 Welcome back everyone to VMware Explorer 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Our 12th year covering VMware's user conference, formerly known as VMworld, now rebranded as VMware Explorer. Two great CUBE alumnus coming on theCUBE, Ricky Cooper, SVP, Worldwide Partner Commercials, VMware, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. We just had a great chat at HPE, discovered, of course, Joseph George, vice president of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on, great to see you. Great to see you, John. So guys, this year is very curious at VMware, a lot going on, the name change of the event, big move, bold move. And then they changed the name of the event, then Broadcom buys them, a lot of speculation. But at the end of the day, this conference, kind of people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We were reporting this morning on the keynote analysis, very good mojo on the keynote, very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. I mean, this is not a show that's looking like it's going to be, you know, going down. This is clearly a wave, we're calling it super cloud, multi-clouds, they're theme. Clearly the clouds happening. Not to date ourselves, but 2013, we were discussing on the- We talked about that, yeah. HPE Discover about DevOps, infrastructure as code. We're full realization now of that. This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together, because the customers are refactoring, they are looking at cloud native. The whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer base has activated them, they're here, and they're leaning in. What's going on? Yeah, absolutely, we're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up, all the way up the stack, and the notion of a hybrid cloud where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and applications, customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment. And so we're seeing a renewed interest, a lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model where they have applications or workloads running at the edge in their data center and in the public cloud in a lot of cases. But having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own, in their control, there's a lot that you can do. They're obviously partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. 20 years, at least, at least 20 years. Back when they invented stuff, they were inventive way. Well, VMware's got a very technical culture, but I got to say that we commented earlier when Raghu was on the CEO, now the CEO, I mean, legendary product, I set the trajectory to VMware, everyone knows that. VMware, I can't know what that was, VMware or HP, HP before it was HPE, coin hybrid, because you guys were both on, I can't recall, Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys, nobody else was there. It was the partnership. Yes, I knew it was there. I knew the exact same way. Hybrid cloud. You had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger, Dave, remember when he said, I got in my drill on you, but now multi-cloud. You focus on that multi-cloud aspect, right? So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at multi-cloud and they're looking at it not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay, so what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors? You're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. Look at the OEMs, you know, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers are now saying, they're coming in droves, saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a multi-cloud partner with you? How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So, you know, GreenLake is a great example. We keep coming back to GreenLake and we're partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be, right, let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support the SaaS and subscription motion going forward and then the sky's the limit for us. So you're plugging that right into GreenLake, right? Well, here's why, right? So customers loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to, you know, an on-premise. You've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. I mean, this is complicated stuff. Now we've got a situation where you can say, hey, we can get an SLA on-premise. Yeah, and I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor, just manager portfolio, you're taking care, just submitting money. That's really a lot of what a lot of the customers have done with the public cloud. But now a lot of these customers are getting savvy. They have been working with VMware technologies and HPE for so long. They've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now we've given them a model where they can leverage the cloud platform to be able to do this whether it's on-premise at the edge or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE, GreenLake, and VMware. Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, you know we want to manage our stuff, what are you seeing is the mix there? It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing, last time we talked at HPE Discover, we talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay-as-you-go, obviously the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems on-prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers, and they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners such as HPE are using other partners for various areas of their services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon. You know, you're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. It's interesting too. The digital modernization that's going on, the transformation we don't want to call it, is complicated. That's clear. One of the things I like about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos. Because we've been saying, quoting Andy Grove next to Intel, let chaos reign and reign in the chaos. And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved. Whoever solves it kicks the inflection point. That's up and to the right. So- Prime idea right here. So GreenLake is- Well look also, look at the distribution model and how that's changed. A couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying, I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale. You know, I'll give you VMware scale for all of the various different partners, et cetera. Yeah, so let's break this down because this is a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the enterprise market was, you solve complexity with more complexity. And everybody was like, oh yeah, we're locked in. That's not what the market wants. They want self-service. They want as-a-service. They want easy, developer-first, security data ops. DevOps is already in the cycle. So they're going to want simpler, easier, faster. And this is kind of why I'll say for the big announcement today here at VMware