 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. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren and you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2019 here in Moscow, North, actually the 10th year that we've had theCUBE at this event. Joining me on the program, I have Brad Anderson and Keith Norby, both with NetApp. Brad is an executive vice president and Keith is director of strategic alliances. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you. So, Brad, I've had the pleasure of working with VMware since 2002. It's one of the highlights of my career in tech has been watching that growth of virtualization, a company that was about 100 people when I first started watching them and that wave of virtualization that just had ripples throughout the industry was really impressive. But I didn't actually get to come to this show until 2010, so as I said, our 10th year of the show, you were one of the few that were at the inaugural event and it's the 16th year of it. So, just give us a little bit of a look back in what you've seen changing. NetApp, of course, is a long, long-time partner of VMware's. Absolutely. It was like 2003, 2004. It was at a hotel in San Diego and there's probably about 1,000 people there but I don't think they were planning 1,000 so it was the longest kind of room and we had people that were just kind of a mile down and finally, the comment was, hey, could we knock down a wall and kind of get people a little bit closer? So, no, that was a long time ago. And in fact, it was Diane Mendel. I had an opportunity to give a keynote and I think there was another keynote from IBM. Yeah, well, you know, I'm sorry they didn't invite you back on stage this morning but, you know, big keynote. A little bigger show today. Yeah, a little bigger. I think we're somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 is what this show's been for about the last five years. Conversation's very different today as I've made commentary. We're in the post-VM era today. VMs are no longer the center of the conversation and multi-cloud is something that they put out there which is the story I've been hearing from NetApp for many years, software company living in all of these cloud environments so talk to us a little bit about how that relationship with VMware and where NetApp sits in the ecosystem has changed. Yeah, I mean, you know, VMware has, NetApp and VMware has been a great partner for a long, long time and NetApp strategy is clearly hybrid multi-cloud. When you think about, you know, private clouds today, VMware has a huge footprint in that space so they continue to be super important. We probably have a little more expanse of definition of hybrid. To us, hybrid is private cloud and public cloud in all kinds of combinations. But we also strongly believe in multi-cloud and so we are, you know, we're driving very hard for the hybrid multi-cloud letting customers basically start anywhere they want to with any cloud provider on-prem in the cloud and have that, you know, that control of data irrespective of and move at their own pace. Yeah, so VMware has long been one of those places where everybody can meet. So you mentioned knocking down walls. VMware is one of the few companies that actually succeeded in doing that and having people be able to work with partners in other areas, there was often a lot of fighting between different vendors whereas here it's, well, whatever you as a customer wants to do, we will be there to do that with you. And NetApp's another one of those companies is like if you have some data, we will help you manage it no matter where it is. So tell us about something that, what are you doing right now in this new world where, as Stu mentioned, it's a post-VM world. So in this post-VM world, how do you manage your data in that post-VM world? Well, first of all, I mean, we really strongly believe about choice and so we're going to manage, you know, the data and start where the customer starts. I mean, we are not advocating that they have to start in cloud, they have to be on-prem, there's an orderly path because depending on the customer, they're all going to take a very different path. And so what we want to do is give them control their data irrespective of the path and allow them to move on that path. But we're seeing at NetApp that it's about the data beyond the data that's increasingly about applications and so you heard a little bit about Kubernetes. That's something we've strongly feel as well in providing a set of tools to provide choice where independent of the cloud, same Kubernetes services, same different tools, same tools set, same services on-prem or in the cloud. Yeah, and NetApp has a strong cloud presence. I mean, some of the things like cloud volumes, some of the other acquisitions that you've made that help you with the cloud journey. Like some of NetApp's offerings are really strong. No, very much so. And we think we can provide a superior customer experience but then if the customer wants to use a broad industry set of tools, we support that as well. We are supporting the customer on his journey with the tools as they determine. So Keith, tell us about some of the strategic partnerships that help NetApp to be able to partner with these different customers and to bring different vendors together to help them solve customer problems. Yeah, well it takes a lot of them to meet the customer needs. As you saw today and the landscape folks that are on the solutions exchange floor, it takes not just a partnership between NetApp and VMware but NetApp and VMware plus Veeam, NetApp and VMware plus a ton of other folks. Cisco has an example, long time partner of ours in FlexPod and the fact that we're doing memory accelerator FlexPod takes something that has had a long tradition of VMware excellence with Cisco and is now at an order of magnitude faster than anything you'd want for apps that need scale up performance, all the service capabilities of ONTAP for things like Metro cluster and beyond. Yep, so Keith, I remember back years ago it was who has the most integrations with VMware and all the VA AI and VVOLs and all of those pieces and NetApp always was right at the top of the list working in those environments. Maybe Brad, if you want to answer this. But today, give us some examples of kind of that joint engineering work that goes on between NetApp and VMware. Obviously there's bundle solutions like FlexPod, that vSphere plus NetApp in there but at that engineering level, where does the rubber hit the road? Yeah, it's funny because I've been at every VMworld except two and so I've been with you in the sense I've seen the landscape of these innovations where Steve Herrod and some others would talk about the movie previews of things like VA AI and VASA providers all coming and that was the big thing you'd focus on. Now it's less about that and I think it's more about what Brad has kind of brought to NetApp and in the focus on simplicity. Now the funny part about simplicity is that to deliver simplicity much like the engineering detail to deliver Tesla or an iPhone is extraordinary. So the work isn't less, in fact the work is more and pre-configuring or pre-wiring as much as possible, the work we started to do over a year ago between George Curry and our CEO and Sanjay Poonan got together, we started planning on some multi-cloud plans and that's where you see a lot