 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage. This is theCUBE here in Las Vegas, Nevada for VMworld 2018. We're in the broadcast booth. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We've got two CUBE alumnus here. We've got John Gilmartin who's the general manager and vice president of the Integrated Systems Business Unit. Clown Foundation is pretty hot news here. We're going to get to that in a second. And we've got Neil McDonnell, VP and general manager of Synergy Group within HPE. You look back at Enterprise. Great to see you guys, thanks for joining us. Fantastic to be here, thank you. So first of all, great VMworld this year. I was really not shocked, but pleasantly surprised last night in the hall there. The energy, people are, I mean, it's rocking VMworld. A lot of new financial news on your end. The cloud is hitting some of the things that we covered on HPE. Discover many times about composable, multi-cloud, hybrid, all this stuff is actually happening. There's now proof points out there that are clear and people are now connecting the dots. It's pretty obvious now. So hybrid, even Andy Jassy coming out and announcing a on-premises offering. First ever in the history of Amazon. I mean, that's not Amazon, that's on-premises. Yeah, bring it RDS on-prem. That's a great announcement, isn't it? This is validation, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, some of the things that you guys have been working on. So before we get into some of the specifics, talk about the relationship between VMware and HPE right now. Obviously, perfect storm for ecosystem growth, a whole new operating model, whole new set of relationship dynamics. What's the relationship and impact customer base? Well, we've been working together as companies for the full journey of VMware. Together we've served 200,000 customers around the world with all kinds of integrations. And the exciting thing is that the journey that we're on now has a pretty aligned vision about bringing simplicity and efficiency to the data center as organizations try and deal with the complexities of this new world. And we've got a pretty compatible vision that we're bringing together with product. Absolutely, I think this, as you talked about, this idea of hybrid cloud really become real, and hybrid IT really being real. There's a great synergy here between the two companies and a great opportunity to help customers kind of manage that transition and make that transformation into that. Neil, talk about the challenges customers face when it comes to the IT footprint of legacy evolving now on the doorstep of modernization. Again, this is not new for HP. You guys have seen this. I've seen, I've heard this before, but now real action has to be taken place. You got the cloud on-premises. What are some of those challenges that your customers face and what are you guys doing? Well, as companies are embracing that transformation, they've got to balance two things. On the one hand, the needs of the business for velocity and innovation. And on the other hand, the needs in the IT organization to manage cost, drive efficiency, maintain the security and compliance governance, and respond to those business needs. And we believe that the infrastructure has to become a software-defined infrastructure to achieve that. The old approaches to managing infrastructure artisanally just can't scale and can't deliver those benefits. So whether you're dealing with the underlying physical infrastructure that we provide with our composable synergy offerings, or you're dealing with the layers on the software stack above that as provided by our colleagues at VMware, you need to be embracing an architecture that's software-defined to have those kind of flexibilities that you need in order to embrace that transformation. So when I hear you guys talk like this, I think about, okay, you're trying to bring the cloud experience to your customers, on-prem, hybrid cloud. First of all, is that the right way to think about it? And second of all, how are you doing that specifically? I guess, I agree with you, yes. We're trying to bring that cloud experience on-prem, but really we're trying to bring a consistent experience regardless of whether you're running applications on-prem or in a cloud, right? Consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, that brings real business value to our customers. And really what we see people trying to do is really think about how do they use IT to go change how the business operates, right? And that's really where the focus is now. It's less about the systems of record and managing costs. It's about how do you create new experiences? How do you enable employees to be more productive? And that's really about supporting developers and data scientists and engineers and helping them be able to access infrastructure in simple ways, help make them more productive. And so a lot of what we're focused on is how do you transform traditional data centers and go build an infrastructure that is dynamic, that can provide the agility and the elasticity and the things that really the developers need to be able to go build new stuff. What are some of the things that you're providing to HP in the relationship? HPE, I mean, specifically the cloud foundation. What specifically is the relationship? Where's that connection point? Well, I mean, so the great thing about Synergy is it is this composable infrastructure and it's the ability to sort of define on-demand these pools of hardware resources. And that's a tremendous fit with the software capabilities and cloud foundation, right? When it comes to, for example, software to find storage, you have vSAN and the ability to go and say, I want to dynamically define how much compute and how much storage I have and be able to change that over time. That's a really unique capability that you have within the composable infrastructure. What about the Synergy? We had Andy Bachelstein earlier and from Arista and I'm just using that as an example. I've been following Synergy. You guys do a great job. Your architecture is nice, the way it fits in with you guys. Arista is another great example. When you actually plug in with VMware, you can really take advantage of it and vice versa. What are you guys doing that's specifically with VMware and