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 everyone, CUBE's live coverage for VMworld 2019 in Moscone, North, in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our 10 years, we have Eric Herzog, the CMO and Vice President of Global Storage, channels at IBM, CUBE alum has been on, this is his 11th appearance on theCUBE at VMworld. That's the number one position. Congratulations, welcome back. Well, thank you very much. I always love to come to theCUBE. Sporting the nice shirt and the IBM badge, well done. Thank you, thank you. What's going on with IBM and VMworld? First get the news out, what's happening for you guys here? So for us, we just had a big launch actually in July. That was all about big data storage for big data in AI and also storage for cyber resiliency. So we just had a big launch in July. So just sort of continuing that momentum. We have some exciting things coming out on September 12th in the high end of our storage product line. And then some additional things very heavily around containers at the end of October. So the OpenShift is the first question I have that pops in my head. You know, I think of IBM, I think of IBM Storage, I think of Red Hat, Macquisition. OpenShift's been very successful. Pat Gelsk was talking containers, Kubernetes. Right. OpenShift has been a big part of Red Hat's offering now part of IBM. Has that RedShift, I mean, OpenShift's come in to your world and how do you guys view that? I mean, containers, obviously. Is there any impact there at all? So from a storage perspective, no. IBM Storage has been working with Red Hat for over 15 years, way before the company ever thought about buying them. So we went to the old Red Hat summits. It was two guys, a dog in a note and IBM was there. We've been supporting Red Hat for years and years and years. So for the storage division, it's probably one of the least changes to the direction compared to the rest of IBM because we were already doing so much with Red Hat. There's a presence of creation at the whole Red Hat movement. We've seen this summits. I was kind of teeing up the question, but legitimately though, now that you have that relationship under your belt and IBM's integrating OpenShift and all the services, you're starting to see Red Hat being an integral part across IBM. Does that impact you guys at all? So we've already talked about our support for Red Hat OpenShift. We do support it. We also support any sort of container environment. So we've made sure that if it's not OpenShift and someone's going to leverage something else that our storage will work with it, we've had support for containers now for two and a half years. We also support the CSI standard. We publicly announced that earlier in the year that we'd be having products at the end of the year and into next year around the CSI specification. So we're working on that as well. And then IBM also came out with a thing that are called cloud packs. These cloud packs are built around Red Hat. These are add-ons that across multiple divisions and from that perspective, we're positioned as really that ideal rock solid foundation underneath any of those cloud packs with our support for Red Hat and the container world. How about protecting containers? I mean, you guys obviously have a lot of history and data protection. Containers are more complicated. There's lots of them. You spin them up, spin them down. If they don't spin them down, they're an attack point. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first thing I'd say is stay tuned for the 22nd of October, because we will be doing a big announcement around what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. We've already publicly stated we would be doing stuff. Already said we'd be having stuff either the end of this year in Q4 or in Q1. So we'll be doing actually our formal launch on the 22nd of October from Prague. And we'll be talking much more detail about what we're doing for modern data protection in the container space. Now, why Prague? What's your thing? IBM has a big event called TechU. It's a technical university and there'll be about 2,000 people there. So we'll be doing our launch as part of the TechU process. So, Ed Walsh, who you both know well and myself, will be doing a joint keynote at that event on the 22nd. So talk a little bit more about multi-cloud. You hear all kinds of stuff on multi-cloud here and we've been talking on theCUBE for a while. It's like you got IBM Red Hat, you got Google, Cisco's thrown a hat in the ring, obviously VMware has designs on it. You guys are an arms dealer, but of course you're, at the same time, IBM, IBM just bought Red Hat. So what are your thoughts on multi-cloud? First, how real is it? The sizable opportunity. And from a storage perspective, storage division's perspective, what's your strategy there? Well, from our strategy, we've already been talking hybrid multi-cloud for several years. In fact, we came to Wikibon, your sister entity, and actually, Ed and I did a presentation to you in July of 2017. I looked it up, the title says hybrid multi-cloud. Storage for hybrid multi-cloud. So before IBM started talking about it, as a company, which now is, of course, our official line, hybrid multi-cloud, the IBM storage division was supporting that. So we've been supporting all sorts of cloud now for several years, what we call transparent cloud tiering. We basically just see cloud as a tier. Just the way Flash would see hard driver tape as a tier, we now see cloud as a tier. And our spectrum virtualized for cloud sits in a VM, either in Amazon or in IBM cloud. And then several of our software products, the spectrum line, spectrum protect, spectrum scale are available on the AWS marketplace as well as the IBM cloud marketplace. So for us, we see multi-cloud from a software perspective where the cloud providers offer it on their marketplaces, our solutions, and we have several, got some stuff with Google as well. So we don't