Explorer around the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, Project Monterey that we've talked about for so long. HPE and VMware and AMD with the Pensando DPU actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake. That's a model. You guys invested in Pensando, right? We are our investor. What's the benefit of that? That's a great point you made. What's the value to the customer? Bottom line, that deep co-engineering, co-partnering, what does it deliver that others don't do? Yeah, well I think one example would be, a lot of vendors can say we support it. That's great. That's actually a really good move. Supporting it, it can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car. And that's really what this does, is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando, as well as the business work to make that simple and easy, that transaction to work. And then to be able to make it available as a service is really what made, that's why it's such a winner with our company. But it's also lower cost out of the box. Yeah, yeah. So you get in whatever, it's called 20%, okay? But it's nuance because you're also on a new technology curve. Right. And you're able to absorb modern apps. We use that term as a bromide, but when I say modern apps, I mean data rich apps, things that are more AI driven, not the conventional, not that people aren't doing SAP and CRM they are, but there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that, traditional architectures aren't well suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that, doesn't it? Well, you think also of the, going to the next stage, which is the go to market between the two organizations that before, at the moment, HPE is running off doing various different things. We're running off to, again, it's that chaos that you're talking about in cloud chaos. You got to go to market chaos. But by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in green light and be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales activation, the enablement, and then we benefit from the scale of HPE. What are those solutions? I mean, is it just, is it IS, is it compute storage? Is it specific SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? So right now for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be. And at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with Project Monterey. And this is now allowing customers to think about, okay, where are their use cases? So rather than going and say, use it for this, we're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level that could be somewhere else, like networking as a great example, right? And allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application, where there is timely response that's needed for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick. Those are places where we're starting to see the services moving on to something like a DPU. And that's what this makes a whole lot more sense. Okay, so to get this right, you got the hybrid cloud, right? You got Green Lake and you got the distributed engine, what's that called? For, it's HPE ProLiant. ProLiant with VMware, vSphere. The vSphere. That's the computer. Okay, so does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer? All three at the same time, or they mix and match? What's that, how's that work? All three of those components, yeah. So the beauty of the HPE ProLiant with VMware, vSphere, distributed services engine, also known as Project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home. It's, again, already pre-engineered. So we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment. You know, work through those details, that's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware. And because, if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HPE ProLiant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular. Submit, Duane had a great quote on theCUBE just an hour or so ago. He said, you have to be early to be first. Yeah, I love that quote. Okay, so you were first. You were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes. Okay, let's assume that relative to the competition. How do you know? How do you determine that? If we have a lead or not? Yeah, if you lead, if you're the best. We go to the source of the truth, which is our customers. And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we're first, we're early, we're keeping our lead, what are the things that you look at that's indicated? I'll say it this way, I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where we do compete head to head in a lot of places. And we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well, let me go shop around. It is HPE GreenLake. Let's talk about how we actually build this solution. And I can tell you from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign is that, hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin Andy Jassy, they do the undifferentiated heavy lifting. A lot of that's now cloud operations. Underneath this infrastructure is code to the developer. That's at scale. And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake, which is why there's no objections, probably. What's the choice, what do you have to shop? There's nothing to shop around. Yeah, exactly. That is really icing on the cake that we've been building for quite some time. There is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Well, times are tough right now, supply chain issues, all that stuff. We've all talked about it. But at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars in time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. We had a great use case. The storage team, they were provisioning with containers. Storage is a service instantly. We're seeing with VMware, your customers bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask, because every event we talk about AI and machine learning, automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the CI-CD Pipeline, security and data become a big conversation. Okay, so how do you guys look at that? Okay, you sold me on green, like I've been a big fan from day one. Now it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do there. It's still a lot of work to do, but directionally, it's pretty accurate. It's going to be a good of a success. There's still concerns about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud, hybrid, public and edge. So that's important and security has got a huge service area. These are on working progress. How do you guys view those? I think you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalists meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here and I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of trying to get that right because it is what is the most important thing to our customers and the industry is really sort of catching up to that. And when you start talking about privacy, it's