 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, day two of VMworld 2018 with the one and only Dave Vellante. Hey Dave. Hey, still got my voice. You do, that's good. And we have probably one of the biggest three-day schedules we've ever had on theCUBE. 90-point interviews. The biggest. The biggest. Well, speaking of big, we're excited to welcome two guests to theCUBE. One, a CUBE alumni, Dave Shacoches, VP of Product, Hybrid IT at CenturyLink. Hey Dave. Dave Shack, welcome back. Well done. And we've got, thank you, that wasn't planned. I'll take the credit. Great cap and burger. The cloud solution started just at VMware. Welcome guys. Thank you for having me. Yeah, super to be here. So this is a huge event. I think this morning Sanjay mentioned they're expecting 100,000 people to engage through the live stream, the on-demand experiences. A lot of impact. Dave, yesterday you had a breakout session where you talked about CenturyLink, your cloud management platform, the managed service. Multi-cloud. Give us a little bit of an overview of that session and some of the takeaways that the attendees got. Yeah, great. And you're right. It's a great energy at the show, a lot of engagement. And what we wanted to try to do this year and what we were excited about doing is to highlight a little bit of what we've been doing in the cloud management space and highlight how CenturyLink can help customers, especially in some of these emerging use cases where, and the title of the presentation was where milliseconds matter. And that to us is all about choice of workload venue, choice of network path and being able to optimize that network path, but then also having the managed services and the IT consulting, they can help customers figure out how to best take advantage and how to make those choices within the landscape of hybrid cloud. So it was actually a demonstration that uses some of our services, one of our service called Cloud Application Manager, which is a workload and managed services deployment tool that actually works the same on VMware as it does on AWS and takes advantage of our partnerships there. And then we use our service we call Cloud Connect, which is what we can use to create a secure, private, dynamic on demand connection between different cloud execution venues. And then we had sort of our IT consulting team come in and say, okay, based on those two side-by-side deployments we just did and here based on the optimized network path, we actually showed how the milliseconds are actually better, but it's a better performing application on the private, private link versus the public public. A real simple example, but it starts to illustrate how orchestration when you can control the network layer and you have the advisory services to help customers make the decisions and judgment, it's a powerful combination. I remember last decade it was when they, we put for the industry put for this notion of private cloud or hybrid cloud and this sort of like, like vision, me and Paul Moritz used to talk about it and others. And so that was kind of great vision, but the problem was it didn't work and it took a long time. So I wonder if you could talk about what's changed, what's evolved, is it just simple maturity, it took that long, just it's hard. And are we there? Yeah, so hybrid cloud is absolutely a reality. We are there. Partners like CenturyLink have really turned it into a reality. I mean, VMware has worked very hard to develop software to help enable partners to realize that vision and really link the business strategies of these customers to the hybrid technology. So when it makes sense to have workloads on-premises with the customer and moving those workloads to a CenturyLink private cloud, those things are things that CenturyLink really has to figure out. Hybrid is the most important word in the industry and the most overused word in the industry. What isn't a hybrid? It's almost easier to explain something that isn't a hybrid than call out something that is. I mean, because everything's a combination of, everybody's unique, right? Everybody's got their own unique set of permutations. I think, Dave, what's really been changing in the industry is as, I think probably the biggest change is the history of monolithic applications moving towards more microservices applications. Designing applications to do a business service for their least focused purpose. Do this one thing, do it well, and then integrate all those services together to achieve the right business outcome, whether it's a work process flow or whether it's an event-driven architecture. I think what you're seeing, why you're seeing hybrid cloud takeoff is that enterprise architects are a lot more used to combining things together because they realize it's much more flexible or you can let one individual team just go do its thing, build its service, expose that service to the IT architecture, and keep on innovating and serving the needs of its customers, whether external or internal. So the software works, it's hard, yeah. And now milliseconds really do matter, physics and... In a hybrid, how is a hybrid talking to each other? What's the connective tissue? It's a network that needs to be able to bond all those microservices or hybrid components together. Somebody said this morning, it was