 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. And welcome back here, San Francisco, Moscone Center North, John Walls along with John Troyer. We're live here on theCUBE at VMworld 2019. And right now we're joined by Chris McRinalds, a product management and cloud-undated services for CenturyLink, and it's good to see you, sir. Good to be here, thanks for having me. And he's going to tell us today why milliseconds matter. Right, you are. That is the goal. You're subject of an upcoming presentation just in about 45 minutes or so. But we'll get to that in a little bit. First off, let's just paint the picture of CenturyLink. Your presence here, quite obvious. But what your portfolio includes there, what you're up to, and maybe starting to hint a little bit about why milliseconds matter to you. Yeah, it makes sense. So we're a technology company, global in nature. A lot of our roots started with fiber connectivity, basic networking services, IP services, but over the years we've become far more of an IT service company. So there was an acquisition of Savas a long time ago that brought a lot of those capabilities to our company and we've made more fold in acquisitions that have also bolstered those capabilities. We have invested heavily in security services recently and about two weeks ago we had an announcement that said we're investing heavily in edge compute, getting workloads closer to end users. And that's really where milliseconds matter is you want the performance of those applications to consumers or machinery or whatever it may be to work effectively and work well. And sometimes that requires that those workloads are in close proximity to the end users. When you bring up edge compute and we were just having this discussion before we started, John, asked a viewer, okay, how do you define the edge? Because there are a lot of different slices of that, right? Different interpretations, different definitions. So with that being said, how do you define and or at least in your mind, how do you separate edge from the core and what's true edge? Yeah, good question. So I think the broadest- Well it's John's question, not mine. I want to get the credit. And I chuckled both times, so that's right. Because there is no perfect answer. The broadest definition I've seen is that you have core and you can think AWS, Azure, you can think where the big core cloud nodes are that are pretty central, maybe 50 milliseconds away from the end users. There's two intermediate edges, if you will, and this is where there are varying opinions. To me, there's really only one. If you're within five milliseconds of where your end users are, I consider that to be a market edge. Some people say there's a closer edge that's within a millisecond of the end users, but I personally have not seen the use cases come out yet that require that low of a latency that don't actually reside where the end users are. So, go ahead. Well, so that's some modules at a warehouse or a manufacturing facility. Is that what you consider like an edge? To me, a market edge. Yeah, it's interesting. If you have 10 manufacturing plants in a geographic area, or maybe a better example, is if you're a logistics company and you have sorting and distribution centers, you have multiple of those in an area that can all use the same compute, as long as it's within five milliseconds. You can do the sorting lines and keep the machinery working. You can get a routed into the right vehicles for distribution. That's a good market edge. When you get all the way to that deep edge or on-premise, think of an autonomous vehicle as a good example. There are certain things you're not going to want to transmit and make driving decisions that don't reside on that vehicle. You don't want to crash into anyone. You need almost instantaneous decisions. And that would be the edge. That intermediate one millisecond that sits between the two of those, I think it pushes one direction or the other. So Chris, here at VMworld 2019, obviously a lot of talk about cloud, but very specifics this year. We have a lot of specifics around what VMware is doing. Hybrid cloud is real. And of course, hybrid cloud implies the network. And so one of the latest announcements from CenturyLink is that you're providing VMware cloud on AWS. You're managing, you are able to help manage, provide that as a managed service. I know you already do managed services where you're managing stuff in your data centers, but I guess you can also manage workloads on-prem. And I mean, talk a little bit about that portfolio and how adding VMC on AWS, VMware cloud on AWS adds to that and then maybe we'll slide into the networking piece and how important that is. Yep. So we have a tool called Cloud Application Manager that has been built over the past handful of years that allows customers to deploy workloads to AWS to Azure and now to VMC on AWS, as well as private cloud environment. So maybe customers want to host those workloads on-premise. Maybe it's regulatory compliance or whatever the reason may be. So we have a lot of experience of helping customers deploy those workloads. And then a lot of customers come to us and want us to manage the life cycle of those workloads. So those are the core capabilities. I think the reason that VMC on AWS is so compelling to customers is a lot of customers may not want to deal with the hardware refresh cycles that they do when it's their own private cloud environment or their own hardware stack. This gives them the opportunity to migrate those workloads in a relatively seamless fashion into an environment that is sitting in more of a public cloud type model where it's OPEX versus the CAPEX and the headache. Yeah, go ahead, John. Oh, that's good. Just in terms of some, and so part of why you would work with CenturyLink is you are an experienced managed service provider, but also you have a lot of the networking setup to do that efficiently, right? So maybe you're talking about some of the workloads that you see going up there and some of the tools and performance folks can expect. Yeah, that's a core part of my product set. So near and dear to me for sure, we've developed a lot of capabilities over the last year and a half around dynamic networking. So if you have your existing VMware environment in your own data center or maybe it's a private cloud that's managed by CenturyLink, we now have the ability for customers to go in and create net new connections, private network connections that have better latency, have better throughput and performance between those environments and AWS, or in this case, VMC on AWS. And it allows customers to do a couple of things. If they have their own environment and they're happy with it today, but it's not scaling and they need to add more capacity, they could do that in a hybrid fashion in VMC on AWS. If they're done with their existing environment and hardware stack and they just want to forklift and move that into VMC on AWS, they can create a big, large connection, push a ton of data over a few weeks, shut it down, and our billing models and hourly billing models such that we're only charging them for as long as it's necessary. This gives them flexibility to manage where their workloads are sitting between those two locations as they see fit over time. So you're talking about all these new flexibilities, new capabilities, much more agile systems being, I guess interconnected with each other, right? But whether it's hybrid or whether it's multi-cloud, whatever the case is, how do you get everybody or everything to talk to each other in a way that works and provides the, addresses the latency challenge? Because to me, I'm again, outside looking in, that's a big hurdle as new capabilities get developed, new possibilities exist, but we got to make it fast and we have to make sure they're speaking the same language. Yeah, it's a great question and it is very challenging and it is not all automated today as much as we would like it to be. We have great integration to deploy workloads between environments. We've spent a ton of time from a networking standpoint of integrating with different cloud providers and they each have their own little nuances and to make it common between all of them takes a lot of time and effort. I think where a lot of our focus is going in the next 12 months is how do you take those application, migration and management capabilities we have in one tool set? How do you marry that with all of the dynamic networking capabilities and standardization across the cloud providers we've done? So now it's not only are you moving network workloads, you're also creating the right underlying network to support those workloads in that multi-cloud fashion well. So two capabilities we have, we just need to marry them up a little more tightly. Well, I mean, what are you seeing out there in the market with your customers? Multi-cloud right is perhaps another overused word like edge. Are you seeing multi-cloud portfolios? Are you seeing applications actually use have data in one place and the compute in another and obviously network becomes increasingly important if that's a reality today, but is that real or is that still science fiction? It's becoming more real. So there are a lot of customers, this is my opinion, a lot of enterprises really bet big on one cloud provider because you have to build up the competency of capabilities inside your own shop and you become really good with working in Azure or AWS or Google or VMware on VMC. The companies that are doing true multi-cloud and using multiple cloud providers well are companies that probably reside around here. So I won't say any of these specifically are doing this, but companies like Uber, companies like Spotify, companies that are born in the cloud that started with those core competencies will take the best of multiple cloud providers. So maybe the big data analytics sitting in Google is most intriguing to them, but they love the storage cost price points on AWS and they love this aspect in Azure. They'll piece together components since they built it in a containerized fashion and they take the best of what each cloud has to offer. And to your point, the cloud providers are coming to CenturyLink and saying we need a better way to stitch together all of these different cloud environments because people, the cutting edge developers are pushing us in that direction now. What about the application network relationship? Changing? You see a shift there of some kind as we're talking about obviously a lot of new opportunities, a lot of new developments and so does that alter the dynamics of that relationship in any way? It does and it's those same conversations I just mentioned actually that's driving it. I think today it is network engineers and network infrastructure people reacting to applications not performing well or reacting to a software, developers requested to add this Google region or that VMware on AWS region. Over time what's going to happen I believe is there are service mesh orchestration capabilities like Istio is a good example, is the one Google is pushing hard and what it allows people to do is from a rules-driven perspective, I want my application to have these latency requirements and you can't find me a network solution that is any worse than that or if you're seeing packet loss greater than 80%, I want you to add more capacity to the network. It won't be humans and network engineers doing that, it's going to be applications saying here are my criteria for me to work well, networks, let me see all the options I have out there, now I'm going to go pick the best one and change it if I need to make myself work the way I need to as an application. I love that I've never connected Istio down to, as an app service layer down to the network. Thank you, I just had a new, I got a new thought. Eureka! Another reason why milliseconds matter. That's right. All right, hey Chris thanks for the time, we appreciate that, I know this is a very busy time for you and you do have a speaking engagement so we're going to cut you loose for that but thanks for spending time with us and good luck at the CenturyLink. Appreciate it, enjoyed it. Looking forward to more success. Back with more from VMware World 2019 after this short break right here on theCUBE. All right, thanks for the time.