 The idea of cloud is changing from a set of remote services somewhere out there in the cloud to an operating model that supports workloads on-prem, across clouds and increasingly at the near and far edge. Moreover, workloads are evolving from a predominance of general purpose systems to increasingly data-intensive applications. Developers are a new breed of innovators and Kubernetes is a linchpin of creating new cloud-native workloads that are in the cloud, but also modernizing existing application portfolios to connect them to cloud-native apps. Hello, we want to welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, theCUBE's ongoing coverage. This is Dave Vellante and with me are Scott Buchanan as the Vice President of Marketing at VMware and Toby Weiss, who's the Vice President of Global Hybrid Cloud Practice at HPE. Gents, welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Dave, great to be here. I agree, thanks for having us. So you heard my little narrative up front and so let's get into it. I want to start with some of the key trends that you guys see in the marketplace and maybe Scott, you could kick us off from VMware's perspective. What are you seeing that's really driving IT today? Well, Dave, you started with a conversation around cloud, right? And you can't really have a conversation around cloud without also talking about applications. And so much of the interaction that we're having with customers these days is about how we bring apps and clouds together and modernize across those two dimensions at the same time. And that's a pretty complex discussion to have and it's a complex journey to navigate. And so we're here to talk to customers and to work with HPE to help our customers across those two dimensions. Great, so Toby, I mean, it's always been about applications as Scott said, but the application, the nature of applications is changing, how we develop applications. I mentioned data intensive applications, we're injecting AI into virtually everything, the apps, the process, the people even. From the perspective of really a company that supports applications with infrastructure, what are you seeing in the marketplace? What can you add to that discussion? Yes, yeah, great point, Dave. With applications becoming more central, think about what that means and has meant for developer communities and developers becoming more important customers for IT. We have to make it easier for these developers to speed their innovations to market, right? The business demands, newer and faster capabilities of these applications. So our job in the infrastructure and what's called the platform layer is to help. We need to build these kinds of platforms that allow developers to innovate more quickly. So we talked earlier about sort of modernizing apps. I mean, it seems to me that the starting point there is you want to containerize. And obviously Kubernetes is the key there. But so okay, so if that's the starting point, where's the journey? What does that look like? Maybe Scott, you could chime in there. Sure, a couple of quick thoughts there, Dave and Toby to build on. First is, if you look at the cloud native computing foundation landscape today, which you can do at landscape.cncf.io, holy smokes, is that a jungle? So a lot of organizations need a guide through that CNCF landscape. They need a partner that they can trust to show them the way through that landscape. And then secondly, there needs to be ways to make these technologies easier to adopt and to use in practice. Kubernetes being sort of the ultimate example of that. And so we've been hard at work to try and make it easy and natural to make Kubernetes part of one's existing infrastructure. So that building with and working with containers can be done on the same platform that you're using for virtual machines. So let's talk a little bit about cloud and how you guys are thinking about cloud. I remember Toby that back in VMworld 2010, it was the very first VMworld for theCUBE. All we talked about was cloud, but it was private cloud was really what we were talking about, which at the time largely meant the virtualized data center. It was kind of before the software defined data center. And today we're still talking about cloud, but it's hybrid cloud. That's kind of the narrative that I set up upfront. The data center, it's become, for the most part, software defined. And so how do you see this changing the IT operating model? I think it's a great question. And look, today you will see us talk a lot about this notion of cloud everywhere. So less differentiation about private and public and more about the experience of cloud, right? Public cloud brought great innovations. And what better than to bring those innovations to on-premise workloads that we've chosen to operate and work there? So as we think about cloud more as an experience we want for our developers and our end users and our IT organizations, we begin to think about how can we replicate that experience in an on-premise environment? And so part of that is having the technologies that enable you to do that. The other part is we've most of us have evolved our IT organization operating models to operate our cloud infrastructures off-premises. Well, now expanding that more holistically across our organization. So we don't have two operating models, but a single operating model that bridges both and brings the ability of both of those together to get the most benefit as we really become to integrate and become truly hybrid in our organization. So I think the operating model is critical and the kinds of experiences we deliver to the users of that IT and infrastructure and operating model is critical as well. Are you guys are both, you know, basically in the infrastructure business and so Scott, maybe we could start with you. There's a lot of changes that we're talking about here in IT, generally the data centers specifically, especially big changes in workloads, you know, with a lot more data intensive apps, AI being injected into everything, Kubernetes making things more facile. And in many ways, it simplifies things, but it also puts stress in the system because you got to protect this. They're no longer stateless apps, right? They're stateful and you got to protect them. And so they've got to be compliant. Now you've got the edge coming in. So my question is, what does infrastructure have to do to keep pace with all this application innovation? One of the conversations that we are having increasingly with our customers is, you know, how can they embrace a DevSecOps mindset in their