 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Word on day one of VMworld 2018. This is the 20th anniversary of VMware. Lots of momentum this morning kicking things off. Justin and I are happy to be joined by some folks from NetApp, we have Nancy Hart, the head of marketing for cloud infrastructure and NetApp, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Julie, it's so great to be here. And an alumni Gabe Chapman. I love your Twitter handle at bacon underscore is underscore king, senior manager of NetApp HCA, Gabe. Hi, how are you doing? Good, so guys, lots of momentum. Pat Gelsinger is probably one of my favorite keynotes because he's really energetic. He even went full in with his faux tat this morning. I was impressed. Pressure. So you guys have some news? Yes. Tell us about what's new with NetApp and VMware. Yes. So fantastic, exciting times at NetApp these days. NetApp is really focused on becoming the data authority for hybrid cloud. And part of that is what we're excited to announce today here at VMworld is a NetApp verified architecture for VMware private cloud for HCI. So what you heard today in Pat's keynote was a lot about connecting on-premises private clouds with hyperscalers public clouds. And that's what we're doing in our partnership with VMware here and this validated architecture for private clouds, citing news for us. In addition, we're also really thrilled to be announcing new storage nodes for our NetApp HCI product and solid fire product as well. Lots going on today. Wow, that's really cool. So Gabe, you've been in the field a lot. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Some of the signage around here is about VMware's making things possible, momentum making momentum possible. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the field in terms of customers momentum leveraging HCI from NetApp to drive new business models, new revenue streams? I think one of the things that I see commonly is that the hyperconverge is a platform has been around for about six, seven years now and customers are seeing that some of the first generational approaches have got them to a certain level in terms of addressing simplicity and kind of that turnkey infrastructure stack. But where they would like to go next is more cloud integrated, more scalability, more enterprise class or enterprise scale technology and therefore they're kind of looking at the NetApp HCI product and the architecture that we've brought to market and seeing the potential to not only do things on premises that they'd normally do in terms of a infrastructure platform but also move into new services. How do we integrate with existing investments that they've had? How do we become connected into the hybrid cloud model with the hyperscalers themselves and really push towards a all-encompassing cloud infrastructure platform other than just a box? Yeah, one of the things I noticed in the keynote today that I think relates to that and I'm interested to hear Nancy and Gabe a little bit more about what customers are doing here because it seems that the idea of it must be all cloud or all onsite, that's gone away now. It's very much hybrid cloud world, multi-cloud world where customers have choice. So are you hearing that from customers? Clearly there seems to be some demand here because we've seen the change in messaging. Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing is customers want the option to take advantage of all the resources, regardless of those resources are on premises or in public clouds and that's what we're doing here at NetApp with our own HCI solution is that as the market evolves under our feet, we talked about what Gabe talked about, those first generation vendors weren't quite enough that our customers choose in NetApp because they want more than what they can get from those first generation vendors and what you really want to see is that convergence continues to march on and that there is more to collapse into the stack particularly that connection up into the public cloud. So customers are definitely looking today, they're making buying decisions today based on that option. Right, and clearly there's lots of customers who have substantial investment already in NetApp so being able to use what you've already got and extend it with a vendor that you're already familiar with and you know how it works, there's a lot of value there. Yeah, we're a trusted vendor. We're a trusted, NetApp is a trusted enterprise vendor with the reliability and customers can come to us with confidence and choose NetApp with confidence. So we were with you guys at SAP just a couple months ago at the beginning of the summer and hashtag data driven was everywhere, I'm seeing it in Twitter. Yes. We often hear many things about data is power, data is currency, data is fuel, data is all of those things. If it can be harnessed and acted upon in real time. Yep. How does NetApp, what are some of the differentiators? Obviously we talked about the trusted partnership but how does NetApp help customers actually live a data driven life within their organization? Well, you know, I think a lot of times it starts with kind of understanding where your data lives, how you manage it, manipulate it and secure it. So we have things like GPDR that comes up on, all of a sudden everybody's scrambling to come up with a solution or a reference architecture, some way that it integrates with it. And I think naturally NetApp being the product, technology company that's been and it's lived and breathed data all its life. We understand our customers' unique requirements around governance, around security, around mobility. And we've built technologies that don't lock you into any one mode of consumption. So if you bought a filer, if you bought an HCI system, if you bought an object store platform, the data fabric piece is the glue that binds and allows data mobility and portability across multiple platforms, not only from the edge to the core but also to the cloud and kind of gives you that larger, bigger picture. And we believe that as we start to see this transition, especially at edge computing, especially as we look at things like NVME over fabrics and getting into new levels and also