 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Rob Stratte live at the Hub, I should say, quiet on the show floor at VMware Explorer 23. This is our second day of three days of CUBE coverage. Two sets, three days, lots of content. We're going to be talking with US Signals. One of our OGs, our CUBE OGs is here. First time appearing on theCUBE was back in 2015. John White is back with us, the COO of US Signal. Great to meet you, great to have you back on theCUBE in person. Yeah, and this is the first time with two new analysts too. So I've been on this week, number seven, but first time with you. Number seven, and you guys know, you guys go way back. We go way back. A few years now, yes. I've been in this ecosystem for a long time. I think this is VMworld, maybe number 11 for me. Okay. I think I'm all around there as well. Yeah, it's up there now. A lot different over the year. A lot of, a lot has changed over the year. I was going to say, at the time we spent at Amazon, I did not, I did not get to come here. Yeah, that was also a pandemic year. That was my law. So yeah, 2020 I missed, 2021, 2020 too. So I missed three years, but then it goes back. And now you're back. Tell the audience a little bit about US Signal. You're a VMware partner, but we want to understand about the business, who you are, what you do, mission, vision, all that stuff. Yeah, it's a great, fantastic business going through some changes this year. So we actually just got purchased by Igneo infrastructure partners in the beginning of the year. And from there, we went and actually, made a few different executive changes to kind of set us up for the future. But the business really serves the Midwest fiber provider, data center provider, cloud and managed services. And so it's that one-stop shop to really help the enterprises solve their IT needs. So we got everything from providing internet connectivity into their offices, providing the routers, the way-end devices, whatever it might be, all the way into then running their applications in the data center. Really cool company. Very cool. Talk a little bit about how your customers, well actually no, let's talk a little bit about the relationship with VMware first and how that has evolved over the years. Yeah, long-term relationship with VMware, with me personally, as this is my second stint in the infrastructure space. US Signal has kind of followed along that same path and a VMware partner, a VCPP partner. And so we provide VMware by the drip, so per gig of RAM, per gig of disk type offering. And we do a lot of co-innovation with them. And so we've been working with them over the years. We're going through this big NSX-V to T migration that everybody talks about in the service provider space. So we're going through that, should be done in November. That's a big thing for us. And we're really leaning in with them now, focusing a lot on the new innovation that they announced this week. So working on the Max, VCM Max, working on NSX Plus, been talking about that for years. And so we're really excited with kind of where they're going and what the future looks like. Yeah, NSX Plus, and I was talking with that team and we actually have the GM on a little bit later in the day at 430 today. So it would seem that that really is a great way for people who have very large networks, or networks that are distributed all over the place. And you have to do microsegmentation and stuff like that. Is that what you're leaning into? Yeah, absolutely. And providing that single management console to kind of rule the world. And so if you have something running at the edge, something running in our data center, something running in the hyperscaler, we can have one network, management console, one way to do tagging, one day to do, one way to do east-west traffic rules, whatever it might be. And that's a huge simplification problem that they're, you know, solution that they're building, which is a major problem for a lot of people. Yeah, and I bet you I don't have to even bet. I know, even though we're in Vegas, I mean, I think you'll have VCM Max before the cloud providers do probably because there's just so much they have to do with the big hyperscaler guys. Yeah, it's a different world, different ecosystem. And it's actually a really interesting time to be a partner with VMware because they're really leaning in. I was at the executive luncheon with some of the, some of the, you know, Raghu and a few other executives and they were talking about that, that they're leaning into the partners. They want to go and focus in on that. You look at some of the licensing changes that are going on right now. They're really leaning into more of that cloud-like model that we as CSPs have been building for a lot of years. And now they're pushing the enterprises to go that way as well. Yeah, I was going to ask you if you were seeing anything around the licensing because to me that they keep talking about the five bundles they're selling more to the enterprises. And I wondered if that, for the CSP programs and if that had any impact. Oh, it's huge. I mean, they came out when some of their announcements saying, hey, we have really three distinguished go to markets now. You can build it on your own. You can build it with, you know, VMC and they have the equinex side of it. Or you can go to, you know, a VSPP partner like US Signal and we can help, you know, operate it for you, run it, own the hardware, kind of simplify your life, get rid of, you know, that layer, you know, all the way down the stack that you really don't want to deal with. You just want to run your applications. Let a CSP like us handle that for you. So I love that marketing. I love that go to market pitch. How involved were you? You mentioned being at the executive luncheon this week with Ragu and the team. How involved has US Signal been in some of the evolution that we saw and heard yesterday from VMware? Yeah, significant. I mean, we've been providing feedback for a lot of years and we were, you know, when you're running VMware in an enterprise, it's kind of nice. You kind of build it. It kind of sits there. It