 Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to VeeamON 2018, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of our coverage of VeeamON, the second year theCUBE has been here. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman-Zeb Ahmed is here. He's the senior offering manager for VMware with the IBM Cloud at IBM, of course. Thanks for coming to theCUBE, good to see you, Zeb. Thank you for having me, very excited to be here. Yeah, so IBM Cloud, big part of your business. Obviously, VMware, you've been there for a long time. Partnerships with Veeam, lay it all out for us. What's going on at IBM, IBM Cloud? Yeah, so we started the VMware partnership a couple of years ago, and our goal was really to build a practice around VMware, which was automated, take it to the next cell essentially, not just be a me too player, but everybody else was doing it out there, but rather make the transition from on-premises to the cloud much easier for those VMware customers. So we've automated a lot of things on the VMware platform. You can deploy VMware stack in a matter of minutes instead of days and months. So it's a much easier transition. We've also worked with a lot of partners, such as Veeam, what customers was using on-premises, and we've allowed them to have those capabilities in the cloud as well in a very automated fashion. I can quickly remember, but I think you guys were first doing something with VMware and the cloud. You're kind of a year ahead of most. I mean, I... It was a few months ahead. They were the first big partner out there with the VMware cloud basically. We got the cloud there and everything like that. In terms of shipping, actually, you guys, I think it was the first one. We were the first ones, yeah. So we were the first ones to market with Cloud Foundation stack, right? Yeah, and then the other vendors followed as well. But yeah, that's been doing great, right? And again, it's fully automated. Matter of minutes, you can deploy the whole stack. A lot of value out there. Yeah, Zeb, maybe help set the picture first a little bit because we talk about this multi-cloud world. IBM owns a lot of applications. IBM partners was a lot. Where does IBM see themselves playing in this multi-cloud, multi-app world? Great question. I think I... So I refer to it as the two T's. So the first one being the transition and then the transformation. So the transition phase, it's really where the challenge has been for those customers, the barrier to entry. How do these customers actually make that move seamless to the cloud? Especially the space that IBM is in on the enterprise side. You know, these applications are legacy, very, very complicated design, a lot of dependencies. So that was a challenge that we try to solve for. And I think we're at a state now where we've not only solved for that, we've also, I don't know if you guys have seen the HCX release that we had with VMware recently, which was, which is a great migration tool and helps customer onboard cloud and adapt to cloud much, much faster. And then also build that ecosystem partner network. So all those tools that you were using on premises like Veeam, right? Making those available in the cloud for those customers has been there. And also on the transformation side, right? So not only just move them to the cloud, but also help them leverage and go up the stack. So microservices, blockchain, Watson, containers, all those things are available to our customers. You know, I think that's a key point that I wanted to highlight is people often say, well, how does IBM compete, you know, with some of the big, you know, cloud players? You're not just infrastructure as a service. You've got a giant SaaS portfolio. You mentioned Watson. So talk about your strategy in that regard. Yeah, I mean, so the enterprise customer, a typical customer, whether it's financial industry or whether it's healthcare, transportation, et cetera. Nobody is just looking for a partner where they can just move their infrastructure to. They're looking for the next state. They're looking to transform their business. They're trying to, you know, utilize all those new capabilities that exist in the cloud today. And IBM has solved for that exactly because not only just use, move your infrastructure and workloads, but now you can consume all those additional value ads in the clouds like Watson and make it for a more intelligent solution in the end. Right, so that's a key differentiator. I mean, there's only a couple of companies that have that. Well, I guess, you know, you guys, Oracle, Microsoft obviously has the applications. And IBM talks a lot about the cognitive piece. Am I correct? You can only get Watson in the IBM cloud. Is that still the case or you now have it on-prem? No, no, Watson can be consumed using an API. So it's a PAS platform. And if somebody wanted to consume Watson for the on-premises workloads and wanted to bring the intelligence for that on-premises environment, they can do that. Are you seeing more demand for that? Or is it primarily in the cloud? We've got huge traction in the healthcare space, especially. There's a lot of financial customers that are onboarding that as well. So Watson's doing great in that regard. For privacy reasons and data sovereignty, yeah. That's right. Except one of the things we've been watching with Veeam for the last few years is how do they penetrate deeper in the enterprise? Or is IBM has, you know, strong position in the enterprise? Help connect for us how the Veeam and IBM partnership go together. So I think this was a very easy answer for a lot of our customers because Veeam has a lot of penetration on the on-premises workloads, especially on the backup and business continuity space. So when we looked at