how do you compare the competition who's joining the composable party lately? It seems to be a lot of competition that you guys now have. I mean, you've been there for a while. I don't know how many years it's been. It seems like nine, but I mean, it's only been one. Three years. Not quite that long. Three years ago we announced composability and the Synergy, if you'll excuse the pun that we have with VMware Cloud Foundation really all comes from simplicity. VCF is about delivering simplicity in customer environments and so is Synergy and composable infrastructure and bringing the two together, we can bring those benefits to span the underlying physical plan with the software stack above it and we can take advantage of the fact that you've got a completely programmable composable infrastructure that can be consumed and managed directly by VCF. And it was, Andy, the best thing I was saying is that the leadership of VMware is actually helping its product. Absolutely. And vice versa. This seems to be the same case, right? Yeah, there's a lot of Synergy. And it's a great... And if I may, you think about the evolution of composable. It's a vision we laid out three years ago and we've been in market for over 18 months. We've got 1600 plus customers deployed around the world on Synergy in production with the platform, getting the benefits of managing an infrastructure as a fluid pool of resources and being able to deploy and manage much, much more efficiently than traditional, artisanally managed infrastructure. It sounds like cloud native. It does. It does a little bit, doesn't it? Well, we're kind of excited to see other people arriving and validating the vision, even if they want to change the name of the vision. But you see others in the industry really embracing this notion that physical infrastructure has to become composable, which is great news for the customer base in general. And we're really looking forward to building on all the success and the ecosystem that we have with VMware and dozens of other partners we've integrated with. So you mentioned cloud native. Infrastructure's code is sort of what I'm inferring from this conversation. Cloud native, well, so the convention of wisdom is the public cloud and things like Kubernetes and microservices are headwinds for the traditional on-prem guys, but you're seeing such momentum in the data center. Obviously, VMware, look at the financials, you guys are crushing it. How are you taking advantages of some of those perceived headwinds and turning them into tailwinds? I think you talked about Kubernetes, right? That's a great example. Kubernetes is really becoming the de facto way people are interfacing and providing interface for containers. And that is inherently kind of multi-cloud and hybrid in nature. But there's still all the same considerations around how you secure it, how do you operate it, how do you support it? And so the cloud operations team, the folks actually have to stand up infrastructure. What we can do is provide them the capability through things like Pivotal Container Services to go provide Kubernetes as a service to their developers. We can integrate that right into the infrastructure and help them focus on lifecycle, operations, security, all those other sides. And Neil mentioned this software stack. One of the key things about that is that automation becomes a critical component on the software-defined data center model. Can you collaborate on that? Yeah, automation is critical at every layer, right? A lot of times people think about sort of the development layer of automation, but you still have to automate the building of the infrastructure. And so this great fit between Synergy, where you can automate the composing of infrastructure itself, and then Cloud Foundation can automate how you actually lay down and deploy and automate things like NSX and VSAN and the software-defined stores on top. And then you think about the ongoing operations of lifecycle management, all this sort of day two stuff that's hard to do. Great sort of layering together that allows you to go operate that in a highly automated way. It's interesting how the VMware Cloud Foundation, also known as VCF, is elevated in the conversation. Can you take a minute just to explain the current situation with VMware Cloud Foundation and how it relates specifically with HPE and the community at large? Just a quick update on what it is and how it's working these days. Absolutely, Cloud Foundation really is the coming together of compute, storage, network, and management from VMware, delivered in a simplified way, in a way that we can automate the entire experience, automate the deployment, and automate all of the ongoing lifecycle management and operations of the whole system. So it's a system approach. And then it connects very nicely down to Synergy, where Synergy can provide that sort of dynamic infrastructure that allows you to find sort of key pools of resources to deploy that software on top of. And what about Synergy? So Synergy's evolved over the years, right? You have this platform and you guys have made some other acquisitions. Where do those fit in? Give us the update on that evolution. Well, composable infrastructure is a vision that we began articulating years ago and we've been continuing to build it out. With Synergy, we began with the first implementation in the industry, all of infrastructure that created compute storage and fabric as fluid pools. And that underpinned the unified API, which is central to composable. If you want infrastructure that's going to be as responsive and agile, you have to be able to treat it as a fully programmable set of resources. And that's what we did first. We built an ecosystem around that with great partners like VMware, and we've taken that value to our customers. But we're continuing to extend what we're doing in the Software-Defined Data Center. We brought simplicity into our portfolio, bringing a great complement in VMware environments. We've got Nimble in our portfolio as well, bringing tremendous storage capabilities. And most recently, we brought Plexi into the mix, which lets us bring simplicity to the management of the physical fabric in a way that greatly reduces the complexity that our customers are having to deal with and brings that into the fold of a