 Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here, excited, really excited, whereas they were sitting in the VMware keynote pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in person with a lot of folks here. Keynote was standing in room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient, and Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Appreciate it, we're going to head us on. Yep, welcome. Isn't it great to be back in person? It is phenomenal to be back. So let's talk about, obviously, three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient. We want to dig into cloud different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. Sure, so Expedient, we're a full stack cloud service provider, so we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud. And we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic and how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with cloud first and trying to go that route only with hyperscaler, and there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. Talk about cloud different and what is helping customers to achieve as they, are everyone's in this accelerated transformation? Yeah, so cloud different is something that Expedient branded, it's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation and first they kept everything in-house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyperscale cloud. And what that really is like, a good analogy would be it's like living in a house while you're renovating it and I know what that's like for my relationship versus if you build a new house or move to a new property that's completed already and that's really the difference in that experience from a cloud different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally and there's a lot of technical debt there and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware based cloud. Now you can remove all that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. That's really critical to get, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about? What are you hearing from the customer? Right, so one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge. Really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos but VM we're wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? Yeah, we completely agree with that message and it's something we've been preaching for a couple of years in part of that cloud different story and it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on premises that's legacy to things that are in like a VMware based cloud like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyperscale but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think about less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? And it's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service writer, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works and that's part of the beauty of the process. I don't know if you want to talk about a specific client or. Yeah, so one of the ones that we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were kind of in that transformation stage of refreshing not only their office space and their data center but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is kind of looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center and from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there but then from an operations perspective, really standardized that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier and allowed them to really look more towards business driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. Brian, a question for you as here we are at the theme of the event is the center of the multi-cloud universe, which seems like a Marvel movie. I haven't seen any superheroes yet but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default, not by strategy, how does Expedion and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware's really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under common platform. And it's had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model. That used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model on average in four to six months. Wow. So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, well, you can go and deploy that on top of the stack of infrastructure in anybody, anywhere. Now, why do customers come to you instead of saying, oh, we'll go to pick your flavor of hyperscale cloud provider? What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things but really hone it in on why would someone want to go to Expedient? In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology. So that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting, and you're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess, another analogy is if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you've got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions, so you can build stuff, it could be cool. But you don't really, you're not gonna get to that in-state. Hold on, that's how Legos used to work. Right. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time. Yeah, you see their sales go up? That's the head set because now you buy a different set for this. I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. Do you ever step on one? Of course I do. There's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's gonna be, the instructions are there, so you also have confidence that you're gonna get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you were trying to assemble everything yourself. Yeah. In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego before they were instructions. No Death Star? No, nothing close with the Death Star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. Got it. Brent, we've seen, obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry, has a cloud-first initiative. They have competitors in the rear-view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are a potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about Expedient was in the recent Gartner Market Guide for specialty cloud. How are these related when what's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactoring their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with a enterprise cloud-like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those kind of the technical at the quote-unquote traditional workloads where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage to time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors. If they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last nine to 12 months really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyperscale. Everything's going to be hyperscale. And they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation. But most companies, when you look at the analysts, say they're about 30% there. They've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to really approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud because you had a pendulum that was, everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first. And then it swung to multi-cloud which meant multiple hyperscale providers. And now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation. You need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyperscale cloud, working them together with that common management plane. And with that said, Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed, have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up the stack? Yeah, the business is much more involved than what it's been in the past. And some of the drivers even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, well, why are you only using 20% of your data center? So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to, where's the best place? And that's a lot of the conference also talks about the best place for your application, put the workload in the right location. My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle, there's this question of how, what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from a CapEx model to an OpEx model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of? Or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? Yeah, there's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is there's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? Sure, so it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's quote unquote free to deploy. But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been the two and a half years which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good, thank you, we're normal. Absolutely. But VMware was talking about that, talking about desktop as a service. There was so much change and quick temporary platform setup to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient Plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create the right hybrid model for them going forward? Sure, so as part of being that full stack cloud service provider, desktop and that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up, what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, we did it in 10 days. And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, okay, what's the right way to deploy it? And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing and the adjustments that they're doing? Sure, so when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools to do their day to day job. But it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware's desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis. But then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. And talk more a little bit, Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen that the threat landscape changed dramatically in the last couple of years. Ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is, it's protected and it's recoverable because everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. Right. Yeah, and if it's not one conversation one, it's conversation one A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients whether it's production, DR or the desktops is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So what kind of, when you think about it, it's kind of doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro segmentation where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network so that they're only allowed to kind of that zero trust model where, hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day-to-day job done but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. Yeah. And also in the US about the cloud smarter earlier and you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment and now you can actually share storage together. You can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. So as we're in August, I think still, yeah, 2022 for a couple more, barely for a couple more days let it change going on at VMware. Expedient has been America's part, VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here and it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. And one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT, everything from the physical data center to the entire stack to people and actually built a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies. So that if you look at strategy A over a five-year period doing your current transformation versus that cloud different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours different that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. Yeah, that panacea that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you and then they've hit that plateau they come to Expedient saying guys with VMware help us accelerate past this. We don't have the time. We need to get this done quickly. How do you advise them to move forward? Sure, so Irikai goes back to that says what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams not being able to respond fast enough to the developers and really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus? It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today. Talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. Thank you for having us. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 22. Stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. And we'll see you in a bit. Bye.