 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we're with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous production of VMworld 2013. theCUBE is a live mobile studio. We take it to events like VMworld and all the big events around the tech industry. We drop in, we extract the signal from the noise and bring you the best guests that are at these events. Jonathan King is here. He's the Vice President of Cloud Strategy at Savvis, a cloud service provider, one of the better known cloud service providers out there. Jonathan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. It's a big event here. We were talking off camera a little bit about Hybrid Cloud. You're hearing tons about Hybrid Cloud. It looks like it's really starting to go from vision to reality. Maybe a little reset of expectations on things like Federation, but the Hybrid Cloud is really starting to take hold within the discussions that you have with customers, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah, I think we're seeing a transformation that's been well underway already where you've had public cloud infrastructure building. You've had strong adoption in the VSPP program, which we've been a long time participant in. And you've also seen, of course, the Hybrid is that you've also have to have private cloud. So Hybrid in terms of private cloud and public cloud workload movement and Federation and even cloud to cloud in terms of public to public workload migration. And I think a lot of the folks here presenting and down on the show floor have just amazing technologies and solutions around this entire space. So what we're doing here is a spotlight on service providers. We're really trying to focus in and help our audience understand what's going on in that space. So how would you characterize just generally the state of cloud service provision? So I think we're at an inflection point where I've described it this week as a phase shift where the past several years, there'd been a question about maybe three years ago, what is the cloud? And then maybe two years ago, it became what should we put in the cloud? And the volume just continues to turn where this year, it's almost more what shouldn't we put in the cloud? So it went from what is the cloud? What should we put in the cloud? What should we not put in the cloud? And I think if you look at where VMware is going and the announcement of its vCloud Hybrid service, they're embracing that as well. So we've been along this journey with them since really VMware first became possible for service providers to offer cloud running on VMware. And when last year and vCloud director came into focus and the VCD API became prominent, those are things that we embraced. And now that vCloud Hybrid service is available, it's something that we're also embracing. Jonathan, so you've been a member of the partner program you said for a while. When vCloud Hybrid service was first talked about, there was a lot of rumbling. Was VMware really trying to cut out their service provider partners and kind of beat them to the punch? Obviously, big news at the show here was that your partner, for the locations of vCloud Hybrid service, can you walk us through, what's conversation? You, your peers and VMware, how has that partnership progressed? And you've used the service, so how has that progression happened? So I think this, this story starts really a year or two ago. It really starts several years ago when we first, as I said, were, have been deploying VMware to serve our customer needs for a long time. And really about, I'd say about 14, 16 months ago, we started to look at our cloud portfolio. And at that point, we had built our own orchestration layer and integrated our OSS and VSS so that we could be our point of differentiation and value was that we had stood up VMware based technologies and could deliver them as a cloud. Looking at this time, a little earlier this time last year with vCloud director on the scene, we said, hey, what if we were to look at VMware providing that orchestration? And that would let free us up to add value in other parts of the stack. So we started to partner very closely with VMware on redesigning our Go Forward product, which we launched in July called Cloud Datasenter, which is based on vCloud director. Additionally though, at that time, we brought forward and adopted the VCD API in that ecosystem. You fast forward to today, those were incremental things where we had already made the shift to say, there's an opportunity here moving from an annual release cycle and a product principally designed for enterprise workloads to now embracing a business unit within side of VMware that's bringing together these assets and these groups to deliver that orchestration. And the win for us is we see accelerated turns of the product so that we get earlier access to that technology and that will benefit us in the entire ecosystem of VMware. What if we could talk a little bit, Jonathan, about you mentioned the partnership with VMware. You're also within EMC's cloud service provider partner. They call it velocity provider partnerships. What's the relationship? What's the