set of composable resources. So we're very excited about where this is going. We're really excited about the benefits our customers are getting by moving down the path and working with VMware, with VMware Cloud Foundation, it's been great to see the impact that's having on our customer's ability to drive change and get out of the minutiae of managing the piece parts of physical infrastructure or the piece parts of a software stack in a much more holistic way. And all that fits under the sort of synergy vision and, you know, it's a land of vision. So for instance, Nimble, storage company, but they've got all kinds of automated, predictive analytics, that pieces of that flow in, pieces of simplicity flow in. One of the great things about what Nimble brings to the table is all of the predictive analytics and the intelligence and the experience that that can deliver customers in managing the life cycle. And that's technology that we're expanding and bringing across our portfolio over time. So we're really excited about the set of assets we're bringing. And in concert with VMware Cloud Foundation and other offerings from the VMware portfolio, we can bring a great solution to our customers and help them move forward because we have so many customers together who are running vSphere on, say, blade system platforms or rack servers that need a path forward. And we have an opportunity here jointly with Synergy and VCF to bring them some real value and help them on this journey. You know, a lot of our analysis, when we do our in-studio and also on the queue, we do our editorial takes on these things. You know, the commentary that comes from the analyst side of the business is, because the journalism, so everyone's, this is the transition, someone's dead, someone's winning, someone's losing all the time. When we talk about VMware and HPE, you guys have so many customers, you have so many joint customers. Specifically, I know HPE, thousands of customers. One of the some of the use cases specifically that you're seeing patterns emerging around hybrid IT or just hybrid cloud specifically that relate to what's happening in the news today here at VMworld because you start to see some visibility, not just hybrid on-premise private cloud, true private cloud, cloud operations, DevOps, composability, these are the real things. Where are the customers at? What are some of the use cases that are popping up with synergy and ACM? It's across the gamut. One of the beauties of synergy in a composable infrastructure is one infrastructure to run any workload, whether virtualized, bare-metal physical, or containerized. And obviously there have been some big announcements this week about some great progress in VMware's offerings with PKS and so on, in the container space. So whether you're running that bare-metal, the virtualized container, you can use one infrastructure and get some real economies of scale out of that and operational economies. We see customers all the way from private cloud on-prem only implementations to 100% virtualized environments, to very heterogeneous mixtures of types of workload, some hooked up in a hybrid environment. And John and I have a number of customers that we've worked with together to bring that value. John, you want to come up? Absolutely, I mean, great examples of customers using Cloud Foundation plus synergy to go provide this very consistent deployment that they can do around the world, right? So a customer might have something in, say, Spain and South America and UK, and now they can have confidence of what they're deploying and something that's consistent and can be operated by the local teams, right? And then they can connect that back into, say, a cloud service and have this very kind of distributed environment they can manage in a consistent way. So final question for you guys, put you on the spot here in the hot seat. Give me your reaction and our definition or description of the difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, because as hybrid cloud is once defined a certain way, people are starting to kind of mix those up. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, I'm eating two different things. Some people call it hybrid clouds when you have multiple clouds, someone you want to work within clouds, and you're starting to see cloud specialized. You look at Google Cloud, for instance, you've got great analytics, great AI. So you're starting to see new clouds taking their swim lanes, if you will. The difference between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So again, people have their own ideas of what these standards mean, but for me, hybrid cloud really means that more consistent infrastructure. So a great example would be I run Cloud Foundation inside my data center and I run VMware Cloud on AWS to deliver Cloud Foundation as a service. And now I have the same infrastructure on both sides and it's seamless and managed across. And then multi-cloud is really then how I extend that and leverage more than native capabilities inside of a Google Cloud or inside of Azure and leverage their machine learning capabilities or whatever. Multi-cloud, more native clouds. Hybrid cloud, more about that consistent infrastructure. So hybrid cloud, more operational cloud ops, if you will, on-prem. Yeah, well, it consistent, kind of the same interfaces on both sides, public and private. And that's the key, it's about the simplicity because it's great having multiple different silos of infrastructure in different places, on-prem or in different clouds. But if those differences propagate into all of your operational modes, there are barriers to taking advantage of that. So the simplicity that can be brought by having a unified view of how you treat these resources is really key. And with VMware Cloud Foundation and Synergy, we can work together to provide that on the on-prem component, either of a hybrid or of a multi-cloud environment. John and Neil, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Sounds like the cloud has got a nice foundation to it with some great synergy between you guys. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, more live coverage here at VMworld 2018. We are in the VM village with all the actions, two sets of theCUBE. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us.