 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. This is day two of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2018. A lot of buzz yesterday, a lot of buzz today. 20,000 plus people here, and they're expecting over about 100,000 engaging with the digital experiences. So we're proud to be here. I'm joined by my esteemed co-host, John Troyer, and John and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time a couple of gents from Cisco. We've got Kurt Milne, manager of product marketing at Cisco, hey Kurt. Great to be here. And we've got Zach Keelik, senior product manager. Guys, it's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having us. So you guys were at VMware back in the day. The theme of this event, a lot of the strategic conversations around multi-cloud. What are some of the things that you're hearing there? How is Cisco helping not just your joint VMware customers, but Cisco's customers in general to embrace this multi-cloud world that is now a reality? No. Well, I think Cisco's vision for multi-cloud really is focused on giving our customers choice. So whether it's a business need or a technical need, we want to let our customers deploy workloads and manage those workloads in the best fit environment. So our vision for multi-cloud is to really enable that kind of mobility and freedom of choice. You know, it's not about lock-in, it's more about switching costs and we want to make it so our customers can make those choices without penalty if they change their mind. So maybe let's drill down into some of the products, right? You all, I mean, you all came from the clicker, when clicker joined Cisco, right? You were in with clicker as a startup. Built this great kind of portfolio, multi-cloud management and accessibility. Now as part of Cisco, it's much bigger portfolio and product. So I'd love to hear more about like the product itself, kind of in what kind of the high-level points are on what it can do and what are, what problems are you guys solving with multi-cloud? Because right, it's everything from day zero to day one to day, day in, right? That things are going on in multi-cloud. So, well, I mean, Cloud Center at its core is a multi-cloud platform, management platform. And so we take the application and make it so that it can be model once, then deployed anywhere. We take it through the entire life cycle of model, govern, deploy, manage through the entire life cycle, end to end, making sure that everything's secured along the way, and of course, integrating with all of our other Cisco products like ACI and App Dynamics and so on and so forth. How important is that infrastructure connection, right? Because on one hand, you have a lot of startups with a lot of developers and right now let's code, let's do some code, let's throw some code up there, throw it up on Amazon, you know, and but then all of a sudden, once you get to a scale or an enterprise grade, right? Then networking security, infrastructure, capacity. I mean, what are some of the infrastructure things that people maybe may not realize when they first start to like look at hybrid or multi-deployment models? Well, Cisco, you know, we have what we call our multi-cloud portfolio. And so as you indicate, there's a lot to it when you start talking about connecting to and using the cloud. So we have solutions that help you connect to the cloud. Obviously, where Cisco, our background is networking. So that's a major part of what we offer in a multi-cloud scenario. We help you secure and protect your activities, you know, in the cloud and between the cloud. And we help consume the cloud services and that's where cloud center fits in. And then if you want to build a cloud as part of a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud scenario, obviously Cisco has a lot of the hardware, the network storage compute capabilities that allow you to do that as well. So it's really a broad portfolio of solutions that Cisco offers to help with a multi-cloud strategy. I think yesterday Pat Gelsinger was saying that the average enterprise organization is eight clouds. I heard something yesterday from one of our guests talking about four and a half clouds. They didn't know you could have a half cloud, I know that now. What are, where are, you know, in product marketing, product management, you talk with the customers a lot, obviously. You talked about we need to give customers choice and flexibility. John and I, we hear that a lot. We've heard that thematically in the last two days at VMworld alone. Where are those conversations? Are they at the C-suite level where they understand we have this multi-cloud environment, whether it's by nature of organic or acquisition, but there's data in there that needs to be, that's power, it's currency. Are you talking more with the IT folks, the folks, the feet on the ground, the boots on the ground? Are you talking more with the C-suite to help them strategically understand how do we manage what we have now, be able to ensure that we can evaluate applications and workloads, know where they should be so we can, you know, apply the superpowers that Pat talked about yesterday. Talk to us about those customer conversations. Well, at the C-level, at the CIO level, it goes like this, you know, when the business comes to me and says, we need to deploy these workloads in the cloud, IT needs to be able to say yes, we can help you do that. And if the business comes and says we want to deploy these workloads on-prem, IT needs to be able to say yes, we can help you do that. So at the executive level, it's really about enabling that kind of flexibility. Then at the next layer, you know, you're starting to talk about putting those capabilities in place, right? Are we going to, you know, in our perspective, you know, a hybrid cloud is something you manage versus something you go build. And so we get into conversations with cloud architects. There's business need. Are we going to architect a solution to help manage this portfolio of service delivery options that are bigger and more complex than we've had in the past? Because