 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at VMworld 2018. Day one, VMware's 20th anniversary. I'm Lisa Martin, very excited to be joined by Dave Vellante. Hey Dave. Hey Lisa, good to see you again. Good to see you too. We're welcoming back to theCUBE an alumni, Jeff Waters, the VP of Global Cloud Sales for VMware. Hi Jeff. Hi, great to be here guys. Last year we talked about the buzz, VMware getting the buzz back. Boy, this is a sonic boom this year. It's a lot of buzz. It's due to power infuse. And we've also got David Gurgels, we're the Chief Revenue Officer for OVH. David, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, both of you, David. So I have to ask first, do you have the VMware tattoo that Pat Gelsinger sported this morning? I don't have VMware, but I do have OVH cloud. Okay, so speaking of OVH, David, give our viewers an overview of what you guys are doing and what momentum you have created with VMware. Yeah, you know, it's an exciting time for us, especially to be here as a global diamond sponsor, right? This is our second year as OVH cloud to be here. Last year when we came, it was right after the V-Cloud Air Acquisition of the asset from VMware, which is where our partnership just continued to grow more and more. And so for the last year, what we've been doing is we've really been focusing on deploying our data centers here, as well as getting our product trade to go to market. I always joke that OVH cloud is the, probably the best kept secret in the US, because that when we acquire V-Cloud Air's assets is when we kind of launched into the US. But as Jeff can tell you in a few minutes, we've been a partner with VMware for years, right? And it's been really exciting. Yeah, Jeff, I wonder if you could talk about that, Jeff, a little bit. I mean, the signal on V-Cloud Air early on, you guys kept having to tune the radio station, so to speak, and then boom, finally it hit the OVH acquisition and then the AWS deal, of course, IBM and other cloud service providers. Talk about how that all came about and the track that you're on now. Yeah, so I mean, we've been partnering with OVH for actually nine years. I went back in a research, yeah, back in Europe. So they've actually been a seven-time service provider of the year award winner. So our relationship with OVH is nothing new, and we've been working with them for years. The other thing is the breadth of the portfolio adoption, the full SDDC stack. So not just V-Sphere, NSX, V-SAN, the entire stack. So OVH is right in the forefront of our overall cloud strategy, and it has been for years. Yeah, and as a global infrastructure provider, I mean, we have almost a million, 500,000 customers, 138 different countries. We have 28 data centers, three here in North America. You know, we've got the breadth to go to the market in a big way, so it's exciting to be here. So lay out the options that you have for OVH customers. What can they, what services can they get from you? What are the platforms? No, it's a great question. So obviously, have a very purpose-felt solution built on VMware, right, with our hybrid private cloud. It's all built on the SDDC stack. So V-Sphere, V-SAN, NSX, everything that Jeff mentioned. We also offer a bare-metal solution, and then we also have a public cloud offering that's built on a relationship they had with OpenStack. So we give our customers three different choices on what they want to go to the market with. So what do you make of, what's the AWS VMware partnership mean for OVH? How do you guys take advantage of that? Well, I mean, you know, look, I think Pat and his keynote this morning talked about that eight out of every 10 customers, you know, is using cloud today, multi-cloud strategy. The average large customers using, what do you say, eight clouds, he said that they're forecasting that there would be 10 clouds by the end of 2019. I'd like to take one of those two spots, if you don't mind. So, no, we think there's huge opportunity. I mean, you know, Amazon's built a business on and has created kind of the standard. We think there's plenty of room to play in a very large market. Well, the services market has always been highly fragmented, and it's always been local in nature, maybe not to the degree and scale, but so you've got, what did you say, a million and a half customers? Globally. So what are they telling you about their cloud strategy? Well, what our customers are asking for is they're asking for agility, they're looking for low cost. You know, we announced a partner program earlier this morning where we're launching that, and our partners are coming to us saying, David, give us choice, give us flexibility, and help us save a little bit of money. I mean, all of our partners are dealing with margin erosion as well as everybody else in the industry. So if we can come to market and actually help them go acquire a customer and help them do that in a way that's cost-effective, they're very excited about that. So what's the conversation that you're having with customers? You know, we