 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Okay, welcome back everyone to the CUBE virtual experience here for re-invent coverage 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person doing interviews face-to-face but we're remote this year because of the pandemic. We're here for the APN partner experience kickoff coverage with two great guests, Rima Ollinger, global lead for VMware cloud on AWS and Arthi Raju, senior manager, solutions architecture for Amazon web services. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Good to be with you, John, thank you. So I got a, I got, I want to get it out there, this partner network experience. It's really about the ecosystem and VMware has been one of the biggest success stories. They've been around for a long time and not one of the earliest ecosystem partners but a big success, you know, 2016 when that announcement happened, a lot of people were like, whoa, you know, we VMware's giving into Amazon and Amazon was like, no, that's not how it works. So it turns out everyone was been proven wrong. It's been hugely successful, beneficial to both. What's the momentum? Share an update this year on the AWS VMware momentum. Great, so John, as you know, we're into our third anniversary and the relationship cannot be any stronger. We see customers are leaning into the service very heavily. We see great adoption across multiple industries. Some data points for you. If we look at October of this year to October of prior year, we're seeing the number of active house or the number of consuming host and active VMs nearly double year over year. We also continue to see great partner interests in the solution. We have over 300 ISVs that have validated the services on VMC and we see over 600 plus partners that continue to take the competencies and build practices around it. So the momentum is very strong since three years still today. You know, one of the comments I made when the naysayers were like kind of poo pooing the deal, I was like, no, no, the cloud growth is going to be a factor. And at that time, the trendy thing was softwares eating the world was a big trend there. If you look at the growth of cloud scale and software innovation and the operating side of it, because VMware runs IT, there's a lot of operators running IT. There's no conflict because Amazon's growing and now the operator roles growing and changing. So you have two dynamics going on. I think this is a really nuanced point for the VMware AWS relationship around how they both fit together because it's a win-win, a better together scenario. And it is on AWS, which is a distinction. Can you guys share your reaction to kind of that dynamic of operating software at scale and how this translates for customers? Absolutely. We see a lot of benefits that this service is bringing to the customers because what it's doing is providing them with this consistent infrastructure and operations across hybrid cloud environments. And in this way, they have the choice of where to place their applications on-prem or in the cloud specifically. And this is one of the reasons why AWS is VMware's preferred cloud provider for all vSphere workloads. We see the customers gravitate towards it and be receptive to it specifically because they say it accelerates my path towards migrating and modernizing my application. It provides me with consistent, as I mentioned, operations and infrastructure. And it also helps with nodey factoring and helps to scale their business and very fast, very seamless fashion. Arfi, what is your perspective? Maybe additional things. Yeah. From a technical innovation perspective, the momentum John has been very strong, especially listening to what customers have been asking us the past couple of years. 2020 has been a big year for us in terms of launching some giant innovations. Couple of things to call out is we launched the VMware Transit Connect. This was announced during VMworld this year and customers have been telling us, hey, we are migrating workloads from on-premises to the cloud. We need a simplified way of connecting all these resources on-prem resources, resources on VMware Cloud on AWS and their AWS native resources as well. So the VMware Transit Connect uses the AWS Transit Gateway that we launched at re-invent two years back to provide that simplified connectivity model for our customers. The next big thing this year was we introduced a new instance type, i3en.metal. So customers have been telling us they want denser nodes for especially storage-heavy workloads. So we launched this i3en that comes with approximately like 45 terabytes of storage per node. So that's a lot of storage for individual nodes. So customers have been taking advantage of these dense nodes as well. There was other areas that we kind of focused on from a lower entry point for our customers. When we initially started the service, John, you know that we had the minimum entry point as four nodes. We've scaled that down to three and now we've come to two nodes giving the same production SLA for customers. The other big launch this year was the acquisition of Datrium by VMware and how we introduced the VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. Datrium uses the native AWS services like S3 and EC2, providing customers this low-cost DR options. We're talking about the APN here and for partners, we launched the VMware Cloud Director Service which delivers multi-tenancy to our managed service providers so that they can cater to small to medium-sized enterprises. What are some of the other use cases that are the key in these migrations? Because this becomes a big benefit we're hearing. Certainly during the partner day here at Reinvent is migration, cloud classification, getting to a SaaS, but not losing the business model either was on-premises or born in the cloud. This new operating model is the key thing. What are some of the key use cases for partners? The most widely adopted use case that John would show rightfully touched on is really the cloud migration. We see around 41% of customers using the service for cloud migration. Now, this could be an application migration like