difference? Is there cross pollination? Help us understand that. Sure, so I think our relationship, we've had a longstanding relationship with EMC. We really have a broad portfolio of capabilities. So we have over 50 data centers in the world in terms of our co-location offering. As a central link company, we have very broad network capabilities. And then with SAV is bringing that together from an IT services standpoint, we have managed services, storage services, professional services that wrap around that. So where we've seen partnership and opportunity with EMC is we have hosted private solutions that use EMC technology. We have a tremendous amount of EMC running in our co-location, as you can imagine. Additionally though, we've taken EMC technology like EMC Atmos. EMC Atmos powers our cloud storage offering. So last year when we launched the VCD API-based ecosystem and included our orchestration partners like BMC and Rackware and others, we also shortly thereafter launched an Atmos-based API ecosystem. So that's what folks like Riverbed and their Whitewater appliance. So they can take and replicate data from on-prem to off-prem. And I think it's that breadth of portfolio where we can host EMC. We have storage offerings built with EMC and as we move to adopt the VCloud Hybrid Service and strengthen our partnership with VMware, we think they'll just continue to be interesting opportunities. So let me ask you, so I want to ask you about one of those opportunities and maybe you can't talk about it specifically because it's futures, but if you look at the VCloud Hybrid Service, one of the things that I think I'm correct in saying that's missing is a Swift-like or S3-like object store. For example, you mentioned Atmos. Could you construct something like that? Again, in concept, not asking you to pre-announce anything, but... Well, so right now, our cloud storage offering is available globally. It stood up in our data centers next to our existing BSPP-based VCloud Director offering. So that is on that in our data centers and it is something that is a service that can be exposed and is available. I think the team at the VCHS team not going to comment on where they're headed, but I know it's certainly on their radar and I think that's an area for collaboration between us as that progresses. But in concept, that's something that you could maybe suggest, maybe you're already working on it and you can't talk about it, but there's no reason that you couldn't try to facilitate some kind of collaboration like that. Is that the intent of these types or at least one of the intents of these types of partnerships? Well, I think the meta point there is that there's opportunity for collaboration and acceleration and we already have cloud storage offering that's in market. These things take time to get out there so we can leverage that existing offering but then knowing where they're headed and where the market's headed, we can evaluate that and determine, okay, we're not going to build that, we're going to build this, we're going to run this longer. It just gives us more flexibility to serve our client needs and make the best decision. So what we heard from Pat Gelsinger this morning when he was on theCUBE was essentially sort of laid out, he said, look, we have great respect for Google and Amazon, Microsoft Azure, obviously. He said, we're the fourth big gun in that equation. And his argument was essentially that it would be harder for Amazon and Google to come into the enterprise is because of a variety of things that we've heard about at this event and others, SLAs and governance and security and all these other things. Even though Amazon, there's a web page and all of that stuff, but I pushed hard on SLAs, I'll push you on SLAs in a minute, too. And then he sort of tipped his hat at Microsoft. They have more of that sort of hybrid potential, but we've got some advantages and enlisted a long list of advantages relative to Hyper-V, which I wouldn't argue with. But the strategy seems to be to bet on hybrid cloud as the primary enterprise adoption model that this notion of the big switch to the utility, plug it in to the public cloud is, I actually called it a big myth and that was sort of me putting words into his mouth. Do you guys share that vision? Do you deviate, if so, where? And if not, how do you collaborate for maximum potential? So, I think we think that hybrid cloud is absolutely a big opportunity and a lot of these terms, big data, cloud, hybrid cloud, they're loaded terms. So, I think though that directionally, we believe that hybrid cloud is a very big, unaddressed space. And we also think that areas like big data would be a big, unaddressed space. And if you look at, I didn't get to see the Gelsinger Pat's talk yet, but that you referenced, but if you look at where Amazon has gone and the scale that they've achieved and where Microsoft and Google are following, those really represent a different kind of thing. They represent a mass compute pool of public cloud capacity that with the right resilience built in or with the right design, you can make work for enterprise workloads. That's sort of their