were, a lot of press, a lot of news came out this morning, a lot of great announcements made by Pat and team on stage. Customers talking about migrating from on-prem to the cloud, from public back to on-premises for security compliance reasons. What are some of the things that you guys are hearing from customers? When you're having those business-level discussions about being able to execute a successful cloud strategy. You want to hit that first and I'll come over. Well, I can't. So, you know, what our customers are talking about is simplicity. One of the things that we're excited to work with VMware on is that our customers, when they move their solution on-prem to our hybrid cloud, they use the exact same resources that they use on-prem today. They don't have to go hire new people. It's all of the exact same economics that they've built to an on-prem solution is in their off-prem solution with OVH cloud. That's what makes this so unique, right? I mean, look, part of the VCloud Air acquisition, what are we doing? We're migrating VMware customers, right, that are using VMware technology that we're setting on VCloud Air and OVH data centers using VMware technology to do it. And so it's- Just to add to that, the beauty is reducing day two complexity on the operations, day two operations. So instead of customers having to build out all themselves and integrating it, OVH is doing that already, right? Right out of the gate in a hosted managed environment. So- And that's because it's a like-to-like homogeneous and you guys laid that vision out years ago when Maritz was running the company. But how does that actually manifest itself? So, a customer says, look, I'm sick of the heavy lifting. I want to get to the cloud, right? So they come to you guys, what are the steps that they take to get there? Well, there's, you know, the first thing you'll do is you'll sit down with the client. Some clients know exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it. And some customers say, hey, I think I need to be in the cloud, please help me. So we'll have that conversation, right? First of all, yeah, exactly. It's for me to see soup to nuts, whatever you want to say. So, you know, a lot of times we'll sit down and we'll walk them through that journey to the cloud. And then once we determine what applications or workloads we want to move, then we'll back into, okay, well, here's the best way to move that, right? And whatever technologies we decide to do. If it's vSphere based, it makes it real simple, right? And you hit the nail on the head. It starts with the application. It's always about the application. What is the end goal, right? Once you identify that, you start looking at the use cases, a lot of it's app migration, a lot of data center evacuation. A lot of these data centers as the different leases are coming up, they want to get out of there, right? And that's the opportunity then to have the discussion. There's also tools that we've got HCX, which allows for bulk migration of workloads, and it reduces the complexity of going to another cloud and another hypervisor from years down to months and weeks. We've had some customers that have done that, migrated hundreds of VMs over a weekend. Oh, sure, yeah. And we're in the process of that right now. So go ahead, please. Oh, thank you. I was going to say, can you give us an example of a customer, whether they're in Europe or you guys have really had a lot of success or here in the Americas that have really demonstrated substantial business outcomes, revenue, et cetera, leveraging the joint service? Well, sure, I mean, we've got customers both in the U.S. and in Amia, but I'm thinking about a customer in particular that's based in the U.K. That they're an M&A company, right? And at one time, they had 97 data centers that they were trying to manage, the complexity of that. And so they originally went to vCloud Air because they were like, help us with this complexity. We're built on VMware, but we've got to close these data centers, right? We need to go to more of an asset-like model and we need to be able to manage it effectively with the staff that I have that's already overworked. So that's how we won them as a client with vCloud Air. What's exciting is, is when we come in and we start talking about what we're doing with OVH and some of the new technology that we're building on the VMware stack, right? Plus the fact that we own our own network. I don't charge ingress and egress charges, right? A lot of the things that we do, we've got 33 points of presence globally. Then we start having a conversation and like, listen, I already had a great solution in vCloud Air on VMware. Now I've got that on steroids. I get the benefit of both companies coming together for a solution for my clients. So how do you get the data from point A to point B to you back up the Chevy truck and load it on? Do you talk about it that way? Your network, what's the kind of best practice? Yeah, so the best practice is to come in and understand the actual environment we're