all of these different cloud vendors, they all provide different value to the business as well, right? They have different specialties and key focus areas, right? If you're doing .NET or Windows, you're probably going to choose Azure and so on and so forth. So when you get down to the tactical layer as well, that's where these discussions start to happen about multi-cloud. You have to have, you know, in order to really capture all that value, you have to have the multi-cloud and then a way to manage it all together, right? Zach, I'd love to drill down a little bit, right? I think we talked about what you talked about platform, workloads, right? Cloud is very abstract. And maybe let's talk about some of the workloads, whether that's sitting on top of Kubernetes or maybe some of these other platforms, kind of what do you all do and how do you all help with those? So Cloud Center manages over 15 clouds today. That includes AWS vCenter, you know, OpenStack, Alibaba Cloud, like all of them, right? And by abstracting and normalizing all those APIs underneath, we're actually able to make it so that you model the application once and deploy it anywhere. We also support, as of our 4.9 release, which was out in May, the ability to go to Kubernetes. The way that our tool approaches that is treats it as a container cloud, so to speak, right? So that you are still able to take the constructs in Cloud Center, the same approach, if you will, to modeling as you would in the VM world, apply that to containers, and then we do a whole bunch of magic in the background to make a really cool experience. Nice. And one of the great things is, you know, if you're deploying containers in Kubernetes, you know, there's this idea of a pod manifest file, a YAML file, and so one of the big debates at KubeCon was, you know, nobody wants to write a YAML file. So what's neat about Cloud Center is when you model this application in a cloud agnostic way, you can click on it and deploy it to Amazon or et cetera. If it's a Kubernetes environment, then Cloud Center writes the YAML file specific to that deployment. If you modify the blueprint, deploy again, it'll write a different YAML file. So it really takes a lot of the burden away from developers having to learn YAML and, you know, basically code the infrastructure and let them focus on coding their application. I think that's the number one complaint I hear from developers in the Kubernetes world is YAML, like no one wants to write more YAML. And it's powerful, right? I mean, you get a lot of capabilities at the code level to be able to do a lot of things, but, you know, with that power comes responsibility or whatever the saying is. And a lot of people don't want that responsibility, so we can help. So, well, Zach, I mean, it sounds like some of this is for the developer, but some of this is also for IT ops. Can you talk about that, those two roles? Those two sides of the coin, right? Both of them are delivering value to the business, but in different ways, right? And they're both dependent upon each other. We sometimes talk about, you know, the infrastructure being a means to the app. Without the need for an app, you know, you don't need the other. So, what we do is we deliver services and within the platform, we deliver tools to help the admins actually put in governance policy across all the different clouds. And on the other end, we allow application architects, application consumers to be able to go in and use the tools to build what they need and describe what they want the outcome to be. So, two sides of the same coin and all the same platform. Speaking of outcomes, a lot of capabilities, features you guys are talking about. I think what you also do with Kubernetes with the Cisco Container Platform is also enabling on-prem. Let's get to some meat. Give us some customer examples, whether you can mention them or not, where the Cisco Cloud Center is really helping the businesses to drive new revenue streams, identify new product lines. What are some of those really compelling stories that you think really articulate the value that Cisco's delivering? Yeah, we've, you know, with some of our early access customers with our new container platform, it's interesting because, you know, there's the, you know, the data center is no longer the center where you bring the data, right? And we can talk about edge or fog computing, et cetera. But what's interesting is a lot of these use cases that we've come into, you know, it isn't a, you know, we've got our application in the data center or the cloud, right? We've got retailers with 2,100 stores. They want to put containerized application on Kubernetes in the stores. Transportation companies, they want to have the ability to deploy, you know, dev applications in the cloud and then to deploy them out to their transportation vehicles. So there's, you know, it starts to get blurry. It's not a black and white picture. There's a lot of gray areas. So that's one of the things that we see is that it's not a, you know, you talk about a hybrid cloud. It's really not that simple. There's just a lot of corner cases, a lot of different things our customers are trying to do. Nice. Across industry, are you seeing, you know, some of the industries that come to mind, like that need to start taking advantage of the superpower of AI, smart manufacturing. Are you seeing any industries healthcare that are kind of early adopters? Early is probably not the right word, but are kind of leading edge there. So I talk with customers, our customers being healthcare, finance, education, you know, higher education, all this different stuff, research facilities. They're all taking advantage of these innovations that they're able to effectively outsource to the public cloud vendors, right? They might not have the expertise internally or resources to actually build these machine learning AI platforms from the ground up. So they have the opportunity to go and rent it from these different cloud vendors and being able to rent the best of breed, depending on who's bringing the best value to them. Nice. And