 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with I co-host Justin Warren and this is theCUBE live from the lobby of Moscone North here in San Francisco. The 10th year we've had theCUBE and happy to bring back two CUBE alums which of course in 2010, we didn't even have the idea of a CUBE alum. We were just gathering some friends, some industry experts. To my right is Jaspreet Singh, who's the founder and CEO of Druva. Sitting next to him is Kit Colbert, who's the vice president and CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, so Jaspreet, I remember talking to you when Druva was a new company and Cloud Native wasn't the thing that came to mind when we were talking about it. We've known for a long time how important data is and protecting that and managing that. Of course, it's something the industry's been looking at a long time, but give us the update on kind of Druva and you brought along Kit, so we're going to be talking about some of the cool cloud, native, multi-cloud, modernization types things, how that fits in your world. Absolutely, if you think about the world, right? In 1998, Salesforce started, they would create a whole notion of SaaS and no software and the whole picture, right? Since then, applications have been SaaS, then came developer tools, which went SaaS, and now it's all about infrastructure, infrastructure management, which is getting to be a cloud native, public cloud-oriented SaaS world, right? Where Druva comes in. As the world gets more and more fragmented, the data gets more and more fragmented, there are multiple versions of cloud or different parts of strategy, data management has to get more and more centralized, which is where Druva comes in and which is where me and Kit are together. I think as VMware built the strategy for multi-cloud, putting the whole VMC approach to multiple versions of public cloud, Druva's a great partner to sort of bring it out, bring the data management together, the single control plane to manage multiple versions of cloud deployment on a single plane. All right, great. So Kit, it sounds like VMC is the kind of key component work together because what I think of Druva, a lot of what I think of is SaaS, and SaaS isn't necessarily the first thing that I think of when I think of VMware, so. We're trying to get there, trying to get there, Stu. Yeah, no, but pull it together as to where your customers intersect. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a great partnership and definitely really focused on rallying around VMware Cloud and AWS. And the core idea there was that we could deliver a cloud service to our customers of our VMware infrastructure, right? And really become a SaaS company, transforming into that and that's something that we've been very focused on strategically, right? And so VMware Cloud and AWS is really the first offering, but there's many more coming. So just earlier today, we announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This idea of bringing our cloud service, SCDC as a service on-premises to customer data centers, to customer edge locations. And the cool part about it, as Jaspreet mentioned, is that this world is becoming more and more distributed. And we're seeing that with just the number of SCDCs and how they're proliferating everywhere. And you do need that centralization in terms from a management perspective in order to handle all that diversity. And so that's a big focus for us in terms of the infrastructure, kind of just the core compute storage network. But you then have to up level and say, how do you think about the data? And that's really where this partnership comes in. Right, so Jaspreet, so if I understand that correctly, what you're trying to do here is to provide one data management method, no matter where the data lives. So I don't have to go and find one tiny thing for, oh, okay, I've got this other weird bit in the corner here that I need a special dedicated data protection thing for, because that's always difficult. I mean, data protection is hard enough. I really don't need to have, oh, how am I going to deal with this particular thing? Oh, now I've got to go and get another tool and learn how to use it, maintain it, keep everyone skilled in it. Actually, I can just pick Driva and then I've solved that problem. Is that what you're doing? That's right. I think we have more forward looking than backward looking. So what you're doing is when an application comes into an enterprise, think about it from a point of view of a new cloud, like a VMC, AWS deployment. If you're deploying a lot of new edge location or data centers or new cloud services, Driva's a perfect partner to bring data management along with it. For a legacy application that you always had, you can keep your legacy vendor with you, whether it has a Commvault, you can keep them as they remain in your enterprise, bring Driva for the new applications and hence all the new workloads which are more cloud bound workloads is that core focus, hence the VMC partnership. Right. So does that mean that I'll be able to use Driva wherever VMC is available? That's right, yeah. Because you're expanding how many places I can get VMC now, I've noticed. So yeah, so that's very interesting. It is, yeah. And I think that's again the beauty of the partnership is that we're doing a ton of work to deliver VMC to more and more locations. We've partnered with AWS and now we've got global coverage, almost all their regions by the end of this calendar year. And now with VMware caught on Dell EMC we can go wherever the customer is. They essentially give us a street address and we can deliver hardware there and then operate it remotely and they can take advantage of that. And the cool thing about it, that all comes up to this control plane we have running in the cloud and this is how we can interact with Driva. They can have a few simple APIs they can manage via us to access all those workloads that are distributed all over the place. Think of public cloud, right? Public cloud is nothing but Amazon's, initially was a concept of Amazon applying retail to IT, right? You can buy a resource anywhere in the globe at a fixed price point at certain SLA. That's the promise of public cloud promise of VMC to get same VM experience wherever you go across the world, same price point. Same promise to Driva, the same data you