working with. What is the tolerance to take that workload up or down? But if we use technology like HCX, I don't have to take that workload down at all. I'm able to basically essentially, and don't let me get over my skis, VMware guy, but I can essentially do a vMotion over my network, right? No cost to the customer into my data center and the customer can continue to use the app while that's happening. And the time that takes is a function of obviously the volume of the data, the bandwidth, the complexity of that. You'll schedule that out over a period of what? Days, weeks, months? Exactly. Years even? I mean, maybe not years, but maybe I have a multi-year strategy, right? So that's how you're seeing people do it. It's sort of a planned approach. Weeks and months, I would say. I would say project-based. So within months, I can get an entire data center from my on-premises into your platform. Is that a fair statement? And if you ever wanted to bring it back, we can do that real easy too. You see that happening? We see customers moving workloads back and forth. It depends on seasonality. I mean, you take the retail industry, right? There's a lot of times where during the retail industry, they'll send things to us, they'll flip it around and after the holidays are over, they'll bring it back on-prem, what happened? And more importantly, I think having network access back into the on-prem data center with HCX allows you to have a network connection. So it does need to talk back. The whole workload may not move back, but you need to have communications back into the network, and that's what HCX, their technology, allows. Right, so it allows me to leave whatever component of my workload I want to keep there. That's right. But I'm talking to each other. So for years at VMware, we heard this theme sort of any app, any workload, really anywhere in the world. Now you guys, right. Now you guys have an open source based public cloud. VMware obviously like, hey, some of these cloud native apps, we'd like a piece of that action. You hear Pat talking about Kubernetes and containers. So what's that conversation like between you guys? I mean, you want some of that, right? Are you talking about edge? Is that more integration? You guys got some work to do there to really compete in that space? Well, I mean, it's your solution, but I'll start off on the edge. So the announcement on edge today, I don't know if you guys have heard yet, but really exciting. We've actually announced a lot of different solutions around automation of the data center. I mean, this whole cloud operations is becoming a sort of a major problem as we have eight to 10 global service providers in most enterprises. So reducing the complexity of that down is incredibly important. All the pieces that we're announcing of VMware as a service, we're going to roll to our service providers in a managed service environment. So all these new technologies that we just announced, David and OVH are going to get access to that and have the same capability. I'll let you guys speak specifically. You know, I mean, listen, the beautiful thing about OpenStack is it's open, right? So I mean, it doesn't really matter what clouds out there, we can interface with it, right? So that's the beauty of it, right? It doesn't change at all the way that we go to market. It's just really, we're giving the customer's choice. What do you want? It depends on the app, right? That's what's beautiful about it is when we sit on meet with customers or partners, it's like, what do you want to do? What workload do you want to move? And we've got choice for you. Yeah, I remember when we talked to Pat about this years ago when OpenStack was kind of the hot new toy, and he said, OpenStack, we like OpenStack. That's cool, we'll embrace it, no problem. We're like, really? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of exactly what's happened. I mean, you're seeing the same thing with Kubernetes and containers and the like. But again, you guys still got some work to do to really earn their business for those types of workloads. I presume you're hard at work. We are. I don't know if you wanted to hit on some of the announcements that you are on the party for. Yeah, no, I'd love to. So the real thing I'm excited about is this morning we announced the announcement of our partner program at OVH Cloud. It's an exciting day for us on that because if you'll remember a few minutes ago, I was talking about all the things we've been doing for the last year, right? Getting our data centers ready and also building out our product stack to be able to go to market and migrating our customers. Well, the fourth thing we were doing for the last nine to 12 months is we've been meeting with partners. And I'm fortunate from my years at EMC and VMware and my team, we have a lot of relationships out there. And so we were able to go meet with these partners and say, listen, here's what we're thinking. What do you guys think? What are you looking for, right? We've got all these big players out