with your platform, you can then, you can take advantage of being on, taking advantage of multiple clouds, but then dive down and grab the functionality and APIs and services on an individual cloud if that's what they happen to specialize in. So. Yep, that's right. And then another thing that we see too is like, you know, for like what I call commercial, what Cisco calls commercial select, but like kind of more of the mid-market, customers are more interested in a platform that, you know, they don't necessarily have a large tools team that can go patch together a lot of specific tools and then maintain the ongoing total cost of ownership. Whereas some of the larger organizations are interested in more of the governance capabilities. They've got multiple teams, multiple business units already out in multiple clouds. And they want to really, without it, you know, encumbering them with a lot of process and overhead, giving them the ability to do their job quickly and easily, but then also have basic controls in place. So if it's patient data for HIPAA or, you know, there's data privacy and gravity that where they need to maintain some of those controls, they can lay that on top of what people are already doing. So, you know, there's different reasons for wanting to have a platform, a multi-cloud management platform, but both medium and large companies are interested in that. Because I think that everybody's interested naturally then too is saving money in the public cloud, right? As soon as people start to mature in their consumption, they start to realize that they always get the bill regardless of if they get the value out of it, right? So Cisco's been investing heavily in this space. We made an acquisition in December called compute.io which focuses on cloud cost optimization. And you've seen that functionality actually roll into cloud center over the past year. And stay tuned for more announcements regarding that. Yeah. Speaking of announcements, here we are at VMworld 2018. I was mentioning in the opening, 20 plus thousand people here, a lot of engagement. What are some of the things that you've heard in the last two days from the VMworld exacts from customers that really kind of excite you guys and Cisco for your continued partnership? No. Well, Cisco and VMware do a lot of business together. So we've got a lot of joint customers. And, you know, I've been going to VMworld for 10 years. And I remember the first time I went to VMworld, there was a lot of excitement, there's energy, there's buzz, and I still feel that here. So I think what VMworld is doing and some of the steps they're making with multi-cloud, some of their acquisitions, some of the new products, work around Kubernetes, work with Amazon. I mean, I think it's all exciting. And I feel that same buzz now that I felt 10 years ago. I mean, it kind of was not to give you guys more of the last word, but it feels like we were working on this for 10 years and we were talking cloud and multi-cloud, you know, 10 years ago. But it seems like from, I mean, you can tell me that the customers are there now. It's real. The technology platform is mature enough. Yeah. It feels like there. Reassure me that it's real. No, in my, you know, I go to these conferences and I kind of do the up and down the aisles, hear the elevator pitch, and you can kind of sense the maturity of the industry based on, you know, the 32nd or 62nd pitch that people give you. And, you know, a few years ago it was really, oh, we're doing something in a cloud. But I think that has shifted either for political reasons. You know, our CIO says we need to now have multiple clouds or for business reasons, you know, we need to put this in this cloud for technical reasons. So I think we're there. It's not just talk, but I really see our customers, the people that come into VMworld, have multiple clouds that they need to manage and deal with. It's great, amazing. So you were saying with Cloud Center you guys have six, I think 15 or 16 supported clouds out of the box, Alibaba, Azure, AWS, et cetera. Google, we talked about the Kubernetes based container platform. That's right. I did read online Cloud Center is going to be a key element of an upcoming hybrid cloud offering that's going to be released in partnership with Google later this year. Zach, you're smiling. Yeah, so I'm- So, Ortiz, just can you give us? We talked about that a little bit at Google Next at the conference that just- Just last month. Which just happened, yeah. And so that is imminent. So I'm not sure actually what we can talk about. But so the general gist and the things that we're talking about on stage is that, Google naturally has a multi-cloud affinity through their Kubernetes, right? Being able to deploy an application regardless of what type of technology and everything like that, abstracting away even the clouds. So that is in direct alignment with our thought strategy philosophy on multi-cloud and what it should be too. So going forward, we are having a joint partnership to pursue those types of customers, those types of use cases where you can potentially have your data on-prem. You have your leveraging services from the public cloud as well, these AI ML type services. And yeah, that's imminent and pretty exciting. We did some early access programs with customers and everybody's pretty excited about it. And we announced that last fall, I think it was in October or something like that. And we've been working with them developing a solution since then. So it's exciting. Well, thanks for sharing, dropping a little bit. Just a little more. Yeah, just a little more. We look forward to, I'm sure our viewers do as well to hearing more about that later this year. Guys, thanks so much for stopping by this. You're now CUBE alum. So we've got to give you some stickers so you can represent. Oh, very good. We appreciate your time. Well, thanks. It's been great. For our guests, I'm John Troyer, my co-host. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from day two of VMworld 2018 from Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back.