 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at VMworld 2018, day three of coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. John, we've had a phenomenal three days. Been great. Biggest, I think, two sets, biggest number of guests, lot of alumni, but also some new folks and I'd like to introduce you to a couple of our guests. We have David Boone, staff solutions architect from VMware, David. You're not only with VMware, but you have a very cool Twitter handle at David Boone 007. Pretty awesome. And Vijay Benga, technical fellow from FedEx Services. We're happy to be here. Well, I have to say, welcome back. You've been on theCUBE before. Yes, I've been on theCUBE before, yes. So, third day, both of you still have your voices. That's impressive, that's very impressive. Lots of announcements, lots of momentum, lots of people here. We're hearing about 21,000 or so. Vijay, tell us before we get into what you're doing with VMware, tell us a little bit about your role as a technical fellow at FedEx. Okay, so I work in technical architecture and our role for the team is to evaluate new products. We look at all the stack in the data center, all the tools that we need to do. We bring them in, evaluate them, see if it meets our needs and then put them through operations and then most important, lifecycle it out. And so that's really what my role has been. See, you've worked with VMware, sorry, with FedEx for a long time now. So I think John and I were talking before, we want to talk about your IT transformation, but you've probably seen a tremendous amount of evolution, not just within FedEx, but within, you know, coming to events like this. Talk to us a little bit about and maybe some of your peers would want to learn. How do you take it all in? Yeah, so it's been an impressive base all this while and then I look back at that and then I look at just this week, the amount of transformation that's going on, the announcements that's happening and the pace at which we have to work and react to. It's just a solid mind-boggling pace. So, you know, we have to pace our energy just to keep up with it. So, very impressive. Well, David, can you talk a little bit about your role then at VMware and how you work with companies like FedEx and maybe what some of the current challenges and, you know, successes that you're having right now. Talking a lot about converged infrastructure here, we're talking a lot about, you know, multi-cloud, you know, what's going on with your role and how you help folks like FedEx. So, I work in our Solutions and Availability Business Unit at FedEx, at VMware, and... Seems like FedEx. With that work, so... Please, 007, he bought it himself. Yes, tight part of it. I do help our large enterprise customers and our strategic customers with going through the POC process and particularly with VSAN. And I've worked with VGA through the entire process of evaluating VSAN at FedEx and working through any issues that we encountered and making sure that it's going to meet their demands when we go into production. So, VGA, how's VSAN treating you? Oh, you know, this has been second iteration as software defined storage. So, David has been an immense help at taking us through this and the team behind him. That is what we don't see. So, I and my team worked very hard at this and, you know, I was telling you about the pace that we saw. If you just look at one topic, VSAN itself, you know, we are laying the foundation for all the products on top. Converged infrastructure, hyper-converged. And even with VSAN, we are covering lots of our use cases and there's several more that we need to cover. So, it's really pretty intense. So, let's talk about how you're working with David and team in VMware to meet your demands. You were talking about it, but also the customer demands. I think we're all customers of FedEx and we have this expectation now in 2018 that we can go to any location and get something shipped overnight all over the world. So, you've got a lot of demand coming from business users, consumers. How, what are some of the key demands on the business that your team is responsible for going, all right, let's figure out a way with partners like VMware to solve these problems. Yeah, so that's a very interesting question because the demand, it doesn't stop. You cover one use case and there's several more that come up and so we're trying to address all the needs. So, when we did the whole test, we made a great plan, worked with David and his team to make sure that we cover all the use cases and we did a whole test plan and we did an evaluation in-house of how they perform, what the requirements are. And so, the key is to make sure that we meet the business requirements. Speed to market is what we try and get to them. So, we try to do that up front, make sure that we cover the use cases. So, when we bring the product out, we've covered at least 80% of the use cases and then try to get to 90 and 100. It's impossible, but that's the goal, so. So, Vijay, David, you know, vSAN, good for a lot of things, actually. The use cases keep multiplying. I'm just kind of curious, you know, what were some of the drivers there and was it all CAPEX, OPEX, you know, what are you finding out now that are you in production and what have been some of the results that you've seen, in both ways? So, yeah, good for it. Yeah, so I can tell you from our perspective what we've seen is that, you know, we looked at, so today we want to try and get off our fabric that we have with our storage and we want to try and use our environment with the conversion infrastructure, white space issues. So, we covered 80% of our requirements up front with the use cases that we have. It's the last 20% that are more difficult. I'm not sure where the industry is with it, but that's what we are here to learn this week. Find out, talk to other customers, see how they're doing and their use cases and experiences and try and cover the width of it. And we definitely try to tie in with all aspects of FedEx running their IT department. So, you know, Vijay is one aspect from an architectural point of view, but then we also make sure that we expand that out into operationalizing on vSAN and making sure that the whole process is covered and that we're making sure that FedEx is successful with our product, not just, you know, worst thing we could do is try to sell them something that they'd have to put on the shelf. In terms of partnerships, sorry, John. I'm curious, David, how VMware and Vijay FedEx are collaborating