys doing? Great. Exciting, excited for ReInvent and excited for the conversation. So thanks for having us on. Yeah, I'm great to be here. We are allowed to be six feet away from each other, so I came in, but super excited about the partnership. Matt and I have been friends for several years and we're excited about another ReInvent. The different circumstances doing it all virtual, but it's a fantastic partnership. You know, I look forward to ReInvent. It's one of my most favorite times of the year and it's also kind of stressful because it backs up against Thanksgiving. And but, you know, you get through it, you have your turkey and you do the Friday and you guys probably have keynote preps and all the things going on. And then you go to Vegas, it's a huge celebration. We're not doing it this year, it's three weeks. So there's going to be a lot of big content in the first week and we're going to roll that out and we're going to cover it. But it's going to be a different celebration. So Matt, I know you're in front and center on this, just real quick, what do you expect people to be doing on the system? What's your expectations and how is this all going to play out? Yeah, it's going to be different, but I think we have just as much exciting news as ever. And you know, it's going to be over a three week period. I think it actually gives people an opportunity to see more things. I think a lot of times we heard from customers before was they love the excitement of being in Vegas and we're not going to be able to exactly replicate that. But we have a lot of exciting things planned and it enables customers to get to more sessions, see more of the content and really see more of the exciting things that are coming out of AWS and there's a lot. And so over the three weeks, I encourage folks to dive in and really learn. This is an opportunity for customers to learn about the cloud and some really cool things coming out. So we're excited. Well, congratulations on all the business performance. I know that there's been a tailwind with the pandemic as people want to go faster and smarter with the cloud and on premise and Sanjay, you guys have had great results as well. Before I get into some of my pointed questions, I have a lot of, I know we don't have a lot of time, but I want to get an update on the relationship. We covered in three years ago when Andy Jassy and team came down to San Francisco with Pat Gelsinger, Raghu, Sanjay, all this went down. It was skeptics. Relationship has proven to be quite strong and successful for both parties. Could you guys take a minute, Sanjay, we'll start with you and talk about the relationship update. Where are you guys at? What's the status of the relationship? People want to know. Yeah, I think, John, the relationship is going really well. It's rooted in, first off, a clear understanding that there's value for customers. This is the best of the public cloud and the private cloud in a hybrid cloud journey. And then secondly, a deep engineering effort. This wasn't a Barney announcement. We both decided, Matt, in his previous role was running a lot of the engineering efforts. We were really keen to make this a deep engineering effort and often when we have our connected QBRs, we're doing one a little later this afternoon. I often can't tell when a Amazon person is speaking, when a VMware person is speaking. We're so connected, both the engineering and then the go-to-market efforts. And I think after the two or three years that the solution has had to gestate and now we have many, many customers starting to get real value. The go-to-market side of the operation is really starting to take off. So we're very excited about it. It is the preferred and the best offering, we think, in the market. And for VMware customers, we message it as the best place for a VMware workload that's running on vSphere to move into Amazon. Matt, what's your take on the relationship update from your standpoint? I agree, Sanjay. I think it's been fantastic. I think, like you said, some folks were skeptical when we first announced it, but we knew that there was something there. And I think as we've gotten even deeper into this partnership and figured out how we can continue to integrate more deeply, both with on-prem and into the cloud, our customers have really guided us. And I think that's enabled us to further strengthen that partnership. And customers continue to get more excited when they see how easy it is to move and operate their VMware and their vSphere workloads inside of AWS and how it integrates well with their AWS environment. And they can still use all of the same functions and capabilities that they've built their business on inside of vSphere. We're seeing bigger and bigger customers really just embrace us. And the partnership's only grown stronger. I think Sanjay and I, we do joint sales calls together. I think that the business has really grown. And it's been a fantastic partnership. I was talking about that yesterday with VMware and AWS Teams members as well. I want to get your thoughts on this cultural fit. Sanjay mentioned, I think the engineering cultures are there. The, also the corporate culture, both customer focused. I remember Andy Jassy told me, hey, we're customer focused. I'm like, well, you're making big statements. Public cloud and now he goes to hybrid. He's very reactive to the customers. And this is a cultural thing for AWS and VMware. What are the customers saying to you now? What are you working backwards from this year? Because there's a lot to work backwards from. You got the pandemic. You got clear trends around app modernization, automation under the covers, if you will. And you got VMware successful software running on their cloud on AWS. You got other customers. Matt, what's the big trends right now that are highlighted in your world? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think, you know, it really does highlight the strength of this hybrid model. I think, you know, pre-pandemic, we had huge numbers of customers, obviously kind of looking at the cloud, but some of the largest enterprises in the world and the more traditional enterprises, they really weren't doing a lot. You know, they were tipping their toes in and some of the forward leaning enterprises were being really aggressive about getting into the cloud. But, you know, many people were just, you know, kind of hesitant or kind of telling, saying, yes, we'll go learn about the cloud. I think as soon as the pandemic hit, we're really starting to see some of those more traditional enterprises realize it's a business imperative for them to have a big cloud strategy and to move there quickly. And I think our partnership with VMware and the VMC offering really is allowing many of these large enterprises to do that. And we see big traditional enterprises really accelerating that move into the cloud. It gives them the business agility they need and allows them to operate their environment in a certain world that allows them to operate remotely. And so we're seeing all of those trends. And I think we're going to continue to see the acceleration of our joint business. Sanjay, your thoughts. Virtualization has hit a whole other level. It's not like server virtualization. It's cultural, it's societal. What's your take? Yeah, I think, you know, virtualization is that fabric that connects the private cloud to the public cloud. It's the basis for a lot of the public cloud infrastructure. So when we listen to customers, I think the first kind of misconception we had to help them with was that it had to be a choice between one or the other. And being able to take VMware cloud, which was basically compute storage networking management and put that into the bare metal capabilities of AWS and engineer deep into the stack and all the services that Matt and the engineering team were able to provide to us. Now it allows that sort of application that sitting on premise to move like a house on wheels into AWS. And that's a beautiful experience we've even shown in conferences like a virtual reality, moving of a workload, throwing a workload into AWS and AWS catches it. It's a good metaphor and a good way to think of those things that VMware like, like VMware customers like, like VMotion moves nicely. But then the other misconception we had to kind of illustrate to our customers was that you could once you were there, let's take that metaphor, the house and wheels, renovate the house with all the, I think there's probably 200 odd services that Amazon AWS has, all of AI, data services, BI, IoT, whatever you have, all the things that Andy and Matt kind of talk about in any of the re-invents, you get to participate and build on those services. So it has, it's not like you take this there and then it's sort of a dead end. You get to modernize your app after you migrate it. So this migrate and modernize motion is something that we've really started to reinforce with our customers. And it doesn't matter which one you do first. You may modernize first and then migrate or migrate first and modernize. And in the modernized parts, we've also made some significant investments in containers and Tanzu. We could talk about that if there's time and optimizing that for both the private cloud world and the public cloud world like Amazon. You know, Matt, this is something that we're talking about a lot this week, these few weeks with re-invent going on. Everything is a service trend. It has a lot of things under it like automation, higher level services. One of the critics would say three years ago when this announcement relationship between VMware and AWS came out was, oh, Amazon's just going to steal all of their customers. And VMware screwed, turns out that's not the case. You guys are both winning and the rising tide floats all boats because VMware has an operator kind of market. People are operating their business with VMware and they're adding higher level services with cloud native. So it's an overall win. So that was proven false. So that clearly the new trend. You guys are gaining a large enterprises that want to go fast that have that existing operator kind of legacy stuff or preconditions of the enterprise like VMware. So how do you guide the technology teams and how do you look at this? Because this is where customers are like saying, hey, I can operate my business, house on wheels, modernize it in real time, come out of COVID with a growth strategy and go faster. What's your view on all this? So I think you're exactly right. I think we see a lot of customers who see, I don't want to necessarily lose what I have, I want to add on top of that. And so whether that's adding machine learning and kind of figuring out how they can take their data from various different data silos and put them into a large data lake and