put anywhere can be managed, protected end to end, same policy, same price point across the globe. And people often forget that part of it. We're technologists, so people like to look at the speeds and feeds and what does the technology do? But when you're running a business there's actually a lot more to it. And pricing models and things that technologists sometimes find boring. I love a good spreadsheet, but something as a simple pricing model where I can understand it and I know what it's going to do for me where when I spin up a brand new application and I understand how am I going to manage this over the long term? How am I going to protect it? And what's it going to do for the ROI on that? And what's it going to look like in three years time not just turning up the brand new project? What is the operational cost of that going to look like? So these are the kinds of things that people, I think it's starting to be a lot more used to now that they, particularly with cloud it's a much more operational model. It's not a build model. It's yes, build is one part of it, but you also need to be able to run and manage it. And think of what we call the world of two ransomwares, right? There's a ransomware when you are worried about a data breach or a data loss. And there's another ransomware we have to, your data protection vendor or your hardware vendor says, give me five years of money upfront with the promise to manage the data eventually, right? So in the public cloud world, it's pay as you go on demand. You need a new application. You spin up a new workload in VMC, in AWS. You need data protection to spin up right there and then. No pre-planning, pre-positioning, architecture reviews needed. Yeah, and I think like the great thing about Druva and what we're talking about here and this consistency of operations, how you're managing data really goes into the whole strategy that VMware has around driving consistency across infrastructure as well. I think one of the big value propositions that we can help with is taking a lot of this very heterogeneous infrastructure with different capabilities, different hardware form factors and layering on our virtual infrastructure which simplifies a lot of that, delivering that consistent experience. And of course, data management, as we said, is a key part of that experience. Yeah, you mentioned kind of the move of VMware towards being more of a SaaS player and working in those environments. One of the flags along that journey is VMware's always had a robust ecosystem, but in the cloud, my understanding is you've released now a VMware cloud marketplace. Reminds me a little bit of a certain cloud provider that has a very well-known marketplace. It gives a little bit about it. And you know, Jesper Edel, of course, tell us about the Druva piece of that. Yeah, absolutely. So look, I mean, I think we again, we're kind of really evolving our strategic aims. You know, historically we've looked at how do we really virtualize an entire data center, right? This concept of the Software Defined Data Center, really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases. And now, as we've been talking about, we're in this world where you kind of STDCs everywhere, right, on-prem and the cloud, different public clouds. And so how do you really manage across all those? And these are the things we've been talking about. And so the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can give people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners, as well as open-source solutions. And these are things that come from the Bitnami acquisition that we recently did. So the idea here is that we can all make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to drive those consistent operations that exist on top of our platform and with our partners, and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well. Right. And Druva is part of it, right? We were number, we were day one launch partner on the marketplace. Marketplace serves predominantly two purposes. One is, you know, the ease of e-commerce. You can drive through a marketplace. Second is the ease of integration. You have a prepacket solution which comes along with it. It's the whole beauty of cloud, exactly as you mentioned. We see cloud beyond technology. It's an e-commerce model most companies should adopt too, right? And as a part of the progress, our commitment is to be on marketplace day one. Druva is right now number one ISV globally for AWS. So we understand the whole landscape of how e-commerce gets done on public cloud, very, very well. And we have super thrilled to be a partnership with VMC on the marketplace. The VMC marketplace. It's another one of those important indicators, I think, about VMware's cloud journey. Cloud isn't a destination. It's not a location. It's a way of doing things. The model, yep. Yeah, so having this marketplace way of consuming software and becoming far more like, as you say, it's SDDC, but with that software as a service. I don't know if you can have SDDC as a service. That's probably too many, too many letters. We use that internally, yes. Oh, there you go. And seeing those features coming to VMware and the partners that you're bringing into that ecosystem. Stu and I, we spoke before, so VMware has always been a great partner for everyone in that ecosystem. And it does have a real ecosystem. And we see it again this year at the show, that you have these partners who come in and you're finding ways to make it easier for those integrations to happen in a nice, easy to consume way. And customers like that. So the enterprise is a heterogeneous environment. If you just do one acquisition, and all of a sudden I've got two different ways of doing the same thing. So being able to have known trusted solutions to do that, where I don't have to spend ages and ages figuring out how do I configure this? How do I actually make this do what I need it to do? It's like, I'm trying to solve a customer problem. I'm not trying to build technology for its own sake, for most of the customers. I just want something that works. And particularly with data protection, I just want it to work. The model is not producing more back-abardments. No, I don't think it should, are they? It's just kind of a shame. I used to be a back-abardment. Maybe it's like, no, we don't need any more of those. Well, I