either Michael or maybe it was Pat this afternoon, I lose track, three laws, law of physics, law of the company, the organization and law of the land. And those determine where you put data or put compute and naturally it's going to be some kind of hybrid. And you guys can make that a reality by being proximate to the public cloud, proximate to the on-prem. So talk about some of the use cases that you're seeing evolve in your customer base. Sure, one of the areas that we're really excited about is some of the smart solutions, capabilities that we're starting to do. I mean, there was a period of time where CenturyLink would look at a customer environment and think about getting network access to a building. Okay, so the network is on the building and now that building is on net. Now we're starting to really think about, and I really loved Pat's line yesterday of moving from data centers to centers of data. We're starting to look at everything that we're bringing onto our network as a potential center of data and what data is that facility producing? What data could that facility be producing between sensors and the facilities management systems and cameras and facilities are getting a lot smarter. So when we bring a facility on net, we're really working with the leaders of whoever's taking charge of that built environment and figuring out how we add value add and how we do managed services inside that facility. We played a pretty big role at a pretty big football game a short time ago where a US Bank Stadium in Minnesota is a facility that we've wired up and helped make that a smart facility for fan experience. So some of the use cases as it pertains to cloud is once you're generating all that data, getting it secure access back to a data center where it can be analyzed, looking for the patterns and then bringing those patterns back into the facility where you can start applying them. That game was a somewhat painful experience for this fan but that's, you and me both. We'll keep that aside, you and me both. And that, you know, the generation of data and the analytics is very, very new and it's not the generation of data that's new. When you go into these buildings, like let's say it's a building in New York that's generating HVAC data and door lock data, security data, video cameras, right? What happens is that data was just stored for some period of time and then deleted. Now CenturyLink can apply machine learning techniques. They can bring that data back. They can interact with the leaders of the business to understand what kind of value can they bring out of this data and move up the stack, right? Where instead of, you know, the conversation used to be how can I just move this particular workload to the cloud, right? I want to move to the cloud. But now the conversation is, is how do I take this application and realize real business value? And that's where these edge cases, where, you know, this edge computing, this IoT use cases that you're talking about, they really turn into real dollars, environmental impact, you know, all sorts of unintended consequences above and beyond just making money for a customer. And you're building, I'm envisioning, I listen to you guys talk, a network mesh of data. And then, you know, over time, I'll apply machine intelligence to that data and my cloud, which is everywhere now, it gives me scale, it gives me the ability to attract ecosystem partners for innovation. I mean, that seems to be the innovation cocktail, if you will, for the next decade. It's data, these networks of data, machine intelligence, and cloud. And there are things you can do when, and one of the reasons why, first off, one of the reasons why we're in the IT solution space and delivering, you know, a data center and cloud-based value-added services, is first off, to manage a network, you need to be very good at managing virtualization. So we need those skills anyway, and so we're committed to building those skills in terms of the company. But the other asset that we have with regards to the network is there's just so many paths through the network that we can hyper-optimize. And to be able to manage, when you're talking about a mesh of data, you want to be able to focus in on, you know, a particular data path. A lot of organizations can build up a cloud network or a cloud networking, a cloud direct connect company through a series of lease lines. We have so much optionality as you move through a network and we can really come up with route miles and route paths through the network that are self-healing and can react. It's vital when you're creating that mesh of data of a composite application that's maybe tying into a data service that they're subscribing to in SaaS, tying into a data service that's running on a legacy private cloud, tying into a scale-up, scale-down public cloud environment. That kind of hybrid is relying on such a strong network. You need to be able to optimize it. Yeah, I mean, I heard the stat yesterday that on average, a large organization has eight clouds that said, we're a small organization. I can name eight clouds like that that we have. I mean, it's got to be 80 clouds that these organizations have. Plus, software companies are turning into clouds all the time now, right? I mean, VMware is a great example, right? They've