organization and adopt some of these more modern patterns and practices and make sure that security is embedded in the life cycle of the container? And so, you know, I think that this is part of the answer is equipping the operator through infrastructure to set guardrails in place so that the development organization can work with freedom inside of those guardrails. They can draw on catalogs of curated container images, catalogs of APIs, start from templates. Those are the building blocks that allow developers to work faster and that allow an operator to ensure the integrity and compliance of the containers and the applications of the organization's building. Yeah, so that's kind of, when I hear Scott talk about that Toby, I think infrastructure is code, designing, you know, security and governance in, right, we always, we always said that was an afterthought. We kind of bolted it on. Second, the security team had to take care of that. This is always the same thing with backup, right? Oh, we got an app. It's all ready to go. How do we back it up? And so that's changing that whole notion of infrastructure as code. Well, I want to talk about Green Lake in a minute, but before we get there, I wonder if you could talk about how HPE thinks about VMware and how you guys are partnering. I'm specifically interested in where each of you sees the value that you bring to the table for your joint customers. Yeah, great question. You know, and starting to think about history like you did 2010 being the start of a theCUBE journey. I remember in 2003 when we first partnered with VMware in the very first data center consolidations and we built practices around this. It's been quite a long partnership with VMware. And I'm excited to see this partnership evolve today, especially into this cloud native space and direction. It's critical. We need, you know, customers have choices and we need great partners like VMware to help satisfy the many different use cases and choices that our customers have. So while we bring, you know, good depth when it comes to building these infrastructures that become highly automated and managed in some cases and consumable, like on a consumption basis and automated, like we help clients automate their CI-CD pipeline. We depend on technologies and partners like VMware to make these outcomes real for our customers. Yeah, I think there's a way to connect a couple of the points that we've been talking about today. Got some data from us, state of Kubernetes study that we just ran. And this is 350 IT decision makers who said that they're running Kubernetes on-premise. 55% of respondents are running Kubernetes on-premise today. And so, you know, VMware and HPE get to work together to bring Kubernetes to those enterprises. 96% of them said that they're having a challenge selecting the right Kubernetes distributions. There's 60 of them in that CNCF landscape and the number one criteria that they're gonna use to choose the right distribution to set them on a path forward is that it's easy to deploy and to operate and to maintain in production. And so I think that this is where VMware and HPE get to come together to help try and keep things as simple as possible for customers as they navigate a fairly complex world. That's interesting, Scott. So who are those on-prem users of containers and Kubernetes? Is it the head of, you know, is the application team at an insurance company who's kind of maintaining the claims app? Is it guys building new cloud native apps to help companies get digital first? Who are those? What's the persona look like? In our conversations, you know, this is the infrastructure and operations team scene that there's energy around Kubernetes and maybe there's some use in test and development in parts of the organization. And by centralizing ownership of that Kubernetes footprint, they can ensure that it's compliant, that policy is set properly to your point earlier that it's, you know, meets the security standards for the organization. And so it's increasingly that SRE or Site Reliability Engineer or Platform Operator who's taking ownership of that Kubernetes footprint for the organization to ensure that consistency of management and experience for the development teams across the larger org. Toby, is that what you're seeing too? Yeah, we see quite a few, we engage with quite a few developer teams in business leads that have ambitions to speed their application development processes. And, you know, they want help. And often, as I stated at the intro, they might be coming off of a much older deployment maybe from 2015 where there were an early adopter of a container platform methodology and wanting to get to some newer platform or they may be in charge of getting a mobile banking application and its features to market much more quickly. So, and often when we get a quote maybe from a client it might come from, you know, the VP of a business unit, but often as we engage, it's, you know, the developers are pretty much our customers and their developer leaders and teams. So, you're running into container technical debt already. You're seeing that out there, it sounds like, legacy container deployments. Yeah, I think so. It takes some expertise to come off those older, you know, the first instantiations of these container platforms where pretty much open source and yeah, you want to bring it to something that's more modern and has the kinds of features, enterprise grade features you might need. So, is it not so problematic for customers? Because as I said before, a lot of those apps were sort of disposable and stateless and now they're saying, hey, we can actually use Kubernetes to build, you know, mission critical apps. And so that's when they sort of decide to pivot to a new modern platform or is there a more complex migration involved? What do you see? Okay, I'll give my hot take here Toby and then ask you for yours. But I guess, I feel like the conversations that I'm involved in with customers is, you know, always begins with their broader application portfolio. These enterprises have hundreds, thousands of applications and job one is to figure out how to categorize them into those which need to be re-hosted or re-platformed or refactored or reimagined entirely. And so, you know, they're looking for help figuring out how to categorize those applications and ultimately, you know, how to attack each category of application. Some should be re-platformed on environments that make best use of Kubernetes. Some need to be refactored, some need to be reimagined. And so they are again, looking