challenge. They're sort of reaching a point where they have to do things to make it work for enterprise. But they're having tremendous success, so it's hard to argue with what they're doing. I think the opportunity for VMware and its ecosystem with the tens of millions of VMs that are out there already running supporting mission-critical workloads that are distributed in all manner of places, that are also, importantly, connected to close proximate storage systems and that also have tens of millions of virtual ports that that represents a big distributed computer. And if you improve the hub and are able to go from an enterprise release cycle that got all of that out there and then you're able to have a vCloud hybrid service that has accelerated release cycles to start to take advantage of architectures around software-defined networking and then to follow software-defined storage, what you start to do is this obviously will grow because it's new, but this water should rise as well. And that's the excitement of that opportunity is it's VMware being VMware, just like Amazon's going to be Amazon. And VMware has gotten here by partnering with companies and by serving enterprise needs. And just given the nature of the architecture, what you can do is, and that's why we're excited about this is we have customers that come and use cloud, they also use Kolo. We have customers that come and use cloud and Kolo and need network, right? So it pulls through multiple solutions and that's part of the value prop for the customers and then the ecosystem at large. Well, that close proximate statement that you made is very, very important. And of course, Amazon does have a play on that with Equinix and some of its other partners, but it doesn't feel like a fundamental part of their strategy, it is fundamental to you guys. Yes, yes. Jonathan, so we talked about kind of the big Amazon Clouds. We've talked about how enterprises go to the hybrid. What about Paz? I know that's a hot topic of yours since Pivotal has been spun out. To be honest, I haven't heard a lot about it at this show. Where does Paz fit into this whole equation of cloud? Yeah, I'll agree with you on terms of the, I think maybe next year's VMworld, I think we'll see a lot more of Paz and developer focus is part of our transformation in terms of launching an ecosystem and bringing forward a vCloud director cloud is that we also announced the acquisition of a company called AppFog in June. And AppFog is a cloud foundry based Paz provider. And part of that calculus, it relates very much to what we've been talking about on the show is that as we start to partner and engage more closely with VMware at the orchestration layer, it frees us up to go up stack in one way and then sort of left and right of the stack and the other in co-location. So from a Paz standpoint, we see buying cycles happening that are entirely or at the very least pretty heavily influenced by developers. And where Paz is going and where Pivotal Cloud Foundry is going and we think there's a big opportunity is hosted private pass. So if you look at, I can go out to a public cloud today and a lot of the reasons that people are going there is because they can get what they need very quickly and have the languages that they want, right? There's just that opportunity is developed and can be with Cloud Foundry and the tooling that Pivotal is working on and that we are engaging on and partnering with them to work on is something we think can be a big, big boom. And we about, I think about a month ago announced that we are going to be contributing to the Cloud Foundry Open Source Project. We've also been named along with GE and IBM as an advisor to the Cloud Foundry and we expect to be very active in that space and since acquiring AppFog, we've added thousands of more developers to the AppFog platform and now we have an evolution where we have public Paz which is free and by the way, you can go to Amazon, you can go to other providers in that, it's a multi-cloud solution. But what you'll see over time is we'll start to add obviously Sabbath zones, then we'll add hosted private capabilities and then I think work closely with Pivotal and how we manage and extend into on-premise solutions as well. We're very excited about that. Yeah, I mean the developer angle is key, obviously. It opens up, it gives tremendous leverage and then just the whole discussion around the ecosystem piece is a great angle on how to compete in this day and age. You've got three distinct segments. You've got, well, even four. You've got the big consumer guys, obviously. You've got the big enterprise guys that are sort of going it alone and you've got really your ecosystem approach which brings a lot of leverage but it's harder because partnering is harder. So, but I think that generally VMware, EMC, Savage guys get the partnership game so it's a nice little equilibrium that the industry's set up here and it's going to be interesting to watch. Jonathan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's really a pleasure meeting you. Definitely. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2013 and we'll be right back.