the partners and the products that existed in the space and we really looked at the market space where the customers were consuming, Veeam had a huge market share. And like I said previously, we wanted to solve for those problems and we wanted to keep the tool set, the same tool set that they were using today on-premises. So this was very seamless for us and it is seamless for the customers to move to IBM Cloud and leverage the same tools exactly. So talk about choice because I can imagine you're getting a call from, you know, Ed Walsh. Hey, how about using my data protection software? Instead of Veeam, how do you manage that? You know, it is tough, right? It is obviously tough. IBM also has a huge portfolio of products, right? In the end, the decision was, or it really came down to what is it the customers are looking for? When it came to the backup space, especially on the VMware platform, you know, the answer was there, a lot of the VMware customers use Veeam. In addition to that, Veeam also checks a lot of other boxes for us. So not only is the VMware stack, but also, I don't know if it's been announced yet or not, but AIX is something of beta that they're launching at this event. So that is huge for IBM. Oh yes, they're also in the bare metal space. So, you know, consolidated view of all your backups for your bare metal, for AIX, for, you know, virtualized platform. So the power guys will be happy. Yeah, except for those that aren't as familiar anymore, I mean, remember AIX back in the day, but this second week in a row, I'm talking about AIX, it was Nutanix last week and it's Veeam today. How much AIX is there still out in the wild? There's quite a bit, I mean, IBM, if you guys know the background, right? When software was acquired, it was a bare metal shop. So with that, a lot of the power stuff came as well. So we have a huge power of practice in IBM. All right, and well, it's still, I remember the Steve Mills charts that showed the availability of AIX versus the only more available platform was the mainframe. That's right. And then you had all that other stuff that everybody else buys, but it's a volume market. So that kind of makes sense though. People will pay up for that. It's still a huge install base, not growing. And Nutanix has a relationship with the power guy. So maybe that's where it's sort of decked in, right? Sure, sure. But Linux, of course, is the hot space, right? I mean, so you see it's powering the web. Well, I'm a VMware guy, so. Yeah, there's Linux sitting on top of some of that. That's right, of course. Yeah, Linux on mainframe, right? Yes. Everywhere, okay. All right, so talk a little bit more about what you're seeing from the VMware customer base, how it's synergistic and not just sort of a one-way trip into Hotel California. Yeah, so a typical VMware customer is seeing who's on-premises today looking to IBM Cloud or actually take the leap into the cloud. Especially on the enterprise phase, these customers want to transform. I mean, there's been a lot of questions for them, especially the customer-based IBM focused on, you know, questions around security, compliance, data business continuity, and data protection and such. So these customers not only want to just make the leap into the cloud, but they also want to solve for some of these challenges and also go up the stack, like I was mentioning. So we're seeing a huge push for containers for those customers that are moving to VMware. They want to build up the stack on the PaaS layer and also want to leverage Watson services like that. Yeah, could you expand on that a little more? Things like, are you working with PKS, the solution with VMware and Pivotal and the Kubernetes stuff? Yes, yes, Kubernetes, Dockers. We also give the customer's ability to do their own stuff, go up the stack. I mean, in the end, you know, they can consume us from an IS standpoint and build their PaaS on top or they can use our own. So Kubernetes, Dockers, et cetera. What's the stories do with cloud foundry these days, right? There was a big push early on and I feel like I'm not as close as you are, but there seems to be a, I don't want to say a pullback, but maybe less enthusiasm. What's the lay of the land? Sure, I mean, IBM was one of the earliest, you know, in Bluemix, I believe, and with IBM Cloud, IBM has a few offerings. I didn't see as big of a push from IBM at the Cloud Foundry Summit as that last month, but you know, IBM, like most of the cloud providers are giving customers choice. That's right. The question is, what? In heavy and open source, I mean, I'm seeing IBM heavy push. I'm wondering serverless, if you've got any commentary there. We've been looking at like OpenWisk and some of the pieces there. Yeah, OpenWisk is there. There's, you know, serverless is a thing that a lot of these customers, back to your own quite original question, a lot of these customers are looking for those types of services and they're all available in the catalog. It's still pretty early. That hasn't overtaken the discussions of the containers and the Kubernetes stuff in your world, has it? It hasn't, but I think the enterprise customers who are looking to move to cloud, they are thinking about those things. So these are some of the check boxes that need to be checked for them for the future growth, et cetera. So you've got VMware's, you know, obviously virtualization strategy. You've got containers come in. I remember Pat Gelsinger in the cube several years ago, when containers were, you know, Docker was rocketing and it was like, oh, Docker's going to kill VMware. And Pat's response was, look, we've got the best containers in the world. We're going to embrace containers. We're like, oh, sure. But that's exactly what happened. What's IBM's point