think this is the idea, right? Like you talked at the beginning about this notion of service delivery and how can we take all these SCDCs that we have out there that customers are running and enhance their value and enhance the value to the customer's business by adding on these value-added services, right? And so I think that's one of the beauties of cloud marketplaces, that they can very easily extend what they, customers can extend what they already have with these additional services. Yeah. All right. Jespreet, VMware's been going through a lot of change. They've made acquisitions. I saw a number of announcements today that I don't think I would have seen back in the EMC days of some of the data protection solutions being baked in the platform. Tell us what it means to be a VMware partner today. I think it's great to see VMware innovating and making strong progress. I think in this world of constant change, you can either be in the front end of, you can never, never over-innovate, right? You can be in the front end of being in the edge, driving change, driving innovation, driving change industry, albeit take a backstreet and then be in HPE, right? So I think I'd love to see VMware, what they're doing and making all the progress and great to be a partner in this change, in this journey to see it as a strong partner. Yeah. I mean, we're not standing still and it's funny, like, so one of the biggest announcements today in my mind is Project Pacific. This re-architecture of vSphere to build in Kubernetes into the fabric of what vSphere is. And it's funny when you start looking at that because I think folks have a concept in their mind of what vSphere is, right? It's VM-based and I work with it in certain ways. It's got a certain API or interface and we're fundamentally changing all that, right? We're rethinking, you know, as I mentioned, how we deliver our SEDCs, how customers consume them. And so I think that notion of being at the forefront, we're very committed to that. Kit, I'm glad you broke it up because I'm still having a little trouble thinking through it. Now, on the one hand, every company is going through this, you know, we're going to containerize everything. We're going to make it microservices. Every infrastructure component, you know, now has that fundamental building. Block Docker had a ripple effect on what happened, similar to what VMware had a decade before. But I look at Project Pacific and I'm like, well, when Cloud Foundry was originally created, it was, you know, we want, back then we called it Paz, but I want a thin layer and I don't want to pull VMware along for that, necessarily. It might sit underneath it, but it might not. So, help us understand as to like, you know, how is this not like, you know, a lock-in to what you're going to use vSphere and you're going to have your license agreement with us every year and now you're going to be locked into this because this is your Kubernetes platform. So, yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. So look, I actually think it drives more openness because Kubernetes is an open platform and we're integrating that in and we're leveraging the Kubernetes API, right? And so then like the vSphere will have two northbound APIs, one of which is based on the existing VM-based one and the other one, which is Kubernetes. And so partially we're actually opening it up. The cool thing about what we can do with Pacific is that we have, what, 300, 400,000 customers running vSphere, they have an aggregate around 70 million workloads. We're able to take that massive footprint and move it forward almost overnight by building Kubernetes into vSphere. And so the way I look at it is this is a huge force multiplier for our customers, this ability to move their fleet of applications for at basically zero costs, very little costs, and while leveraging all the tools and technologies they already have. This is another good thing that, you know, that around our partnership with Druva as well is that because of the way we've architected this, all the tools that use vSphere today and the vSphere APIs, those APIs will see the Kubernetes pods and things that are provisioned and those tools can operate on those pods just like they can on VMs. And those things just work out of the box. So if a customer gets specific and uses Druva and they start provisioning some pods into Kubernetes on vSphere, Druva will see those, they can manage the data, that's all automatic. And of course Druva can do extra cool things like even get deeper integration there, but the point is that we've got, you know, thousands of partners, again, who's out of the box, that stuff will work. Now, is that locked in? No, I actually think that because people are switching over to Kubernetes, they now have the ability to move that to a different Kubernetes environment if they so see fit. Anyway, so that's my quick answer. Think about the world, right? Virtualization is practically free right now, right? What you pay for is the enterprise wants to pay for abstraction level, remove complexity, make my scale happen, right? And this is where you pay for the whole VMware stack. When the customers start deploying containers, they haven't seen the complexity they would see at scale. When they see the complexity in management, in data plane, in security plane, then they would need the ecosystem of providers to solve those complexities at scale. That is where I think if Kubernetes takes off in production application, that's not smoothly dev and test, it goes to production application, the world would need something which is a much more robust set of control planes to manage it end to end, right? Yeah, I mean, we've solved a lot of the hard problems around running applications in production. And I think what we're doing in the Pacific is enabling all those cool innovations to work not just for existing apps, but for new Kubernetes based apps as well. All right, well, Kit and Jaspreet, thank you so much, a lot of new things for everybody to dig into and always appreciate both of you and your teams are very responsive and dig in. Be looking forward to more blog posts and more podcasts from your team and the like to go into it more. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We have tons more coverage here at VMworld 2019. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.