get some machine learning insights on top of that, whether they want to do analytics, whether they want to do IoT, whether they want to modernize to containers. I think there's a whole bunch of ways in which customers are looking at that. But you're absolutely right. It's not a, I'm going to go from A to B, it's I'm going to take A and add B to it. And we see that's over and over again. I think what we've seen from customers doing it and they're really taking advantage of that, right? And I think customers see all the announcements that we're making and reinvent over the next three weeks and they want to be able to take advantage of those things, right? It's they want to be able to add that onto their production environment. They want to take a lot of the benefits they've gotten from their VMware environment, but also add some of these innovations from AWS. And I think that's, that really is what we focus on. It's what our engineering teams focus on. You know, we have joint engineering efforts to figure out how we can bridge that gap, right? So that they, the VMware environments can very easily reach into their AWS environment and take advantage of all the new services and offerings that we have there. And so that's, that's exactly what our joint teams really push together. Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts on this. And we talked years ago, remember we had a conversation on theCUBE. I asked you, Sanjay, this is a great move for VMware because it simplifies the messaging and clears up the whole cloud strategy. And you had said something that I'm going to, I'm going to bring this back to today. You said, it's not just simplifying the messaging to customers about what we're going to do in the cloud. It's going to simplify their life. It's going to make things easier, have them set up for better, betterness, goodness down the road. Can you take a minute to explain what that, what that goodness was? What came out of the simplicity of the messaging, the simplicity of the solution? Where are we now? Is that all kind of tying together? Can you take a minute to explain that? Yeah, I think when the history books are written, John, this partnership will be one of the most seminal partnerships because from VMware's perspective, maybe a little bit from Amazon, I'll let Matt talk about it if he feels the same way. This is a headwind turning into a tailwind. I think that sort of narrative that VMware and Amazon were competing with each other is that maybe it was the early story in the early days of AWS's progress and VMware trying to build our own public cloud and then divesting that. Matt's a Stanford grad, I'm a Harvard grad. So one day there'll be a case study I think in both schools about how this partnership. We have a strong partnership with Dell. I sometimes joke that's a little bit of an arranged marriage. We don't have, we didn't have much saying that because EMC bought Dell. So that's an important partnership, but this one we had to work hard to create. And I tell our customers, Dell and AWS are our top partners. And as you think about what we've been able to do here, the simplicity of the customer for you, as you describe this, is being able to really lower cost of ownership in any process in terms of how they're building and migrating apps to be the best optimization of hardware, software and services. And the more you can make that better, simpler, cheaper through software and through the movement to the cloud, I think customers benefit. And then of course the innovation machine of both companies, Amazon's really building on, I mean, every time I go to reinvent, I'm just amazed at the, I think it's up near 200 services that they're building in all of these rich layers. All of those developer services and I don't know, two million customers, the whatever number of people they have at Reinvent this year, get to participate on top of all the applications in the virtualization infrastructure we've built over the 20 years of our history. So I hope, as we continue to do this, this is all now about customer success, large and small customers being able to do it. And I'm very gratified two, three years since we announced this, that we're getting very good customer traction. And for us, that's going to be a key focus to the Reinvent presence we have at their show. It really just goes to show you when you've built, when you invest in relationships up and down the spectrum from engineering, a product and executive, it kind of does pay off. Congratulations to you guys on that. Matt, I want to get your thoughts on where this is going because you're talking about the messaging from VMware and the execution that comes behind it is the best private public cloud, hybrid cloud success. There's momentum there. What are the customers saying to you when you look at customer proof points? What do you point to? Because you're now in charge of sales and marketing. You have to take now the install base of Amazon web services, which is you got the devs and the startups and cloud scale to large enterprises. Now you got the post COVID growth go fast, cloud scale. You've got a huge customer base. You've got to target these guys and you got to bring the solution. What are they saying about the VMware AWS success? Can you share some data? Yeah, I'd be happy to. I think, and look, this is what gets us excited. I know Sanjay gets just as excited about this. And