services that we're delivering across the hyperscalers, a cohesive picture and story around where your data lives, how you manage it and who can access it is empowering customers to make their transition into the multi-cloud space. That's clearly that transition, I think, is what people weren't really understanding in probably three or four years ago. I was like enterprises aren't going to be there in one spot, you can't just turn it on in five seconds. These things take time. Yeah. So with our data fabric, we're able to cover the entire NetApp portfolio from edge to core to cloud. And as you say, enterprises and different departments in those enterprises will make their own transition and go down their own journey of digital transformation in their own time. And NetApp can really be that trusted partner for all these enterprises. So with so much choice comes, I think, inherently a lot of complexity. I thought they did a great job this morning in the keynote, Pat Gelsinger and team, of really talking about their announcements, what VMware has done in their history pretty clearly. But I can imagine from a customer's perspective, if it's an enterprise organization who doesn't want to get uberized, they probably don't know where to start. So talk to us about sort of the business level conversations that NetApp has with not just your existing customers who know they can come to NetApp to trust you, but also some of those maybe newer businesses or newer enterprise businesses to NetApp. How can they come to you and say, help us understand, we're probably have, what did I say this morning, the average customers, eight clouds, how do you help them to sort of digest that, embrace it, and be able to maximize it so that their data can be available as soon as they need it? Right. So what it is is data is the heart of the enterprise and help people help customers change their world with data, but there has to be a direct business outcome for that. So when enterprise customers learn to mind the value of their data, they can really build new revenue streams, they can create new touch points with their own customers to drive their businesses. So for example, one of our early NetApp HCI customers were down in Australia, a company called Contatal, a service provider down in Australia, and they were really struggling to set up new businesses and new services to their own customer base. But when the conversation, when they worked with NetApp, what they were able to do was deploy new services three times faster over their last vendor. So think about what that did for their top line. If this company, Contatal, could deploy new services, new revenue opportunities three times faster. Blowing their competitors out of the water. Blowing their competitors out of the water. That's a business level conversation. This is not a conversation of technology. Yes, under the covers, there's some amazing, fantastic technology, but it has to serve the business. Contatal has now been so successful with NetApp as HCI that they now are expanding into brand new geo and geo regions and bringing new services to a whole new set of customers and a whole new customer base working with us. And that's what I'm hearing in the conversations that I have with customers. I'm interested to hear from yourself and Gabe as to whether you're hearing this across the board. You've got one example here of customers who are concerned more with additional revenues, new revenue streams, new ways of making money top line. And not so much about cost savings. That was something that was being, we were concentrating on that maybe three or four years ago. That seems to have been de-emphasized now and people are much more interested in seeking out new ways to use things, new sources of revenue and focusing on top line. So is that something that you're seeing across the board or is that sort of only leading edge companies that are looking at that? We see it across the board, I think with a lot of customers across many different verticals. We'll take it for instance, Children's Mercy Hospital bought us a modern NetApp HCI product for a virtual desktop implementation. And they did so for a lot of reasons. One of them being the traditional TCO ROI discussion, but also allows them to provide a platform that isn't just a silo of resources because of the unique aspects and differentiation that we have on our platform. We're able to go and do mixed workloads and do consolidation. So they're realizing savings and gains across collapsing silos, bringing multiple applications onto the same common infrastructure the same way they would have gone and swiped their credit card at Amazon. When you do that, you don't care if you're putting a SQL database and Oracle or whatnot, they're going to give you the resources that you need. We want to mimic that locally on-prem for customers. And then also have that integration with cloud services. So if we're building a cloud service that runs on Amazon or Google or if we're integrating with VMware as it runs on AWS or whatever, we want to be able to extend those services from local on-premises environments into the cloud and back based on that. And I think that's really where the value is because there's no turnkey public cloud, hybrid cloud integration piece. It's a journey and you have to analyze all the applications and the way you've done business. And NetApp having been working in the enterprise space as a trusted advisor for such a long time, we understand the customer's needs and we've been in the cloud space for a number of years already and we kind of understand that space. So we're kind of bridging the gap at the data level and helping to expand that more so at the infrastructure level as well and as we branch into new services as time goes on. Yeah, well, you've got that challenge of every customer being different but there's also trends that are common across the industry and NetApp being the size and having the history that it does. You've seen all of these things before and you know that, yes, this is unique to you as a customer but also we've seen this in other customers, this would be of value to you and you can bring that to those customers. Right, not only that, we have this product