 Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Ward and VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bardawaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. Great to be here. Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depressed word, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out, as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues to years later. And I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I've seen multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware Explorer just recently and going into re-invent, which is only a couple of weeks away. Feels like tomorrow, but as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? I mean, first thing I want to say is, in October, 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think, John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, a year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we've gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the process is this notion of working backwards. So really, really focused on customer feedback as we build the service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. I know in the first years, we tried to get across all the regions. That was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise-grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS React Connect, transit gateways, with our own advanced networking capabilities, and along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two new services, just focused on that. And then more recently, we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re-invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts, and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our FedRAM high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited, we're five years old, the customer momentum is really, really strong, and we are scaling the service massively across all CEOs and industries. That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has kind of been the theme for AWS, since I can remember from day one, Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting, as I always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using in vSphere. And these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move. When you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem, and then overlay it on top of AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to VMC. That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own super cloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the capex and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make and performance IaaS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination you mentioned jointly engineered? What are some of the key differentiates of the service compared to others? Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the early adopters of AWS Nitro platform, right the reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we've been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint you get the full software-defined data center compute storage networking on EC2 bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on AWS EC2 global regions. Now, the other thing that's a real differentiator for us customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware. We took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transition to VMware Cloud and AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for J debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even raise this issue to us we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems no action from you. And the customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks many other customers around the world super thrilled they had to take no action but a pretty incredible industry challenge that they were all facing. No, that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security and you kind of teasing at it but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you're doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting that before we came on campus more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just it happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week this came out of the woodwork but moving fast on those patches is huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. You know, it was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's an issue at any layer including all the way up into the app layer as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability as a first order of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customers all that. Works really well. On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What's the, what's some of the updates? Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service for your phenomenal back in relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS in the backend for support issues or any hardware issues, the Vasky management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration which is much, much easier with VMware Cloud and AWS. Presenting that easy bottom to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. You know, you had mentioned, I got a list here, some of the innovations. See, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the Gios working, advanced network disaster recovery, you know, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is, what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of the customers? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action, you know, as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CICD pipelining with, with modern apps, putting more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform I4I.Metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and speeds that you would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback and allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And, you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSX with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering for VMware Cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we've done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts. And a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource-defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course, it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar for ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort of at the heart of our all. The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on every year. It's the same conversation. Get better, faster, networking, more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the jurisdiction resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What does that mean? Yeah, I mean, I think we've been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We were scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? So that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower the cost, even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers requested for five virtual machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value. When customers are comfortable, they can go from one to the other. They can go back to that post-based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers. If you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard, again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship. They love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS. And then they start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens. And because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? Sure. There's a, well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability and latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with text extract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovation. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here, but that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform? Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? Because you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever is homegrown, what is being rolled out because you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening and with customers? I mean, it's been phenomenal that the customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples, large bank, they merged with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was, how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the globe, of which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. It's really phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we're seeing rapid expansion across the globe. They're constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. It's great to see the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One of the other interesting and fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which we just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. It's a huge point about the sustainability for everyone. Glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one, you see that constraints, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS many years ago. This is like 2013. And at that time, people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud than premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, you got to stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that. And I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to kind of end with a kind of a curve ball and put you guys on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer, continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys, what each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for better and what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people have focused on? Can you share your perspective? I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique. That's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today, leveraging world-class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate. That's my take. Narayan. You got a lot of platform to compete on with Amazon. You got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side, what's your answer to that question? I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly doing. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we've invested in Kubernetes, means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in the industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformation, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we're inherently part of it. Yeah. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that. We're seeing the same thing. It's more of the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure, at your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happening in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developers. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. They appreciate it. Thank you so much. Okay, John. Okay, this is the cube and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware cloud on AWS jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.