 Why, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And welcome back to VMworld. Our coverage here on theCUBE continues from Mandalay Bay here in Las Vegas. Along with John Troyer, I'm John Walls and it's good to have you with us. Let's continue our coverage here from VMworld today and tomorrow. We'll be back with a full array of guests for you. Right now we're joined by Bill Carpovic who is a general manager of the IBM Cloud Platform. Bill, thanks for being with us. Oh, my pleasure. Good to see you. So, some news earlier this week. You've been working with VMware obviously for a few months now with Cloud Foundation, but you're expanding that relationship. Tell me a little bit more about that and what that entails. Yeah, absolutely. Well, IBM and VMware go back a long way, but in February of this year, we announced a new partnership in the cloud and really to work together to address really what we saw happening with mutual customers, which they wanted to take their virtualization that was off and running behind the firewall and really take it and get the benefits of a public cloud experience. So we announced then in February that we were working together. We've had over 500 clients joined since then and the big news on Monday was their new offering, the vCloud Foundation were the first public cloud where it's available and you can get it either in a pure public cloud environment or in a hybrid environment connected back to the behind the firewall systems and that offering is now available to the marketplace. So in your mind, the significance of that, first off the 500 that you've added on and seeming a relatively short period of time. So how significant is that to you that you have that kind of adoption going and then the decision making alone? What is it that you think motivates people to come to you in that kind of service? It's one of these fun partnerships where as opposed to the vendor who's really pushing it on the market, they really had just this incredible demand saying, hey, customers saying, guys, get together, right? We really want you two to work together in a unique way and that's really proven out. And really the benefit that people get with particularly this combination is enterprises who were largely, most of their portfolio was still on VMware and other technologies. They have to push really aggressively into cloud native applications. They need to do that, but they need to also bring the rest of their portfolio along with it as quickly as they can. And what we do is give them an ability to move in an evolutionary way for the rest of that portfolio, which is often running on VMware, right? And they can keep parts of it behind the firewall or put it in the public cloud, the kind of classic hybrid use case. We've been talking about it for many years, but it's been really hard to do. And we've made it very simple and really available at global scale, right? Anywhere around the world, we have 46 cloud data centers, right? And enterprises just can't compete with that kind of scale and trying to get out of the data center business. And this gives them an opportunity to move those workloads without making any changes. Really, they can use the same tools that they know and love today and the same images and management constructs and that allows them just to get the benefits of cloud much, much more quickly. One of the fun things about cloud is that, everybody has their own definition of it, right? Cloud can mean many things to many people. One of the interesting themes here, I think, this week is this multi-cloud, cross-cloud realization that there is not one cloud. There is, you know, there's many aspects of cloud, public, private, hybrid. And so even at IBM, you guys have definitely taken a hybrid approach to what you guys are doing or not hybrid, but really portfolio approach. You have many several different kinds of clouds, some of the kinds of offerings. Can you talk a little bit about what cloud means for IBM? How would you describe IBM cloud as well? Yeah, sure. No, I think you're right. There is a proliferation of clouds and sometimes that makes it a little bit hard to distill. And at IBM, we have this incredible strength, which is this portfolio breadth. But at times, you know, gosh, what actually is the cloud play? And there's really, I think there's four key elements to the IBM cloud play, right? And as it turns out, I think we announced we have about $11 billion in cloud revenue. So perhaps quietly, we've really grown our cloud business. And part of it is cloud enabling some of the more traditional technologies, right? That is a part of that story and that's important. People are trying to extend their applications to the cloud, right? Another piece of it is that we offer cloud management and integration across public and private cloud environments, okay? The third piece, which is what I'm very involved with is a true, very competitive global scale public cloud, right? Which includes infrastructure as a service, okay? And so Softlayer is our brand for that offering. And then we have a market leading platform as a service that's branded as Bluemix, which includes a whole series of application capabilities and makes it very easy to build very high-powered applications, as well as get access to the Watson APIs. And so all this capability that is in IBM in the form of advanced analytics is made available through our cloud development platform, our cloud platform, right? And that is really valuable. And that's where this VMware play comes into. It's an on-ramp onto that public cloud and now they can use and consume these other services that are of high value in the rest of the cloud experience, right? And then IBM is, of course, a massive solution provider and systems integrator, so we have a large consulting and management practice, which is really the fourth part of how we can help clients. And that's really critical because what we find is people need help, right? They need to help figuring out what's the next move, what's the right move, implementing, and various pieces of it. So that's what we're doing in the cloud. Softlayer, Bluemix, incredibly powerful platform. So what are some of the customer use cases that you're seeing that are really innovative and powerful? Yeah, that's a good question. So I'd say we have different