it's really, it's resonating across our customer base. There's folks like S&P Global, who's a large enterprise. They had a hardware procurement cycle. They were looking at an on-prem implementation and they looked at AWS and VMware and they said, look, we want to migrate all of our applications. We want to migrate everything we have into the cloud. I think it was 150 critical financial applications that they seamlessly migrated with zero downtime, now all running on VMC in the cloud. You look at governments, right? We have folks like the Scottish government and many government customers. We have folks that are like Penny Mack and regulated industries. They really took critical parts of their application and seamlessly migrated them to AWS and VMC. And they looked at us and when we talked to these customers we really say like, where is the best place for us to run these vSphere workloads? And the great thing is we have a consistent message. We know that it's the right, that AWS and VMware is the best place to run those vSphere workloads in the cloud. And so as we see enterprises, as we see regulated industries, as we see governments really looking to modernize and take advantage of the cloud we're seeing them move whole swaths of their applications. And these are not just small parts. These are the critical, really mission critical applications that they know that they need to get flexibility on and they want to get that agility. And so, there's been a broad swath of customers like that that have really moved large, large pieces of their application in AWS. So it's been fun to see. And John, if I might add to that, what we've also sought to do is pick some of those great customers like the ones that Matt talked about and put them on stage. So at VMworld in the previous, we had Freddie Mac and we had IHS market and these are good examples in the few that Matt talked about. And so I'm super excited and I expect there'll be many more at Reinvent. We did some also at VMworld. So we're getting these big customers to talk about this because then you get a tent phenomenon. Everyone wants to come to this tent to be able to participate in that momentum. The other thing I'm super excited about it started off as a U.S. phenomenon, just the U.S. customers. But I'm starting to see real interest from European and APJ customers, Asia-Pacific customers in countries, Australia, Japan, U.K., France, Germany. So this becomes a global phenomenon where customers understand that this doesn't have to be just the U.S. centric customers that are participating. And then that was for me a very key objective. Because the early customers are always going to start in the geo where there's the most resonance with the public cloud. But now we're starting to see this really take off in many parts of the world. That's a great point. That's something we can talk about in another conversation. Maybe we'll bring you guys into some of our live check-ins throughout the three weeks we're doing here at Reinvent. But this global regional approach, Matt, has been hugely successful. We're on Amazon. We have cube regions because by default we're on top of Amazon. You're seeing companies build on top of Amazon. Look at Snowflake, the largest IPO in the history of Wall Street behind VMware. They run on Amazon, right? They'll probably have other clouds too on the road, but the point is you guys are enabling this globally. And it is one of the things that we hear from customers that they love about running in the cloud. Is that, think about if you had to, you mentioned Snowflake, imagine if you're a Snowflake and you had to go build data centers everywhere. If you had to go roll out to Europe and then you had to build data centers in Germany and then you had to build data centers in the UK and then you had to go build data centers in Australia, like that would be an enormous cost and complexity. And they probably wouldn't do it, frankly, at their early stage. Now they spin up another stack and they're able to serve their customers anywhere around the world. And we're seeing that from our VMware customers where they actually are spinning up brand new VMC clusters where they weren't able to do it before where they either had to operate from a single stack. Now they're able to say, you know what, I'd love to have a VMware stack in Australia and they're able to get that up and running quickly. So I do think that this is actually enabling new business. It's enabling customers to think about how do they put their compute environment close to where their end users are or where they need that compute environment to be. Sometimes it's close to end users, sometimes it's for data residency requirements, but it really kind of enables customers to do that where think about in a COVID world, if you had to go launch a data center in a new country, you probably just, I mean, maybe it wouldn't even be possible to do that. We are today. And now it's just API calls. I mean, your point about going slows in an option, the imperative, you know, we have an expression here inside, SiliconANGLE and the CUBE team. Is there a problem? Yes, is it important? Yes, what are the consequences if you don't solve the problem? Can you quantify those consequences? And then you got to look at solutions and look at the timing. So you got timing, you got cost, you got the consequences of not doing it and speed. All those things, no