of our persistence in cloud volumes on VMC. You see us having a VMware-validated design on NetApp HCI for VMware private cloud, VDI solutions and these are meant to draw NSX in and when has NetApp ever had an NSX integration? All of a sudden now we have NSX integrations to make that easier to bring on board. We have V-realized integration so you can build a self-serve portal catalog just like they talked about today and the list goes on and on. So it's funny how it's less, the features are important but what's more important is trying to make this as simple as possible for people to consume and then for the folks that need things like scale-up apps and services or they need the same cloud volumes in this data fabric on any one of the hyperscalers, we have really the only end-to-end story on that and that's what makes the VMware Plus NetApp thing work really well. So how do you balance the flexibility of being able to solve multiple customer problems and they all have different needs? How do you balance the simplicity with that complexity and it was mentioned by Pat in the keynote as well that you've got this kind of tension between I need to be able to do everything flexibly but that can sometimes lead to complexity. So how do you change that to become simple for customers to use? I mean, I think the biggest thing is a design input. I mean, if you start out with just trying to make the technology all it can be with one particular cloud or one particular partner, then it becomes very difficult as you try to expand it to multiple partners and because it's about choice, we're kind of thinking about that right up front and so if it's a design input, it puts as Keith said, it puts some burden on the technical team but it is a much more powerful solution if you can pull it off and that's been a big part and I think it kind of starts with this mentality that it's about choice and we got to make simplicity and now part of the value proposition rather than an after thought as it has maybe historically has been. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about customers because the message I hear this morning is you talk multi-cloud, you talk cloud native. There's a lot of change in the industry. I'm participating in a couple of career advice events because I remember back 10 years ago it was oh my gosh, if I'm a server admin, I need to learn to be virtualization then it was cloud or architects but we know that change in the industry is constant so what are some of those key drivers when you're talking to customers in general and specifically when you talk about engaging in partnership with VMware? Yeah I mean I think it starts with people just recognizing even if people haven't moved the cloud today that tends to be their primary strategy. I mean in a recent survey I think we found 98% the customer said cloud is their strategy however 53% said still on-prem is their primary compute center so they're not there yet and so but because that's their strategy then we have to respect that and so increasingly you're seeing a net app we lead with cloud even though we know customers aren't quite ready there but we align to that long term vision but then our strategy is made up of helping them modernize what they have currently on-prem helping build private clouds with the same services they have in public cloud and then let them have the complete absolute choice of what public cloud or multiple public clouds they want and design with that full spectrum in mind knowing they could start anywhere on that scale. Yeah the customers ultimately are going to dictate to the market what is real and I think over time PO is sort of vet who's right on this stuff and so history's a great lesson teacher of all those things. For me it seems less about how many different things you can offer and as you see whether we're at VMworld or at Red Hat Summit or AWS re-invent or KubeCon, every vector turn of the customer's prism on this will say something slightly different but I think in general categorically if you look at it you can start to just glean what you think are the real requirements and by the way the real requirements are not all technical. I think what gets lost on folks is that there is a lot of operational political factors probably political factors a lot more than what a lot of people think. They're just talking about what the speed is to refactor apps or to migrate apps. Frankly there's just a lot of politics that goes with that there's a lot of just stuff to work through. And that's where I think simplicity is so important because of those non-technical reasons simplicity resonates across the board. Yeah but I would say you have to have simplicity with capabilities. Yeah I mean just one of the things you talk about right if I modernize some application well the people that were using that application they were probably complaining about that old one but at least they do have to relearn that new one. So we're going to have some exciting announcements tomorrow so everyone kind of check out tomorrow's stuff that we'll announce with VMware with NetApp tomorrow. We're here at the show floor and we'll be showcasing some of those things. We can't give away too much of that today but we think the future is bright and together with VMware this partnership I think has a lot of upside. And like you said we've had a 17 year history with hundreds of thousands of customers together and an install base that goes back to like you said to be very beginning. I remember back to the very beginning of the ecosystem NetApp was one of the strongest players in that market and since then it's evolved beyond just NFS. Well hopefully Brad we can get you on a keynote for in another 10 years and you'll be able to we can knock that wall down for you. Exactly. Exactly. All right great want to give you both the final word you know so many big themes going on you know takeaways that you want people to have from VMworld 2019 Brad. I think the biggest takeaway is that just like the show today you didn't hear a whole lot about virtualization it's moving to containerize and we at NetApp view that you know we support all virtualized environments on-prem across the cloud. We are moving to supporting all containerized application environments on-premises and cloud and it's about choices and combinations of both but keeping data control. Yeah I'd say for me it's really the power of the better together. You know to me it's nobody's great apart. It takes really an ecosystem of players to kind of work together for the customer benefit and the one that we've demonstrated at VMware with NetApp plus VMware has been a powerful one for well over 17 years and the proofs and the pudding in terms of the joint customers that have a ton of loyalty to both of us and they want us just to work it out. So you know whether your allegiance on one side Kubernetes battle or another or you're on one side of anyone's storage choice or another you know I think the customers want NetApp and VMware to work its out and come up with solutions and we've done that. And now wait for the second act of this to come out. We'll start that tomorrow. Keith and Brad thank you so much. If you couldn't tell by the sirens on the street we are live here from San Francisco. At Moscone North. Lots more coverage, three days wall to wall coverage for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE. Thank you.