classes of customers. We certainly have the Fortune 500 Global 2000 company that you would think of as IBM's bread and butter, right? And that's large banks globally, large financial, large health organizations, manufacturing organizations, government organizations. But we also have some of the leading startups. We actually have an incredible penetration among gamers, right? And in fact, Softlayer was really the place to go for high performance cloud native applications, right? And we continue to grow our install base and customer base with these emerging growth companies, right? Bitly is an example of a company recently that moved off of Amazon and moved towards us. And we have a lot of these stories, Workday, we just announced recently, a major cloud-based ISV moving from other cloud environments to our cloud platform because of the value, right? So we see across segments, and that's really exciting for IBM to really penetrate new segments in addition to large enterprises. The workloads depend on who the customer is and what they're trying to do, right? I mean, largely in the cloud, there's two things you can do. Build new apps, right? Or take existing apps and get some benefits, right? Taking the existing apps and getting the benefits of cloud, that's the VMware story, right? And sometimes referred to as lift and shift, doesn't have the best connotation, right? But so you have a lot of folks who are just getting, how can I take my existing apps, get the benefit of a cloud environment, global basis, security, et cetera. Most of the work, however, and that's an exciting piece of it, is people building new applications. It's the enterprises and the startups that were saying, I'm going to define a new way to compete in my industry, right? I have to transform my customer experience, I have to transform how I do business, and that's where they come and build these next generation applications on our platform, run them at scale, and they plumb in this very advanced analytics, right? Using, again, Watson services and other capabilities or IoT services to build these high value cloud native applications. Give me an idea if you would, when you're identifying need or you're helping your customers identify their need and making their decisions, you know, what data is going to go where, what process is going to go where, how do I decide? I mean, and how do you roll up your sleeves and help them make determinations? Or maybe sometimes they don't really know what they want. Yeah, well, I think we have a whole portfolio of services, everything from boardroom level strategy, how should you compete in the 21st century, right? This whole digital transformation phenomenon. Sometimes it's at that high level, right? Sometimes it's, hey, where should I deploy this? It's a multi-cloud world, right? In our cloud, or in our IaaS, on our PaaS, on another cloud, right? And so we can consult in terms of how to think about your IT portfolio, right? We have another capability we refer to as the Bluemix Garage, and this is really cool. This is about going to a large enterprise saying, hey, how do you think about innovating in the 21st century? How do you rethink business problems, right? We use the notion of design thinking and other very modern concepts in this garage format, and we, it's really an immersion experience, right? Sometimes what we do is a do tank as opposed to a think tank that you come in and you go do, and you reimagine your problems, and then we very rapidly prototype and build the applications, and we can do that for the client, or we can help them, assist them do it, we can provide the tool chain, and that's really causing them to really become 21st century innovators. That's another part of our portfolio that we've added in the last two years, and we have these centers now globally, where we can bring clients into this really novel experience and train them on these modern methods. VMworld here in Las Vegas this year still the place where the infrastructure part of the industry comes together, and what are you seeing? How many VMworlds have you been to? 10, 12, I don't know, yeah. I'm not my first rodeo, you know, still the same communities here, there's a lot of us that have come along into journey, right? And the things we're doing now, we wouldn't have imagined 10 years ago. But what are some of the conversations you're having, or what was your take, or you're taking away what different things are you seeing this year at this industry gathering? You know, I think a couple things. I think on one hand, okay, you talked about cloud, I mean, we've been talking about a lot of this stuff for some time, right? But what's fun is to see it really happening, right? Because it can take years, right? When you go watch the keynote, right? On day one, you should set your watch, because in about two years, that's actually going to be happening, right? And in a similar way, what really, what's exciting is just very pragmatically, the things people have been desiring to do, right? Which is move their applications in this fluid way, in a hybrid cloud environment globally, it's now really happening, right? And it's a mainstream phenomenon. So for me, that's just fun. It's the realization of the vision that's been painted for many, many years. And then I think the second thing is really VMware and this whole ecosystem really figuring out what it really means to not just, hey, say we're going to have a cloud play, but really have a role in the more cloud data ecosystem, right? And you saw that certainly with their announcements around the cloud connector and connect between our cloud and other clouds and orchestrate amongst those platforms, like they were orchestrating among hardware platforms in the past, right? So you see a real evolution in that strategy. I think that speaks to the future. And it's fun to be realizing the things that have been spoken about a couple of years ago. Well, Bill, I want to thank you for being here. And we will set our watches, knowing that we have two years left. I bet the timeframe now is a little more truncated. You know, it's good to see it on a fast track, but continue good luck at IBM and thanks for being with us. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, guys. All right, back with more from VMworld after this. You're watching theCUBE.