SAP, SQL Server or Oracle application or it could be a complete data center evacuation. And we see that with some customers who have a cloud mandate or they have refresh cycles that are coming up or maybe they're in a cold load and they're not happy with their SLA. I could use the example of William Hill is one of the customer's largest betting and gaming companies that are in the UK. And what the use case was a combination of a data center extension as well as a capacity expansion, specifically. And what William Hill was able to do is move 800 on-premise service and they decommissioned them in the first 12 months. And they also migrated 3000 VM. So that is called migration to the big use case. The second big use case, as I mentioned earlier is the data center extension. That includes also a VDI. The combination of both is around 42% of the use cases with around 26% I would say for data center extension and 16% for VDI. Why? Customers want to expand their footprint. They want to go to a new region and they want to meet on-demand cyclical capacity needs or sometimes temporary needs for some events or some seasonal spikes. So we see that as a second big use case. A third one equally important tends to be disaster recovery. Now, this is either to augment an existing DR, replace a DR that is already in place or start a new DR. And that constitutes around 17% of the use cases that we see because customers want to reduce their DR effects caused by moving to the cloud. And one example that comes to mind is Pennsylvania Lumber's Ment's Mutual Insurance before the DR use case. They work with an external storage partner of ours, Faction, in order to put that in place. So overall a great use cases across the board. And I know a big one is application modernization. Arthi, I know you work with your teams on that if there's any feedback from you on that. Yeah. The next generation applications or application modernization comes a lot. We talked to like AWS customers who are migrating from on-premises to the cloud using VMware cloud on AWS. And three or four years back as we were building the service and architecting, one thing was very evident. Like we wanted to make sure that as we were building the service, we wanted to ensure that customers can take advantage of the native AWS services. We've got 175 plus services and new services launching at re-invent. So we wanted to make sure that there is this seamless mechanism and seamless path for customers to modernize using native AWS services. So what we've done as part of like onboarding for customers and as customers build on VMware cloud on AWS is provide them both the network path and data path so they can as they're into the same availability zone or region they're like, hey, I can use S3 for backups. I can use EFS for file shares, et cetera. So we're seeing a wide range of next generation application use cases that customers are building on. Well, I want to get at the reasons why customers are continuing to adopt VMware cloud on AWS. Can you guys share an update? I'll say the obvious reasons at the beginning was nice strategy for VMware, it's proven to be clear. But where's the innovation coming from? What's the key drivers for the adoption of VMware cloud on AWS? So one of the key patterns that we are seeing is customers who used to be risk averse, customers who've invested a lot in VMware. And at the point they did not want to move their workloads or applications to the cloud because of the risk involved or sometimes they didn't want to refactor or they were worried about the investment in tools, resources. They tend to gravitate towards this solution. The fact that you could provide your customers with this consistent infrastructure and operations across on premise as well as on the cloud environment. The fact that you do not need to do an application refactoring. You could optimize your workload placement based on your business needs. You could move your workloads bidirectionally. You could either leave it on prem over to the cloud and vice versa. They've also noticed that there is a lower TCO associated with the use of the service. We know from a study that VMware Commission forced there in 2019 for that study that 59% there is a recurring savings in terms of infrastructure and operational savings that is related to that. We also customers tell us that the disconsistency in infrastructure is translating into zero refactoring. Disconsistency in operation is leading them to use their existing skill set. And with the ability to relocate their workloads into the environment that best suits them, that is providing customers with maximum flexibility. So I would say it is delivering on the promise of accelerating the migration and the modernization of our customers application so that they can continue to respond to their business needs and continue to be competitive in the market. Arti, I want you to weigh in and get reaction to that because I've talked publicly and also privately with Ragu for instance at VMware when this was all going down. This is a joint integration. So there's a lot of things going on under the hood that are important. What are the most important things that people should pay attention to around this partnership? Could you share your opinion? Yeah, sure, John. So one of the most common questions that we get from customers is, hey, this is giant integration. We can take use, make use of native AWS services. But what are some of the use cases that we should be targeting, right? As we talk to customers, some of the common use cases to think about is it also depends on the audience. VMware admins, for example, who might not be familiar with the AWS side of services, they can start with something simple like packing up. So S3, which is our simple storage service, we see that use case way more often with our VMware cloud on AWS customers. This also ties with that datrium integration that I talked about with the VCDR, the VMware cloud disaster recovery providing that low cost DR option. We are also starting to see customers offload database management, for example, with Amazon RDS and taking advantage of the managed database service. As we talk to more customers, some of the use cases that comes up are like, hey, how do I build this data lake architecture? I've migrated to the cloud. I want to make use of the data that I have in the cloud now. How do I build my data lake architecture or perform analytics or build this operation resiliency across both these environments, the VMware cloud on AWS, as well as the native AWS environments. So we've got that seamless connectivity that they can take advantage of with VMware Tronset Connect. We've got the cross-account E&I model that we've built that they can take advantage of. Andy talks about this, Werner talks about this, security is always job zero for us. And we're also seeing customers that take advantage of the AWS services like the web application firewall or shield and integrating it with the VMware cloud on AWS environment. And that provides a seamless access, right? You now have all these security services that AWS provides that allows you to build a secure environment on VMware cloud on AWS. So providing customers that choice has always been a priority, right? We're talking about like infrastructure level services. And as we move up this stack and as customers are going through this modernization journey, like VMware provides containerization option using VMware Tanzu that came out at VMworld. And then they also have the native options. We provide EKS, which is our Kubernetes as a managed service. And then we also have other services that enables customers to take that jump into that modernization journey. One customer we've been working very recently with is Pennyman. They migrated their VDI infrastructure into VMware cloud on AWS. And that's allowed them to scale their environment for the remote workers. But what they're doing as part of their modernization journey is now we're helping them build this completely serverless architecture using Lambda on the AWS cloud. Yeah, and that's really where they see the, you know the value of these high level services. You know, the old expression, Rima, you know they use the hockey from Wayne Gretzky skate to where the puck is going to be or, you know, get to where the ball will be in the field. This is kind of what's happening. And I'm kind of smiling when Arthur was talking because, you know, I've been saying it's been going to IT operations and IT service management is going to change radically. This is years ago. What you're really talking about here is the operating side of IT coming together with cloud. VMware, I think is a leading indicator of you still got to operate IT. You still got to operate stuff. Software needs to be operated. Apps need to be operated. So this new operating model is being shown here with cloud. This is the theme with and without IT with automation. This is the big trend from reinvent this year. You know, obviously AI machine learning. You still got to operate the stuff. It's IT. Depends on, you know, we've got Lambda and automation. It doesn't go away. The game is still the same. Isn't what's happening here? Absolutely. So what we're saying is once that you're absolutely right about the fact that they needed to, you know worry about the operations. Once they might write their workloads, they're taking their data. They're saying, how do I make it? Make sure that I put in place operational action. And this is where, you know, AWS comes in and we provide them with the tools needed to do that. And then step number two, say, what can I do with this data? How do I translate it into a business benefit? And this is where the AI ML tools come in place and so forth. And then the third step, which is all right, what can I do to modernize these applications further? So your spot on John in saying that this is like a transformation. It is no longer a discussion about, you know migration anymore. It is more of a discussion about modernizing what you have in place. And this is again where the brilliancy between the collaboration between VMware and AWS, each bringing to the table, you know sets of tools and framework for customers, whether it's security framework or networking framework to make the pieces fit together. So we're very excited about this partnership and we continue to innovate as you heard in a prior discussions with our executives on behalf of our customers. We spoke about the RDS, Amazon's Relational Database Service on vSphere. We spoke about Outpost on VMware Cloud on AWS to bring the cloud to the customer's data center for specific needs that they have in place. And we're not stopping here. We are continuing to make more joint engineering and more announcements hopefully in the future to come. That's great insight. And a lot of people who were commenting three, four years ago, when this is all going down, they're on the wrong side of history. The data is undeniable, refutable. It's a success. Arthur, give us the final word, modern applications, modern infrastructure. What does that mean these days? What's the bottom line when you talk to people out there when you're at a party or your friends are on Zoom or a chime in a conference? What do you tell people when you say, what's a modern application infrastructure look like? Yes, the word modern application, the good or bad thing is it's going to, what I said yesterday could be different from what I'm saying today. But in general, I think modern application is where we enable our customers to focus more on their business priorities using our services versus worrying about the infrastructure or worrying about like, hey, should I be worrying about capacity? Should I be worrying about my operational needs or monitoring? I think we want to abstract all that. We want to take that heavy lifting off of customers and help them focus on their business. Horizontally scalable and leveraging software in the application. Can't go wrong with that formula in the cloud. Thanks for coming on and thanks for the awesome conversation. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, John. Okay, it's theCUBE Virtual for Reinvent Experience 2020. This is virtual, not in person this year. I'm John Furrier, your host from theCUBE. Thanks for watching.