 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. We are back live here on theCUBE at VMworld 2019 at the Moscone Center downtown San Francisco along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walson. Thanks for joining us here at day one of our three days of coverage here at VMworld 2019. We're now joined by the CEO of Equinix, Charles Myers, is with us and a cube rookie. We love that. Nice to have you on the show. Glad to be here. Pleasure, yeah. Thanks for being here with us. Let's talk about first big picture here from the higher level. The whole multi-cloud, hybrid cloud movement, what's going on now with the enterprise. Your perspective on kind of where we are in that shift, if you will, or that transformation and what's driving it. You know, what's creating all the bonus. I get that question a lot, right? People ask the what ending are we in question? You know, it's a regular. So what ending are we in? Well, you know, I would say a couple of years ago, you know, as people said, I don't think that, I think the national anthem is still being played kind of thing, you know? And I think the game has probably started now, but I still would think we're very early in it. And you know, I think I'd actually bring it up to even a higher level and talk about what's happening in terms of how companies are thinking about digital transformation. And what I think is happening is it's becoming a board level priority for companies. They can't afford to ignore it. You know, digital is changing the, you know, basis for competitive advantage in most industries around the globe. And so they're investing in digital transformation. And I think they're going to do that, frankly, independent of whatever macroeconomic climate we operate in. And so, and I think, you know, the big driving force probably, you know, in digital transformation today or through the cloud. And so, and what we're seeing is there's a particular architecture of choice that's emerging for customers. So Charles, give us a little bit of a scope of your world because, you know, there was a move many years ago, we used to say in the IT industry, you know, friends don't let friends build data centers because there's only a handful of companies in the world that are good at it. Believe your company's one of those. So, and not only, you know, even, you know, you talk about the mega providers like, you know, Google and Amazon, they actually don't build many of their own data centers. They partner with certain companies and you're one of the first companies that I talked to that was, you know, when you talk about how we position multi-cloud today, well, you know, let me put some gear in an Equinex environment and, you know, have that direct fiber, you know, into AWS or Azure and the like. So that was early and we've been talking for a while. So give us a little bit of that broad look, you know, because from those big public clouds, you know, they're spending, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year to build that out. So, you know, and often your real estate is a big piece of your world. So. Absolutely, and well, we certainly like to think we're pretty darn good at building and operating data centers, but there actually are a lot of people that build and operate data centers. And of course, the clouds do buy from third parties, but they, you know, they build some of their own and they do buy from third parties as well. We think we occupy a, you know, pretty special place in the overall data center landscape because candidly people, you know, can buy credible data center capacity from a number of players. What they can't, what they really want though is not so much a data center as they want to connect to somebody specifically. And that's where Equinix is really different. You know, with 10,000, you know, customers inside of our digital ecosystems, you know, and we operate in 200 data centers across 52 markets around the world. And that, you know, we represent kind of something very special and it's that interconnection piece that really differentiates Equinix from the rest. You know, you've had some, I guess, expansion news in terms of partnerships with VMware that you announced. Talk about that a little bit, if you would, about how you've grown that relationship and where do you think that'll take you? Sure, and it bridges a little bit back to Steve's earlier question too, which is, you know, kind of what role do we play and how does it, you know, frame in the overall cloud landscape? What was announced today was a preferred partnership between ourselves and VMware and also Dell to deliver the VMC on Dell, you know, offering, which is really aimed at the sort of hybrid cloud requirements for enterprises. Customers who, you know, have a set of workloads, some of which may be very well suited to public cloud and they may go either native on AWS or with a VMC on AWS type solution. But a lot of times, they, for a variety of reasons, are looking for a hybrid cloud solution and they want to implement that on private infrastructure, but they would like to get the benefits of cloud. They would like to get the simplicity, the flexibility, the as-a-service convenience, but they need the control, the compliance, the predictability, and the performance that private infrastructure allows. And so that's what the solution is all about and we're the preferred global co-partner for that solution. And do companies have a pretty good idea when they come to you about what they want to do and where they want to do it? Or do you have to shepherd them through that a little bit because there are a number of factors I would think that go into that consideration? Absolutely. And I would say it's more typically the latter. There are certainly some who come with a well-developed, you know, sort of view on things, but that often changes to some degree and we like to think of ourselves as, you know, it's probably an overused term in IT, but it's as a trusted advisor in terms of helping a customer think through. It's really one of the great things that I think both VMware and Equinix are positioned as, which is somebody who doesn't bring and say, here's the answer. Instead, they come and say, look, the answer probably depends on a lot of factors. And so you may want a private cloud solution. You may want a public cloud solution. You probably want a hybrid cloud solution and a hybrid multi-cloud solution. So let's