not just about company information. It's about individuals information. It's about information that if exposed actually could have real impact on people. So it's more than just an IT problem. It is actually, and from HPE's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. There are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing. My golf swing, I slice right like you wouldn't believe. But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces. Here's where the problems are and start working on that. So my view is if your infrastructure is not secure, you're going to have troubles with security as you go further up. Stay in the sandbox, so to speak. They're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side. You've seen a lot of open source and supply chain in software. Trusted software. How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's important. Yeah, security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions. And we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself. And that's the beauty of having something like HPE GreenLake. We don't have to pick the infrastructure or the middleware or the top of stack application. We can look at all of it. It's all of it, that matters. Question on the ecosystem posture. So I remember when HPE was one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HPE because of EDS, you had data protector. So we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time. And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where your Broadcom is acquiring VMware. You guys, big Broadcom customer. Has your attitude changed or has it not? Because we meet where the customers are, you've always said that. But have you leaned in more? I mean, culturally is HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. So first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners. We always have, well before any Broadcom announcement came along, we've been working with a variety of partners. And that hasn't changed. And that hasn't changed. And if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed at all, the answer's absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware. And we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with you on it. And of course, we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on the whole Dell piece. Yeah, but you still had the same chairman. Yeah, there we go. But since then, I think what's really become very apparent and it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners. Many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast and we need to rely on each other to help us solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that in the past may have been barriers. But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history, right? Over, we've got over 200,000 customers jointly. Hundreds of millions of dollars of business. 100,000, over 10,000, or 100,000 channel partners that we were having come in. There's numerous, numerous solutions. An independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there. There's the ecosystem floor, the expo floor. I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming, Ricky. We thought about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspective, both of you, if you don't mind, weighing in on, there's clearly the wave coming. We're calling it SuperCloud because it's not just multi-cloud. It's completely different looking successes. It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs and I think every vertical will have its own power law of cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing the assumption, but it's trending in when you've got OPEX, right? Has to go to infund statement. CAPEX goes to thanks for the cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming. We're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave? Because beyond multi-cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece. That's a whole nother story. That's what everyone's fighting for. But everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? Well, I think that the multi-cloud is obviously at the epic center. If you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion. And now we're in a position where, we've brought many companies over the last few years. They're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in how we're moving forward. Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers that never bought from us before. Never. Hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter. So brand new to VMware. The trick then is, how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? So new logos are coming in? New logos are coming in all the time. All the time. From across the ecosystem, it's not just the OEMs, it's all the way back. So the ecosystem's back of VMware? Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks, is that PartnerConnect 2.0. When I talk to you about multi-cloud, and what the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four or five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, et cetera. And the use of other partners to do other services, deployment, or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about with there. Then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure you're rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and debt, it's a points-based system we're putting in place now. This is a big pie that's developing. The market's getting bigger. It's getting so much bigger. And then you help them out. Do you agree, obviously, with that? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there, or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question. Now it's everything. And what I think that what we're seeing in the ecosystem is people are finding the spots where they're going to play. Am I going to be on the edge? Am I going to be in analytics play? Am I going to be a cloud transition play? There's a lot of players that are now emerging and saying we now have a place apart to play. And having that industry view, not just of a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are looking at Telco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into them? The fog is lifting. Everyone can see their position there. We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I spread too thin? And my advice to the partner ecosystem is let's pick our spots together. Let's really go to and then strategic solutions that we were talking about. Absolutely. Sounds like composability to me, but I have to go back. Yeah. Guys, thanks for coming on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog has lifted people seeing their spot. There's value there. Value creation equals reward. Yeah. Plus the ease of use. This is the new normal. Great job. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. Thank you guys. Okay, back live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone.