 Welcome to the Cube on the Ground presentation here in Palo Alto at VMware's corporate headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. It's for a special on the ground presentation, Mark Lohmeyer, vice president of products in the cloud platform group at VMware. It's joining me today. Welcome to the Cube on the Ground. Great. Thanks. It's good to be here. So I was excited to see your name on the list because I wanted to drill into you on the AWS relationship, which is your part of your role in that. And you've been involved in vSphere and much of other products so you know the cloud strategy. So we're not going to talk about the misfires of VMware's cloud strategy. Some of the people in the press would like to focus on that. I was very bullish on the announcement. We had an exclusive conversation with Pat Gelsinger and Amy Jassy up in San Francisco six weeks ago. So Ragu there and Terry Wise from AWS. Great relationship. And I'm bullish on it because the culture of Amazon web services and VMware are two geeky cultures. Both have very active communities. Both speak loudly when things aren't going wrong. Both of you guys as companies are customer centering, which Pat Gelsinger and Amy Jassy again reiterated on stage. And obviously this solidifies a hybrid cloud offering for you guys. So I want to get your thoughts. What's going on now? You had the announcement six just six weeks ago, which by the way was a very stealth announcement. No one knew it was coming. Something was going on. We were even I couldn't even figure it out, but then it got broken out there. And then re-invent was just last week. So much happening last week. What's going on? What's happened since six weeks? And what has come out of re-invent last week in Vegas? Yeah. So just taking a look back for a sec. If you look at the original announcement and the way sort of Pat and Andy talked about it, it was really this idea that, hey, today customers are struggling a bit because we're effectively forcing them to choose. They can either build a great VMware environment on-prem or they can build a great environment in the public cloud with AWS, but they were telling both of us this, hey, we don't want to have to choose between one of those two worlds. We want to be able to live in these two worlds simultaneously. And that was sort of really the core idea, I think, behind the partnership of enabling this new hybrid cloud solution for them. So that was sort of the high-level concept, I guess. And I think after we did the announcement, one thing that's amazed me is just the level of positive customer reaction to what we're doing together. I think we were looking forward to... Can you share one? Yeah. So I'll give you an example of a company that plays in the travel industry. So they actually provide an IT platform for airlines. And they are a huge VMware customer today, companies called Amadeus. So they're a huge VMware customer today, and they've built all of their mission critical applications around VMware in their own private cloud. So vSphere and other VMware solutions. And if you think about their environment, obviously, uptime is critical. If that service goes down, people are missing their flights. But they also have an eye to the future, and they're also sort of trying to think about, hey, how could I leverage the public cloud? So they're thinking about things like, could I do disaster recovery to the public cloud? Or maybe I want to spin up a new application in a location in a geography where I don't have a data center presence. And in the past, that was, as we were talking about before, it's a bit of a tough decision, right? I could use my VMware environment on-prem, or I could try to do something totally different on the public cloud. And so they're incredibly excited about this announcement. So they can do it on both. They can do it on both. They're very comfortable with VMware, and they can move it here, and then get the goodness of AWS on top of it. There is some of the developer tools and new services that they have. Yeah, and if you look at their teams, I mean, these teams have spent 10 years learning how to use the VMware tools, customizing their applications for these environments. And now they can basically leverage all of that with absolutely no changes on top of the AWS cloud. So I'm looking at my list here. I want to get your thoughts here. And since you're on the product side, I want to get the product perspective in terms of how this has changed the product roadmap, because it's not like you guys are just endorsing it. It's a primary cloud. It's the number one market share. But you have other cloud providers. You have IBM and a bunch of others. But with respect to like storage and infrastructure, as that gets commoditized, how does that change the software you guys are writing? How does that change how you guys look at like things like Kubernetes or things like containers? So I think, I mean, one of the really interesting things about this partnership is that we're actually bringing the value of the full VMware STDC stack to the AWS cloud. So not only can they continue to run their applications on vSphere with no changes, but we're also delivering our enterprise-class storage capabilities with vCN as a service on AWS and all of our enterprise-class networking and security capabilities with NSX as a service on top of the AWS cloud. So we're actually