talk through what you're trying to accomplish and how we can get you there. Yeah, Charles, you know, we know that things are going to change and the advice we always give to practitioners is whatever you deploy, you need to be able to have the agility and have options so that a decision you make today is not going to freeze you from doing something in the future. Absolutely. A lot gets talked about in the multi-cloud world, what is portable and what things are moving and, you know, we know Kubernetes is not magic. Right. Your company must have actually a really good view of things going from the public cloud to my own racks to moving sideways because many times moving between clouds is just moving between rows in your data centers or over some connection. Gives a little insight what you're seeing. What's the trend along that line? You bring up a really great point and one frankly I think our sales teams and our solution architects are constantly talking to our customers about which is future-proofing your architecture because you don't know kind of what your needs are going to be tomorrow. And so being able to deploy infrastructure in a way that has greater agility and flexibility is really critically important and that's why putting private infrastructure immediately proximate to the cloud, being able to get to the performance benefits, the economic benefits of that is really key. So that's definitely something we're seeing as a critical part of the conversation with our customers. All right. How about edge computing? That's something touched on a little bit this morning but I'm sure you've got some strong feelings about where we are today. You know, it's funny because I always tell everybody inside my company or out, I always say be careful about the word edge because one person's edge and another person's core, right? You know, and so we actually talk about Equinix as really the best manifestation of the digital edge today. And perhaps that sounds somewhat self-serving but I would say that when you look at people who want to place infrastructure in a geographically distributed way and they want to interconnect it with clouds, with networks, with other members of their sort of supply chain, Equinix is really the best solution for that in many, many cases. And so we really talk about edge-oriented solutions with our customers inside of our sort of population of 200 data centers across 52 markets today. Now, typically I think when you're hearing edge today people are talking about an even more geographically distributed footprint that is out closer to IoT sensors or closer to customer endpoints and those kind of things. And I think that will happen over time and I think people talk about compute and storage moving closer to that edge. But I think that's going to take place over a long period of time. I think 5G, once it's fully densified and deployed I think we'll start to drive some of those applications. But what we're seeing today is the current digital edge at Equinix works very well for most of these edge-related applications. So what would you call it then? If it's not edge because like you said, one man's edge, all the other edge, right? We call it the digital edge. That's right because some people might operate out there as a core business, right? And to them that's the core, right? I mean you raise an interesting point depends on your perspective and how you see it. So we do call it the digital edge. And you think from the telco side of that slate though, I mean mobile applications, mobile devices, we all know about the usage trends what we've seen in the last 10, 15 years. That's going to just explode. So how are you preparing for that onslaught? Because you know 5G's coming. It is, well we're actively involved in fact we have, we've had real success in a number of, I would call them, edge-sensitive or edge-related ecosystems. Digital payments, connected car, these things. And people love to talk about autonomous driving. The reality is that most autonomous driving interactions are done on board. You don't even have time to go out and make a request to the cloud, right? But other connected car value propositions that do interact with a farther edge are things that we've actually been working really closely with equipment providers and service providers on. And they're having great success in implementing those things using Equinix as part of the architecture. All right, Charles, how about security? When you live in this multi-cloud world, I need security that can live across the environment. How does Equinix make sure that it's a trusted partner in that whole security story? Well there's a variety of sort of layers to it. The biggest response to be we have specifically is physical security. Because people are trusting their infrastructure reside in one of our facilities and it needs to be physically secure. So there's five layers of security between the front door. I know you've toured one of our facilities and have gotten the full experience of all the biometrics and all the checks and balances that occur in terms of being able, someone to be able to gain access to their facility. So there's the physical side. Then there's really sort of virtual or digital security. And what we're doing there is really cultivating the ecosystem of providers. And we have a number of really sophisticated customers who are delivering cloud-based security solutions. VMware is one example of that. But there's a variety of other customers that have a sort of security oriented value proposition companies like C-scaler and other people that are really doing that well for customers. So I think that we're really more about cultivating that full ecosystem so that customers have access to the full portfolio of security tools that they need. Well, Charles, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. And I do want to congratulate you on having probably the strongest team showing of theCUBE so far today. Hey, how's the equities doing today, everybody, all right? That's the equities culture. All right, all right. Trust me, they're clapping, all right? I was expecting a little more of a rousing applause, but next time. We'll work on it. All right, good deal. Thanks for being with us. Pleasure being here. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. Charles Myers joining us from Equinex. Thank you. Back with more, we are live here in San Francisco at VMworld 2019.