gone and evolved their offering and it's really where I think VMware has really led in the market. You're always effective in the market when you can lead from a position where you're modeling the behavior. You're not telling the customer you want them to do one thing and then doing another. VMware very much saw the cloud trends and turned its software into an online service. The online mode of delivery and delivering it as a cloud has really been effective. I know from our perspective as a service provider, it allows us to sort of move up the stack and add value at a higher layer, right? We're so much of our value proposition when we started out with VMware 15 years ago building private clouds. There was just so much time and effort and calories you had to spend setting up the storage network and getting it all installed. And basically VMware said, here you go. Here's the software. Good luck implementing it and call us when you need support. But now, VMware is moving up the stack and delivering it all together, all wired together. And so we're able to go and add value on top of that in a lot more of a deep and meaningful way to our client base instead of saying, look, we got it working. So Dave, what's CenturyLink's sweet spot? Well, you know you're going to knock it out of the park. You're going to crush the competition. You're going to make the client happy. What's that sweet spot for you? The two big sweet spots for us is really where we can deliver an IT solution that is either reliant on a secure, reliable network connection or a insight into our cybersecurity capabilities. There's a whole other wing of CenturyLink that is a pretty significant cybersecurity group we have because we're monitoring so much of the data that's flowing through that network. And this is visibility and insight that we're doing big data analysis against all these different packet flows where we can see threats emerging across our network between our DDoS mitigation centers and our threat intelligence service and our security log monitoring environment that allows us to pick up on those threats as they're emerging. So a customer that has a security conscious, you know, network reliance workload and application is really where CenturyLink's assets shine through. Greg, last question for you as we wrap things up here. Talked about business outcomes, obviously essential for every customer. Talked about the value add of the partnership. When we're at shows like this, we talk about digital transformation. You said hybrid is, you know, a very overused word. But at the end of the day, companies can't really successfully transform their IT digitally transform without cultural transformation. Very true. Can you give us and kind of bring it home here with how VMware and CenturyLink are helping customers really evolve their culture to be able to glean the value from this partnership and the technology? Yeah, certainly. The biggest area where CenturyLink and VMware I think play well is when you're talking to C-level executives, right? So when you're talking to the decision makers, the strategy folks, and what happens is when we can take some of that workload back to experts, what it does is it frees up the mind share for more strategic thinking within the business. So they can focus on culture. They can focus on turning into DevOps. They can focus into using their data to move their business forward. They can make a better airplane. They can make, you know, they can sell more houses. Whatever it is that they do well, you have to free up that mind share in order to get the bandwidth, use a CenturyLink term, the bandwidth to think about how to transform your culture, right? And to improve the happiness of your employees and things like that. Cultural transformation is every bit as important as digital transformation. You can't really do one without the other. And that's where I see, you see a lot of organizations that are succeeding, taking a cultural mindset and really applying platform thinking. If we as an IT organization, wherever I work, right? You know, in a public sector, in the private sector, whatever industry it is, if we are building something that our partners can use, our customers can use, our internal teams can use, but we are building it together, that's the kind of cultural transformation you're seeing. And that's, you know, sort of embedded inside most organizations digital transformation. I like that, not, it's platform thinking, not product thinking, not necessarily project thinking, but platform thinking. And there's maybe many projects that support that platform North Star, but that's, that is the North Star. Yeah, that's sort of IT delivery state of the art. Using a service provider gives the customer freedom to think, right? Think about their business, think about where they want to go and quit worrying about the plumbing, right? Let, quit worrying about, you know, what do I do just to keep the lights on, right? I like that, the freedom to think. Well, thanks so much guys for stopping by and sharing all of the momentum that CenturyLink and VMware are doing together. We appreciate it, thank you. Good to chat with you, thanks guys. For Two Dave's and a Greg, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from VMworld 2018, stay tuned, stick around, we'll be back.