 Good afternoon everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest, the executive vice president of products at PhoenixNAP. William, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you so much, happy to be here. Talk to us in the audience a little bit about PhoenixNAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. Absolutely, yeah. So we're a global infrastructure as a service company. Foundationally, we're trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure, but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock-in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. I like flexible and easy. You guys started back in Phoenix, hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right? And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company. It's called Secured Servers, no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to PhoenixNAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explorer. There's about seven, we're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware in its partner ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six VSPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, VCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on there was only 10 of us, 11 of us and most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking TerraMark, BlueLock, some of these guys, good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot and here's Plucky PhoenixNAP, still offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? I love the theme of this event, the center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers, both in the right home, but if you drill down on that right home for right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right? If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public-called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal, right? And there are other ways to do that, right? If you need a, if your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, there are hyperscalers for that, right? And people need to learn how to make that choice, right app, right home, right infrastructure, and that's kind of what we help them do. It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructure as a service? Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis efficiency uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware is kind of abstracted, but that actually I would say is a boom for infrastructure as a service as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right? People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not, they're cloud platform companies, right? And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right? But it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler and ultimately that infrastructure is very expensive if you look at it that way. So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software. Yeah. People who said ah infrastructure, I as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future. People also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. Absolutely. So to talk about that, I mean you agree, I mean if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? Way more than people think. Well there you go. So what are you doing in that arena specifically with VCPP? Yeah absolutely and so I think a good example of that. So last VMworld in person to 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we've been working with Intel on for about two years at the time, which was Intel Persistent Memory, DC Persistent Memory. And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC Persistent Memory on board so that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in 7 more. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially, but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business. Helping people identify this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper. Like that kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot and VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right? And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been an inquiry. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately they, I don't know anything that's not public, right? Well, they rebranded, by the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. Yeah, that, I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if this has been official, is that a... Well, that's what they said. But that's the word, right? Well, but when a Vago acquired Broadcom, they said, we'll call ourselves Broadcom. Absolutely, why won't you? Yeah, so I imagine that what's been reported is likely to be. Likely, yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense. And we can start to see even more great intellectual property and software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, you know, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform. And they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that, that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? I mean, you know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business. And doing very, very, using very specific technologies to do very interesting things makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smart nicks, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix Snap story better. So I'm super excited about that, right? Yeah. Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you in exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with you, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be. And foremost, I'm not trying to No, yeah. I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. Come on in. But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the SDDC consists of. Absolutely. So, I mean, am I on the right track? No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right? Is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right? As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially. And possibly ever, persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity. But we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right? When, you know, the discrete GPUs coming from the just announced flex series GPUs from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right? Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one, isolate came out. You could get it in our metal as a service platform, the morning it launched on demand, right? Those types of agility points, they're not because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right? And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware Cloud Foundation, which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core-based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware Cloud Foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you're still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value you guys are delivering? We definitely, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish Foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different, or what, not save money, that money is going into helping some child that's in need, right? And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as a plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff, we've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing the single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build, cure, well not cures, but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking, if you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, this is my problem, this is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically, yeah. And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C-level conversation? Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be. I think most companies would love to have that, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would have said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right? And those guys are, I guess that's an even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for, Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right? It's just like VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right? But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's, yeah. When you're in customer conversations maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so I think that increasingly, we're finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is like just relying on ex hyperscaler forever or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it and the bills that are coming in are just like whoa, like how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. Like we're just, it's not, if I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If you're going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native, move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. Good advice. So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on-premises environments into, going back to the VCPP, SDDC model? Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and replatforming? What does that look like? What's the typical? Yeah, I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in-the-close story, right? And so even when we get customers, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, service, right? Better service, right? We've been part of VMware for 12 years. The technology behind VMC on AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all, right? They're going to be there to support their technology, but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud, and then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are. You are leveraging public cloud for certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later, but I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your Colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. No one's doing that, right? But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right? Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape, and VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world, right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. Last question for you as we wrap up here, where can the audience go to learn more about PhoenixNAP and really start test driving with you guys? Absolutely, well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will retarget you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, I want to upgrade Ubuntu, you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. Absolutely, thank you so much. For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes, so stick around.