does its thing. When you run it at VMware inside of a CSP, it is constantly changing. You're bringing in new customers trying to break your world. And so we have to give that feedback. We have to tell them, you know, where we're running into issues with scale. One of the big announcements they talked about this week then too was the life cycle manager. That's huge for us. When you start to run a VMware environment with thousands of nodes in it and you have to go through and patch something or patch vSAN or whatever it might be, it's complicated. So they're really leaning in to help us out and operate at a larger scale, which I think at the end of the day is good business for VMware. You know, if you think about it, we probably offset majority of the support issues that most customers in VMware would have if they were buying as an enterprise customer, right? Because you call VMware when you have a problem and you're an enterprise customer. There, it's on us to figure out and operate with an SLA. And so it's a lot different, you know, relationship. So I'm happy with where they're going with the project. Yeah, it seems like, and again, the vSAN Max to me, and I even brought this up to the vSAN team and I'll send them a little clip of this afterwards, is that I said they should lean into the service providers, the CSPs with vSAN Max because to me, you know, hundreds of clusters talking to one, you know, vSAN Max, that screamed, not just Uber large companies, but it screamed CSP. For sure, 100%. And are you looking at that as being able to provide you a good ROI on that? Is that one of the things you think? I think it's a good ROI, but I think it's also focused on the automation. And so we started, I started working with the vSAN team years ago. I mean, I remember them talking about vSAN Max in probably 2019. And they knew they needed to build something a little bit bigger, a little more scalable. And so we were really talking with them back then about what the future could look like. And a lot of it had to do with automation. And so when you have a software-defined storage layer, when you have a software-defined network layer, you can then build the recipes to then simply instantiate whatever you need, the application, a VM, whatever. And that simplifies our life. And that's really like the big, you know, really big pro for us. What's the value in it for US signal customers, the VMware partnership, but what you've built on VMware? What value in it do they get? The biggest thing that we always talk to our customer about is really shifting where you focus in your life. I think it was VMworld 2015-ish or so. Somebody put up, you know, thanks for running a VM, said no CEO ever, right? And that's the concept. I mean, you don't want to have to think about are you going to hit the SLAs? Is it going to go bump in the night? Who's going to fix it when you come to a provider like US signal? We take care of all that. And then you start adding in all the one-step adjacency products. So backups and networking and security, it really then just simplifies their world. So they focus on their application, which is truly their value creator for their business. That's how they're going to be different. That's how they're actually going to pull that customer in, make that customer stick with them a lot longer, is if they focus on the customer's needs. You know, and we're, I think, this is, I think a perfect timing for you to jump back into this side of the fence, because I think their theme of multi-cloud makes a lot of sense. And I think both of us having been at a hyperscaler, you know, you start to look at it and go not everything runs as cheaply or as good in that hyperscaler. And there's reasons why you put workloads on-prem or in a cloud, you know, being adjacent to you because you got rid of your data centers and things of that nature. Is that what you're seeing is a lot of customers are saying, hey, I want to bring these workloads to you. I don't want to go all the way up to a hyperscaler, you know, or even to a VMC, but I want to go, you know, here because of, you know, it's a workload with latencies or adjacencies or data adjacencies to like a mainframe that they still do have or something of that. I think, yeah, that's exactly what we're seeing. I think there is a, you know, there's a paradigm that's kind of occurring that's interesting is you have all these companies that are running inside of their data center and then they're running new stuff in the cloud or they're trying to. And there's been a lull. They haven't invested in their data center because they were focusing on the cloud, but they're realizing, hey, this cloud thing isn't really a solution, it's a technology and it's not going to be a one size fit all. And so they need that intermediary gap. And I think that's where a US signal plays is we can kind of bridge that. We're going to embrace, you know, public cloud as a technology and a tool. We're also going to, you know, embrace their data centers and some of the assets that they've had. And, you know, you start to think about edge services and stuff like that. But you still need to have data centers in the middle, fiber in the middle, the fiber that connects it all and then that cloud and managed services don't layer on top. And so it's going to be truly that hybrid multi-cloud that we've been talking about and thinking about for years. Yeah, we call it super cloud. Super cloud, yeah, I do love that. I do. Yeah, I see Dave talk about super cloud all the time and I get excited because it's, you know, we were thinking about that years and years ago, but we didn't know how it would come together from a technology standpoint. So from a strategic alignment perspective, it sounds like US signal and VMware are really dovetailing from a multi-cloud management perspective. Value in it for customers is very delineated. Is that fair statement? Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, you're going to have an ecosystem of cloud providers as we kind of evolve and you have an ecosystem of applications that run and you're going to start to place, you know, the right workloads and the right clouds and there's going to be just an evolution of, you know, who we become based upon that. And I think as you look at, you know, a lot of the ISVs, they're starting to rebuild their applications in, you know, utilizing things like containers and Kubernetes. And so they're going to need that platform to run those applications in the future as well. And that all can't live inside of the hyperscaler. There's latency issues, there's sovereignty issues, there's general compliance issues that have come together. And so there's going to be that middle person that needs to be there to make it all work. What do you think, you know, seeing this again, being here for the first time in a while like myself, what do you think, where should they lean in even more? If you were telling Raghu, hey, I think you should, you know, with us partners, the CSP community, here's where I want you to even go further as, you know, Broadcom says they're going to invest, you know, a billion dollars in partners or what have you. I don't think VMware's taken their foot off the gas in the R&D world at all. I mean, I think they've made huge enhancements over the last few years. I mean, I kind of jumped out of it in 2019, coming back into it now and it's like, all right, they're executing on their roadmaps. I think the biggest place that I would put investment is simplifying the business and how people transact. You have enterprises that have been buying perpetual licenses forever. You have the CSP providers that, you know, sell it by the drip. They need to make that easy. They need to make sure that they're maintaining that customer inside of the VMware ecosystem because it's truly, you know, superior technology than what else is out there. And then figuring out how to just help them grow in the future. And so I don't know that it's as big as investment in R&D as people might think, but I think it's a simplification of a business that is really, you know, potentially exciting me. Yeah, I think that is, I agree with that. And I think that they're starting to go down the portability of licenses and things of that nature. I think there's only like two clouds right now that you can do that with or maybe it's more, I can't remember, but I'll have to follow up on that. They're extending it to a lot more people, but yeah, it's something I think that they're doing the crawl walk run a little bit to kind of figure it out because they don't want to upset the enterprise that they service, I don't even know, how many hundreds of thousands of companies, right? And they don't want to upset and overwhelm the CSPs. So I think it's a balance. But I do see, just in the little licensing changes, I do see an alignment towards, you know, this reoccurring revenue, this cloud-like operating model that, you know, really AWS helped usher in. And they will embrace it. We think that'll accelerate with the Broadcom acquisition. We definitely think that that's something Broadcom is really good at doing is simplification and skinning down. And we already have been hearing that they're going from like 10 or 50,000 SKUs down to 100 or something like that. It's like unbelievable SKU simplification, if I can say that 10 times fast, but. I think the hidden secret in a lot of the cloud stuff that I've seen in my time at the hyperscaler and some others is there is purchasing and there is consumption. And so you might purchase into a new model, you might purchase into the latest and greatest software, but you might not actually consume it. And I think that's the one thing that they're going to narrow in on is like, hey, no, we need to get out of the old and get into the new. And I think they're going to be a driving force to change that, which I think is exciting from a market. And I look at the show floor and I think that's what everybody's waiting for is to kind of see, hey, what's this new world going to look like? And how are we going to embrace it? So everybody's sitting back with their money, waiting to kind of put their chips where the bets are going to go. Right, we shall see hopefully in the next couple of months. I think it's going to be fun, yeah. That's a good outlook. Last question for you, if we could take a peek into the product roadmap or give us a glimpse into what's coming for you as signal. Yes, so a lot of it's going to be focused on tying together edge and maybe multi-site solutions. We are seeing, we have a heavy vertical focus in healthcare and manufacturing, which is dealing with a lot of latency and also a lot of processing of data. I mean, the whole focus on private AI is a big part of kind of where we're kind of looking and going in the future. If you look at manufacturing, right, if they're using cameras, you don't want them to send that camera feed, video feed all the way back to a central model. You want them to process it at the edge. What do you need to do that? Well, you need to have the proper connectivity, you need the proper hardware sitting there to actually make that happen. And so I think that's going to be a really interesting play for us as we grow. And that's really one thing about US signal that I think is going to be a big standoff for us is we own the fiber. We own the fiber. So we can guarantee the SLAs, we can guarantee the recovery times, we can guarantee that we're building these redundant rings to keep it all protected and make sure that the network stays up so you can run the applications. Think about it in a hospital. Yeah. You know, you're working with life and death situations. You don't want your fiber cut to be like, oh no, I can't process your imaging now because I can't talk to the cloud. Like that has to still occur. I think that's going to be a really strong play for us in the future. Well, we will keep our eyes on US signal. John, thanks so much for coming back on the field. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We appreciate having you. Thanks. All right, for our guests and for Rob Stratje, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the Cube live day two of VMware Explorer. The Cube is the leader in live tech coverage.