for that expert guide to show them the way. Right, and when we engage in those early discussions, kind of, we call it right mix advisory, you know, you're trying to take a full broad scope as you said, Scott, down to a few and, you know, determine kind of the first movers, if you will. Also, you know, clients will engage us, you know, for very specific applications that are a suite of applications. Again, like mobile applications for banking, I think are a good example because, you know, they have an ambition. I mean, the leader of that kind of application may very well think that is the mission critical application for the company, right? But of course, finance, they have a different point of view. So, you know, that application to them is the center of their business, getting, you know, their customer access to the core banking features that they have. And, you know, they want to zero in on the kind of ecosystem it takes and the speed at which they can push new features through. So we see both as well, you know, the broader scope application weaning down to the few discovery application and then, of course, a very focused effort to help a particular business unit speed development on their mobile app, for example. It's interesting, Scott, you were talking about, you know, sort of the conversation starts with the application portfolio and there have been these sort of milestones around, you know, major application portfolio, I'll call them rationalizations. I mean, there's always an ongoing, but Y2K was one of those, the big move to SaaS was another one, obviously, Cloud. And it feels like Kubernetes, I mean, it's like the Cloud 2.0, you know, coming on-prem, is another one of those opportunities to rationalize applications. We all know the stats, right? We always see 85% of the spend is to, you know, keep the lights on and the only small portion is innovation. You know, there's always a promise we can change that. It reminds me of the, every year I would go to the Boston Marathon, it was this guy who would run and he had a hat on with an extension and it was a can of Budweiser way out there and he couldn't reach it. And so he would run, it was almost the same thing here, is they never get there because they have so many projects coming online in the project portfolio and then the CIO's got to maintain those in the application heads. And so it's this ongoing thing, but you do see spikes in rationalization initiatives and it feels like with this push to modernization and digitization, maybe the pandemic accelerated that too. Is that a reasonable premise? Are you seeing sort of a milestone or a marker in terms of an increased effort around rationalization and modernization today because of Kubernetes? Yeah, definitely. I think that there are a couple of, Kubernetes is a catalyzing technology and the challenges of the pandemic or a catalyzing moment, right? And I feel like organizations have seen over the past 18 months now, that those enterprises that have a way to get innovation, to market, to customers faster, not once a quarter, but many times a day are the ones that are separating themselves in competitive marketplaces and ultimately delivering superior customer experiences. So it comes back to some of the ideas, you know, full circle that Toby started with around delivering a superior developer experience. So that, you know, those developers can get code to production and into the hands of customers on a much more rapid basis. Like that's the outcome that enterprises really care about at the end of the day and Kubernetes is, you know, part of the way to get there. But it's the outcome that's key. Great, thank you. Dave, in one of our practices, Dave, there was, you know, that's been our bread and butter for so many years. This, you know, this broad-based discovery narrowing down to a strategy and a plan for migrating and moving certain workloads. We see a slight twist today in that clients and organizations want to move quicker to the apps they know that, you know, they want to focus on. They want to prove it through the broad-based discovery and kind of a strategic analysis, but they want to get quicker right away to the workloads they are quite sure that need refactoring or leverage the benefit of a modern developer environment. Yeah, and they don't want to be messing around with provisioning LUNs and servers and all that stuff. They want that to be simplified. So I'm going to end on GreenLake. And I want to understand how you guys are thinking about GreenLake in terms of your partnership and how you're working together. You know, maybe Toby, you could sort of give us the update from your perspective. Can't have a conversation with HPE today without talking about GreenLake. So give us the Kool-Aid injection. And then I'm really interested in how VMware thinks about, you know, participating in that initiative. Absolutely. And thank you for helping us out here. You know, I see more and more of our engagements with clients that ask for and want to sign a GreenLake-based contract. And that is one very important foundational element. And there's so much more. Because remember, we talked about the cloud experience in cloud everywhere. And GreenLake brings us an opportunity to bring dimensions to that, especially on the consumption model. Because that's an important element. If we begin adding partners such as VMware to this equation, especially for clients that have huge investments in VMware, there's an opportunity here to really bring a lot of value with this cloud experience to our customers through this partnership. All right, Scott, we're going to give you the last word. What's your take on this? Hey, listen, hard for me to add much to what Toby said. He nailed it. You see a ton of energy in this space. I think we've covered a bunch of key topics today. There are ongoing conversations with our customers in GreenLake is a way to take that conversation to the next level. Guys, really appreciate you coming on. Give us your perspectives on Kubernetes. And thank you, Scott, for that data. 55% of IT decision makers out of 350 said they're doing on-prem Kubernetes. That's a new stat. I wouldn't have expected it to be that high, but I guess I'm not surprised. It's the range the developers want the latest and greatest. So guys, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and appreciate you coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Thanks, Dave. And thank you for watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of HPE's Discover 2021, the virtual version. We'll be right back.