because you were saying earlier you've covered about 80% of the use cases, but we know in any element of life you can't please all the people all the time. So, David, are you helping from a consulting perspective Vijay and team decide, okay, what's the priority order of use cases that we can solve now? Is that, talk to us about how that partnership evolves. Absolutely, so I think over time, Vijay and I have established a relationship of trust and that's really the most valuable thing that we have between us is that we are collaborative. We can talk under nondisclosure about warts and problems and issues and where things may not fit with the FedEx process, what we can do to overcome those or work around those and feed that back into product management and make sure that we're continuing to evolve our product to meet our enterprise customers' needs. So, FedEx is enabling or influencing product development in a good way for VMware, sounds. Yeah, we definitely have a strong draw from our users as to what is needed to be built into the product for the next generations. So, yeah, people like Vijay are keyed to us to ensuring our continued success. And, David made a good point because it's not just the use cases that we can support with vSAN, it's equally important to know what not to venture in now and then venture in as it gets a little bit more mature and we understand it. So, that's really key for us, yeah. Vijay, I'm kind of curious. So, you know, we talked, you've been there at FedEx long time, seen cultural change, how we do projects, how time to value, all that sort of stuff. We're here at VMworld 2018 here in Vegas. Lots of, really, I thought this was a really interesting year in terms of product announcements from VMware and others, a lot of multi-cloud, a lot of, again, accelerated time to value as a service sorts of things. People who you thought were software providers or actually service providers and vice versa, kind of really kind of cool stuff. What's exciting you as you're looking forward to kind of go to the next level in taking FedEx and their infrastructure along? Yeah, so what I see happening is our adoption to try and get to the cloud as well. I think the speed to market is so important and we don't want to be in the way we want to be able to enable and or assist to be able to provide the service. The business partner and their requirements drives it. So that's what we see. And I think the embracing of that, I think the adoption of it, I think we see a good win from our side. I'm also curious, speaking of embracing and adopting, one of the things that Pat Gelsinger talked about in his keynote Monday was the superpowers of AI, machine learning, IoT. How, DJ, is FedEx, where are you, I guess, on that maybe embracing adoption's journey with embracing and being able to leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning to be able to get to market faster? I can talk about the IoT first and then get to AI because what we've seen in terms of IoT is being driven not from the data centers but from our edge. The demand is coming out and that's what we see coming from the outside and typically we've done from the inside out, data centers to the field, but we see the drive happening a lot more intense on the field and the data collection and the IoT devices that is driving that in. So that was interesting to us to see. And about AI, you were talking about also AI? Yes, and so, you know, FedEx is so huge. I think there's a lot of development happening on multiple areas on the AI, so you know, it's just impressive and amazing what we're doing with it, so. It's great. So David, if you're working with a customer, you know, so VSAN stands up, you're working with VSAN, the rest of VMware portfolio. You know, what do you, then how do you go the next steps? What does VGA and his team need to start looking at, right? As the VMware portfolio expands, how do you help that VGA and the executive level really think about this? I don't think that it's a matter of what the portfolio brings to the table. It's really more about what does FedEx need from us? What can we do to help them? What gaps can we fill? How do we partner together to make sure that we continue this successful track? Nice, nice. What we see is what's important on the roadmap, cause you know, we said about the 20% use cases, data protection and other things that are important to us, which are still being developed and you know, we are okay to partner and work with them, test the products with them, so it helps us help them, you know, enable us to use the rest of the 20% cases. Very symbiotic, FedEx is a massive global customer, company and customer. I'm curious, Vijay, what recommendations would you give to your peers, whether they're at a company that's comparable in size to FedEx or maybe even some of the smaller companies that VMware works with? What are some of the, you know, helping them distill this massive challenge down into some digestible buys? What would you recommend? Yeah, so two things that come to mind. One is to make sure that you listen to your business partners. You know, it's about the business, make sure you're meeting their needs. And the second thing is, you know, we build on the foundation that we've laid. I think this is what hit me this morning. It's like all the VMware stack that is there, you know, there are several other products and we could certainly go down those paths in the rabbit holes, but you know, if you build on the foundations that we have, I think we see a lot of synergy. The operations, you know, makes it all simple. One way to do things. So that, I think, is something that we've learned because we did go down, you know, some rabbit holes and you know, we are trying to reestablish back and see, build on the foundation that we have. And that's just part of it, right? Going down those rabbit holes. Yeah, it is. Try, feel fast, move on. Well guys, thanks so much. Yeah, feel fast. Yes. And failure is not a bad effort. No, I mean, in this, if we have failed at six months, yeah, that's great. But you know, you come out and you have a product that will last you and you know, continues on. That's awesome. That's so approach. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing what FedEx and VMware are doing together and your excitement and your ability to advise others is great. So thank you so much. Thank you, we appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. For my co-host John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest shortly.