one's going to roll out a data center in six months if they tried. So again, cloud and joiner come in to play here. You got to operate something that's a hand in the glove. I'm seeing the cream rise to the top with COVID. You're seeing real examples of real scale, real value, problems that are solved that are important that have consequences that can be quantified. I mean, it's simple as that. Yeah, no, John, I was going to say, in addition to this VMware cloud and AWS, we're also a pretty prominent AWS customer for some of our services. So some of the services that we've seen accelerate through COVID are these distributed workforce security capabilities. So we use Zoom internally, that obviously runs on AWS, but then surrounding that with Workspace One and Carbon Black to secure the laptop that goes home, those services of ours run on AWS too. So this is one of those places where we're grateful that we could run those as cloud services because we're also just like Snowflake and Zoom and others, many of the services that we build that are SaaS type services run on Amazon and that reinforces the partnership for us almost like a SaaS customer. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate your insight. As always, a great conversation. We can go for another hour. You guys are the leaders of your organizations. You're at the front lines and managing through the pandemic. We'll have you guys come into our check-ins throughout the three weeks now here during re-invent for more commentary, but I'd like you to end this segment by sharing in your opinion, what is the most important thing that the audience should pay attention to this year at re-invent? I know there's a lot of things going on. It's three weeks, not four days. It's so, it's longer, but still, there's a lot of announcements, Matt, on your side, VMware, you got the momentum, you got your announcements. What should customers pay attention to this re-invent virtual 2020? So, do you want to go first? No, no, Matt, it's your show. You go first. I would encourage folks to really think about and plan the three weeks out. This is the opportunity to really dive in and learn. Re-invent is, as many of you know, this is just a different type of conference. It's not a marketing conference. This is a learning conference. And even virtually, that doesn't change. And so I encourage, look across the broad swath of things that we're doing, learn about machine learning and what we're doing in that space, learn about the new compute capabilities or container capabilities, learn about what is most relevant to your business. If you're looking about, hey, I have an on-premise data center and I'm looking about how I extend into the cloud, there's a lot of new capabilities around BMC and AWS that makes sense. But there's also a lot of cool announcements around just other services that could be interesting. We have a ton of customers that are giving talks and learning from other customers is often the best way to really understand how you can get the most value out of the cloud. And so I encourage folks to really kind of block that time. I think it's easy when you're remote to get distracted by watching Netflix or answering emails or things like that. But this is a great opportunity to block that schedule, find the time that you have to really spend time and dive into the sessions because we have a ton of great content and a lot of really cool launches coming up. Yeah, and just very quickly I would like, one of the things I love about Amazon's culture and we're similar at VMware is that sort of growth mindset, learn it all. And I'm looking for it myself personally to going to reinvent university. This is three weeks of learning, listening to many of those things, I learn a ton and I've tried to have my own sort of mindset of have being a learn it all as opposed to know it all. So these are incredible sessions and I would also reinforce what Matt said, which is go and find pure customers of yours that are in your same vertical. We're seeing enormous success in the key verticals VMware plays in, which is telco, financial services, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, CPG, retail, I mean, whatever it is. So, and many of those customers will be doing virtual talks or we have case studies or use cases because often these sort of birds of a feather allow you to then plan your migration and modernization journey in a similar fashion. Matt and Sanjay, always great to get the leaders of the two biggest companies in our world, AWS and VMware to share their perspectives. This year's going to be different. I'm looking forward to really kind of stepping up and leaning into the virtual because we're going to do three weeks of CUBE coverage. We're going to have like special coverage days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for each of the three weeks that we're in and we're going to try to make it as fun as possible, keep everyone engaged and try to help people navigate through the virtual world. So looking forward to having you guys back on and sharing, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the CUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Virtual ReInvent 2020. I'm John Furrier, host. Stay with us, SiliconANGLE.com, the CUBE. We'll be checking in with our live coverage in and out of the sessions and stay with us for more wall-to-wall coverage. Thanks for watching.