of view? Yeah, you know, here's the thing. You know, we want to give them the option to do whatever they want to do. We're seeing a lot of traction on the microservices side on the containerization, but I think it's going hand in hand. A lot of the customers are using the Ember platform still, yet they're also leveraging some of these other microservices and containers. So I think Pat's right on. You know, I think originally what was, people were talking about getting rid of the IaaS layer of VMware is going containers completely. You know, our take is, let give the customers all the functionality and the ability to do whatever they want to do. We are seeing it's more of a mixer at the moment. And we had Ed Booneon on recently, founder of one of the founders of VMware, and he was talking about the challenges in the data center at scale. In a particular, when you introduce virtualization and you, you know, reduce some of the hardware resources, how do you deliver, you know, predictable, you know, high performance at scale and some of the challenges there? That's even on-prem. Now introduce cloud and you've got distance and latency and other physics. So what do you, what's the discussion like with customers around how to architect, you know, the ideal cloud on-prem hybrid? You know, it's a great question because that is a question that got asked all the time because in the enterprise space, like I said, these customers in a lot of cases have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy so it never becomes a key part of that discussion. For us, the answer is very simple. You know, we've laid down the fiber across the globe, across all these data centers. So when you're talking about latency and data transfer and those types of speeds or having, you know, a multi-cloud strategy across the globe, it's a very simple and easy conversation because not only do we make all that information available to our customers as far as what latency to expect from which data center to another one across the globe, but also it's all private and it's all secure and it makes for a very good multi-cloud story. I don't know if you saw Ginny Rometti's talk at IBM Think, but she used the term, a lot of people tongue-in-cheek make fun of it, but I kind of like it, incumbent disruptors. I mean like, if you're IBM and you get the client base that IBM has, you better come up with a term like that because that's exactly what you're trying to help your customers do. So, my question is where does the cloud and your offering, you know, with VMware fit into the incumbent disruptive scenario? Yeah, so, VMware, like I said earlier, you know, we didn't want to be a me-too player with VMware. Not only did we want to have a good story with VMware because obviously VMware is a huge market share when it comes to virtualization, but on top of that we wanted to be more futuristic and solve for some of those questions and concerns that the enterprise customer had. So, you know, tight integration on the enterprise base, on the microservices, containerization. Watson is a huge part of the VMware platform. You can seamlessly integrate into Watson really have intelligent decision-making on the VMware platform. So, you know, we wanted to ensure that we were, you know, helping our enterprise customers move to cloud yet also solve for the future problems. So, the incumbent piece would be both VMware and IBM, right, the incumbent customers. The disruptor would be, I guess, cloud, all the new cloud services, certainly the machine, intelligence, cognitive, et cetera, components is the disruptive capability. Now, it's up to you to figure out, okay, how do you apply all that? Presumably, IBM and your partners can help. Yeah, and you know, here's the thing, you know, you mentioned earlier, IBM is one of the only companies in the world that can have an end-to-end, not just infrastructure, but also services wrapped around it. So, if you're a customer who's not only looking to move to the cloud, but also have services wrapped around to go end-to-end, you know, IBM is the company to do that for you. Well, it's interesting, okay, I got to ask this too. So, we were with Dell Technologies a couple of weeks ago, and we had Jeff Clark on, and we asked them, he said, look, companies like IBM, HPE sort of, IBM selling off its X86 division, HPE splitting, Dell did the opposite, you know, the mega merger. And his comment was, well, I don't see how you can do end-to-end without both ends. Now, his definition of end-to-end is obviously different than your end-to-end. I have to ask you, what do you mean by end-to-end? Is the client sort of just a commodity? We can get that anywhere? It's not really an integration challenge? So, what I'm saying end-to-end, what I'm talking about is a enterprise customer looking to move to the cloud, solve for the future problems, essentially reinvent themselves, transform their business, leverage the new applications, microservices that are there, but also have services wrapped around it, right? Somebody who's there to help them end-to-end, whether it's just doing migrations, for example, or right, from on-premises to the cloud, but also help them on board and guide them on what is there in the cloud, or the microservices or our PAS layer and how they can transform really. So, that, to me, Stu, is, Zeb's talking about not a hardware view of end-to-end, but maybe a systems and a software view of end-to-end and cloud services. All right, Zeb, thank you very much. You have one more? You're good? Thanks so much for coming with theCUBE. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, yeah. All right, keep it right there. But Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veeamon 2018 in Chaitan. We'll be right back.