giving them the rich set of capabilities across compute, network, and storage as a service. Is it the same code base that's running on both? This is the great thing, which is it's literally the same code base. Now we've done some things under the covers to make sure that we run in a very performant way on top of the AWS infrastructure. Because that's just more of an integration issue? More of an integration issue. And actually one of the great things behind the partnership is both companies are investing in a pretty meaningful way and a deep engineering relationship to make sure that what we're delivering to our customers is really something special and unique. We're not just sort of slapping this stuff together. There's some real hardcore engineering work going into making this service great. Talk about re-invent Amazon's web services. They had 32,000 people. I was calling it the center of the tech universe. It really is an intersection and a culmination of all the different cultures out there. The VM world culture, a bunch of other cloud native folks and developers, and also a lot of the geeks and the DevOps guys, and obviously software developers, all coming together. You guys had a breakout with Pat, 1,000 people in there, share that story that you would share it to me before we came to the camera. So this was great. So we obviously had a breakout session on the VMware Cloud and AWS solution. First of all, there was over 1,000 customers in the room, which was always great to see, kind of stadium-style seating. And we basically have to sort of show hands how many of you are VMware customers, almost every hand goes up. How many of you are AWS customers, almost every hand goes up. So I think it really speaks to the fact that... It validates the customer-centric thing that people are thinking, well, why is Amazon and why is Jassy and Galsing here dancing here? And then their main message was customers were asking for it. So that's proof positive of that point. Any kind of anecdotal feedback coming in that's hitting the product roadmap or inbound data that you guys are writing down and taking notes on in terms of what people are looking for specifically? So one thing that's really exciting to me is how customers are starting to think about how they would take advantage of this new service. It's one thing to sort of build the service, but it's another thing to sort of hear into customers' own words, hey, I can do some really amazing things with this service that were never possible before. And it's interesting to probably talk to a few hundred customers at this point since the announcement. And you kind of hear three big sort of ways that customers are thinking about it. You have one set of customers that's saying, look, I'm going to continue to have a significant investment in my private cloud for a long, long time, but I want to take advantage of the public cloud for more extension-oriented use cases. So things like disaster recovery to the public cloud or things like geographic capacity expansion. You know, it's very interesting to a certain set of- Any IoT? So a bit, a bit, but I would say more at this point. They're more sort of IT-centric use cases around their existing enterprise apps. But then you see a second group of customers where really they're saying, hey, I increasingly want to move more and more to the public cloud. Maybe I'm migrating specific apps. Maybe I want to consolidate down my data centers. And for them, this solution is incredibly compelling because they can leverage all of that tooling, all the skill sets they've built, all the things they've done to make their applications run great on VMware. They can now bring that all to bear on the cloud. One of the fascinating walkaways for me this year was kind of the epiphany of, you know, connecting the dots in all 90 events we've gone through this year in the cube is the horizontal pattern that we've seen across all of our events. One is cloud is happening in a big way. Hybrid is absolutely the number one use case with a lot more public cloud than people have thought. I mean, people were poo-pooing that saying, hey, you know, public cloud's a joke. And I think the other one was from James Hamilton's presentation on Tuesday night, the level of how important elastic is, you know, talking about how they're doing their own silicon, how they're keeping the packets from touching anything outside their network. So this speaks to a scale as the second point. So obviously, big data is going to always going to be relevant. That's not an epiphany. But the relevance of public cloud and hybrid being real now and scale. How does that affect your product strategy? Because now you have to compete with more scale-like products, scaling rapidly. Yeah, I mean, I think you sort of touched on two things. One is sort of hybrid, right, and how that's really coming to the forefront. And the second is the scale point. So I think on the hybrid front, what we've been hearing from customers is in many ways this new service we're building together is for the first time delivering to them what they would think of as a real hybrid architecture, right? It is literally- It's a clear, straight, narrow. They can see the path. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. You look at this thing and you say, oh, I can go into my VMware vCenter tools and I can see all my resources across my on-prem environment as well as now on top of the AWS cloud. And I can do everything consistently across those two worlds. And not only that, but all the other stuff I've built on top of that, whether it's scripting or third-party tools or VMware's own tools, all of that just works consistently. So for many of them, that is the way they think about hybrid. And it's the first time someone's really delivered that to them in the way that they think about it. So absolutely hybrid is key. But you also touched on scale. And I think, I mean, to me, this is one of the things that's really exciting about this partnership. Because if you think about it, AWS has made a huge investment in data centers, regions, availability zones around the world. They've got 13 today, they've announced they're adding five more next year. So their pace of investment in the scale of that environment continues to grow rapidly. From a VMware perspective and from our customer's perspective, they can now all take advantage of that. We're going to enable this service across all of their regions around the world. Yeah, I was saying to Dave Vellante who wasn't there, he says, what's your takeaway in mind? Well, it's kind of a radical view, but this could be as big as Wintel, except AWS is Intel and your Microsoft. Because you guys are going to be that software, but it's not a stack. It's kind of like not a great analogy, but it's an interesting combination. If you look at the scale of the service, Amazon's providing a service, not a product. And when people buy products, they want to look at the speeds and feeds and kick the tires, and they care about what's going on in the product. No one cares what the service is doing, as long as it works at scale. So interesting new dynamics existing. Yeah, I think it's actually great. It's a great analogy. I mean, I think one thing we heard again from our customers is, look, they love the VMware enterprise class capabilities, leading capabilities across compute, network and storage. But today, we've been delivering that kind of as a product on-prem. So what they'd love to do is combine those capabilities with what AWS gives them, which is a cloud service, right? And that's what we're doing. So, Mark, give us the update on what's going on with the product. What's your outlook for 2017? What are the top priorities? What are the PMs working on? What's happening? Give us a peek inside. Blow-by-blow. Yeah, give us just a sense of the trajectory on the product, and just timing of what people will expect, when, where, the kind of orientation, so on and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. So we're marching towards our initial GA from mid-2017. Full steam ahead towards that. Significant investment from both companies from an engineering perspective into creating this joint solution together. And so there's unique things we're doing on the VMware side as well as AWS is doing on their side to make that a great service and really bring these capabilities together in a really meaningful way for our customers. In advance of the initial GA mid-2017, we're going through a customer lighthouse program and beta program, and the reaction to that has been tremendous. So, what qualifies as a lighthouse account? So the idea is that we would work very closely with a small number of customers, and, you know, our goal is to really make sure we understand their environments, their requirements. We understand that early in the product development process, so we're feeding those back into the service. Lighthouse folks out there, it's like, it's a concept of, you know, you go to market, lighthouse brings the ships into harvest, you know, that kind of thing. Exactly. So we have a lighthouse meeting, that's their customers are going to work with closely. Exactly, yeah, exactly. So work closely with, we can learn from them, then we're ensuring that we're delivering a great service that meets their needs on day one. So that's kind of with an initial very small group of customers, and then over time we expand that out to a larger set of beta customers, as you might imagine. But the interest in that has been off the charts, it's like a waiting list. I mean, just the process. I mean, who runs this? This is the challenge. This is the challenge. So we've got literally hundreds and hundreds of customers who have said, you know, I'm interested in being a lighthouse or beta customer. Obviously, you know, a small number that we can work with in a meaningful way. Are you guys doing any kind of outreach and field? I mean, obviously the sales guys must be going crazy. Yeah, so it's, I mean, as you can imagine, it's really caught on like wildfire, not only amongst the VMware field sales teams, but also amongst the AWS sales teams, and a lot of customer interest in learning more. So those are all kind of coming back to us. So is it safe to say that VMware is now an arms dealer for cloud? I'm not sure if I would say an arms dealer for cloud, but it's definitely exciting to be part of all of those discussions. Well, we're a meeting and we can say whatever we want, but you're an arms dealer for the cloud. There you go. Always good to be Switzerland. Mark, thanks so much for spending the time here on the ground. Thank you. We are here on the ground, hit VMware's corporate headquarters in Great Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier with the Cube. Thanks for watching.