there. Obviously we know all the names, but what differentiation could we bring to your business to help you go grow revenue? And they came back to us and they said, wigs, what we really want to be able to do is we want to be able to come in slowly, expand that as much as we can, make big commitments, make small commitments. We want the ability to be agile. We want to be able to help us figure out a way that we can save money and worry about that, help us resolve that issue of that margin erosion. That's the big thing that a lot of the channel is dealing with today. And so that's what we did. We came up with a program with four different levels, right? You can dip your toe in with a very minimum commitment. The higher commitment you make, not only do you get a better price, but you also get a ton of support on the back end. So actually come in and work with you on your messaging. I have sales teams that can actually go out and help them sell the solution with us as the infrastructure layer in the underpinning, right? And it's just, it's so far it's been really good. So these are, don't hate me for saying this, these are sort of traditional box sellers now trying to transform their business, right? And add more value or their value added suppliers. So maybe they're, S&P or... You got maintenance service providers. You got maintenance service providers. So hosting. You got the SIs and the OSs, right? So, you know, some of these guys, they either want a private label, right? Or a white label your solution. Some guys just want to go to market of the solution and they just need an asset like model, right? They're just, they're exhausted with, you know, investing in infrastructure, right? So they're like, listen. And bodies. And body, you take that over and let us worry about that. You see, from VMware's perspective, that's exactly what we're seeing. We've got an ecosystem of 4,200 global service providers. They build their own data centers have a VMware-based hosted solution of some type. A lot of different flavors. They want to get out of the hardware space and out of the data center management space. This is why it's a great solution for OVH. They want to focus on, and again, we call this asset light. They want to focus on high margin, trusted value, things that they're good at where they can make a lot of money. Which is like, which is what? Like, I see there's a consulting piece up front. Security. It could be security, specialization, yep. Security services. Patching monitor, you know, automation, migration services. I mean, the exact discussion we just talked about, right? Customers need that journey. So OVH abstracts away the need to do hardware and allows them to go focus on the rich or higher margin services that they offer. And how are they making it sticky? Because obviously they want that, right? I mean, so what do you see there? And how are you helping them? I think anytime you're adding a value added service, if you add that value, it is sticky, right? I mean, for an example, you know, to help our relationship with VMware and just how strong it is, you know, Fusion Storm was one of the partners that we announced today, right? And they had a quote in there and I was just setting in, you know, Pat's keynote next to our customer. You know, and I'm like, so, you know, I get this, it makes sense. You're looking for this, you know, infrastructure as a service play. He's like, David, what we're trying to do is help our customers that love the VMware stack. We're trying to help them to get to the cloud, right? They don't care about the infrastructure. All they want is great service, right? And great support. And he said, that's my secret sauce that I am able to offer that. And he goes, you guys handle the infrastructure. He said, it's perfect. Last question, David, for you, what are people going to be able to see and feel and touch at the OVH booth here at VMworld? Oh, that's a great question. So you're going to be able to go over, you're going to be able to learn about some of our other announcements with VMware specifically around what we're doing on the whole SCDC as a stack, right? And the VMware Cloud Foundation and the announcement we had on that this morning or actually I think that was Friday. You're actually going to be able to go over and they'll pull up and they'll show you some demos and be able to see the technology live. I think they have a show every hour and you go over there and if you go over and you might win a Yeti mug, I think they're giving a Yeti mug to whoever pays the most attention. So go over there and learn about that. Can I watch you use another Yeti? I love it. I can't have too many Yetis. Does it come with caffeine? Cause that and all over. Well, we'll leave it clean. Yes, maybe caffeine. Awesome, David, Jeff, thanks so much for joining David and me this morning. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. You're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day one, Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around. We'll be right back.