called ActiviteQ and it tends to be a service and support and monitoring application. But like you said, we have a very large customer base and using features and functionalities in AI, we're able to use the data that we get from ActiviteQ as sort of a community wisdom in effect and then make suggestions to those users as well. So again, NetApp does have a very large install base. What can we learn from that install base? How can we help existing customers run their operations better with that community wisdom? We've always referred to it as actionable intelligence for your data. So like, you know, we've all played Tetris as a kid. It's playing Tetris with your data, Tetris with your workloads and making sure that they all line up so that you get the all four blocks, break at the same time, get the high score, right? So it's really kind of taking and really truly mining your infrastructure, mining your workloads and your information and making sure that you're getting the most effective resource utilization that you possibly can across, not just virtual machine workloads, but also data workloads and understanding what you have on the floor versus what you need six months from now to one year from now. That active IQ platform is really an integral part to really understanding customer's data, resource utilization, et cetera. Yeah, as someone who has played storage Tetris, any help that you can do, it's very, very welcome. I'm going to bring that back. That's the second reference I've heard of that in the last couple of days. So one of the things that Pat Gelsinger and team talked about this morning during the general session was superpowers and the need to enable enterprises to be able to harness their superpowers and maximize AI, machine learning, IoT, the edge. How was NetApp and VMware uniquely positioned to help your customers be able to take that actionable intelligence scale that you mentioned on that data to drive the new business models and revenue streams? Well, I think our superpower would be, information is power, so that's our superpower is being data driven and understanding how we take the customer's data, leverage it to its most effective use and allocate it and protect it properly, right? So there's a whole bunch of different areas around what we're doing there. Ours would be understanding data, understanding how customers want to use it and what kind of information they want to extract from it. And so, I'm just like, I have to come up with a fancy term for maybe data thrivers is my superpower, but that could be definitely one part of it, right? You can take a logo out of that. Data thriver? Yeah. I think so. So NetApp has been a partner of VMware for a very long time. You have a large ecosystem of partners as well. What you guys announced today, talk to us about some of the benefits or really the opportunities that's going to give to NetApp's channel partners. So there's a lot of opportunity here for our channel partners, right? As our customers take this journey, they're going to turn to their trusted advisors, their partners to help them take that journey as well. And so what we've done here with what we announced with the VMware private cloud for HCI, this is a significant opportunity for our channel partners to work with their customers and take them down that path to be that data thriver, to harness that superpower. New opportunities for all, right? Customers need someone to help them show the way and the channel partners are really the community to do that. So for those channel partners who are keen to go and do these, how should they engage with you? How should they start talking to NetApp about helping their customers to go down this journey? Well, obviously, we're making a large, and we're making the announcement this week. That's the kind of the first step is, come by, come to our booth. It's a thing. Obviously, we have a very large channel organization. We have outreach. We'll have training. We'll have, I mean, that the path to hybrid cloud starts with turnkey private cloud. And that's kind of what we've done here. We're working on that turnkey private cloud with our partner VMware and NetApp together to kind of facilitate that first step. And then we go out and work with our channel partner organizations to find the customers that want to go down that path. And then they can bring their additional add on to it. So there's a lot of opportunity to go out and really kind of push and help customers make this transition between the two different worlds. And obviously, you know, we can go to netapp.com and come and take a look. And we have plenty of information there too. And just as we wrap up here, I'm curious, Nancy, to get your perspective from the cloud infrastructure perspective or vision. The announcements that VMware made today, big news with AWS launched that last year, talked about a lot of expansion going to APAC and a lot of work in Australia. What does that, as well as some of the other product enhancements that they announced today, what does that mean to NetApp? Right, so I think for NetApp and for our customers, because really let's just focus on NetApp's customers, some of the announcements you saw Pat make today provides new options, new opportunities for NetApp's customers globally, right? As there's these new features, new functionalities, to that turnkey solution for private cloud, what you saw is VMware expanding that relationship with AWS just gives new options and opportunities. So hopefully people can go and maybe by tomorrow get a data thriver, I don't know, a pen or a sticker. I have to run out to Kinko's real quick and make some stickers. Maybe print it on some bacon. I actually, I think we have pretzel necklaces in our booth to go for the beer call. Should have worn that, so, oh, wow. What time is it? Soon, not soon enough. Well, Nancy and Gabe, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Justin and me. Very excited to hear NetApp's continued transformation and what you're helping customers achieve. So thank you for your time. Thank you very much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE for Justin Warren. I'm Lisa Martin, we're at VMworld Day One. Stick around, we'll be right back.