really care what cloud and it's all about choice and customers are gonna make that choice. There's been surveys done, you guys have talked about it, that certainly in the enterprise space, you're not gonna use one cloud, you use multiple clouds, three, four, five, seven. So we're not gonna care what cloud to use, whether it be the big four, right, Google, IBM, Amazon, or Azure, could it be NTT in Japan? We have over 400 small and medium cloud providers that use our spectrum protect as the engine for their backup as a service. We love all 400 of them. By the way, there's another 400 we'd like to start selling spectrum protect as a service. So from our perspective, we will work with any cloud provider, big, medium, and small, and believe that that's where the end users are going, is to use not just one cloud provider, but several. So we want to be the storage connected. That's a good bet. And again, you bring up a good point, which I'll just highlight for our own watching. You guys have made really good bets early, kind of like we were just talking to Pat Gelsinger, he was making some great bets. You guys have made some, the right calls on a lot of things. Sometimes, Dave's critical of things in there that I don't really have visibility in this storage analyst, he is. But generally speaking, you, Red Hat, software, the systems group made it software. How would you describe the benefits of those bets paying off today for customers? You mentioned versatility, all these different partners. Why is IBM relevant now? And from those bets that you've made, what's the benefit to the customers? How would you talk about that? Because it's kind of a big message. You got a lot going on at IBM Storage, but you've made some good bets that turned out to be on the right side of tech history. What are those bets and what are they materializing for you to? Well, the key thing is, you know, I always wear a Hawaiian shirt on the cube. I think once, maybe I haven't. You were forced to wear a white shirt. You were forced to wear the white shirt. And once I actually had a shirt from, when I used to work for Pat at EMC, but in general, Hawaiian shirt. And why? Because you don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. And we've been riding the wave of technology. First, it was all about AI and automation inside of storage. Our easy tier product, automatically tiers. You don't have, all you do is set up once, and after that, automatically use data back and forth, not only to R-rays, but over 450 R-rays that aren't R's. And the data is hot, it goes to the fastest tier. If you have 15,000 RPM drives, that's your faster. It automatically knows that and moves data back and forth between hot, fast and cold. So one was putting AI and automation in storage. Second wave we've been following was clearly flash. It's all about flash. We create our own flash. We buy raw flash, create our own modules. They are in the industry standard form factor, but we do things for example, like embed encryption with no performance hit into the flash. Latency as low as 20 microseconds. Things that we can do because we take the flash and customize it, although it is in industry standard form factor. The other one is clearly storage software and software defined storage. All of our arrays come with software. We don't sell hardware, we sell a storage solution. They either come with Spectrum Virtualizer, Spectrum Scale, but those packages are also able to stand alone. If you want to go to your reseller or your distributor and buy off the shelf white box componentry, storage rich servers, you can create your own array with Spectrum Virtualized for block, Spectrum Scale for file, IBM Cloud Object Storage for cloud. So if someone wants to buy software only, just the way Pat was talking about software defined networking, will some software for file block or object and they don't buy any infrastructure from us, they only buy the software. So is that why you have a large customer base? Is that why there's so much diverse set of implementations or partners? Well we've got customers that are system oriented, right? Sell me a flash system. Got other clusters that say, look, I just want to buy Spectrum Scale, I don't want to buy your infrastructure, just all work, build my own, and we're fine with that. And the other aspect we have of course is we've got the modern data protection with Spectrum Protect. So you've got a lot of vendors out on the floor, they only sell backup, that's all they sell. And you got other people on the floor, they only sell an array, they have nice little arrays, but they can't do an array and software defined storage and modern data protection, one throat to choke, one tech support entity to deal with, one set of business partners to deal with, and we can do that, which is why it's so diverse. We have people who don't have any of IBM storage at all, but they backup everything with Spectrum Protect. We have other customers have flash systems, but they use backup from one of our competitors, and that's okay, because we'll always get a PL one way or another, right? So you want the choices factor. Question on the ecosystem and your relationship with VMware, as John said, 10th year at VMworld, if you go back 10 years, the VMware storage was limited, they had very few resources, they were throwing out APIs to the storage industry and saying, here, you guys fix this problem, and you had this cartel, it was EMC, IBM was certainly in there, NetApp, a couple others, HP, HP at the time. Dell, I don't know if Dell was there, they probably were, but you had the big COS that actually got the SDK early, and then you'd go off and try to solve the storage problems, of course, EMC at the time was sort of putting the brakes on VMware, now it's totally different. You've got actually similar cartel, although you've got different ownership structure with Dell EMC, and you've got vSAN, VMware's doing its own software, finally the cuffs are off, so your thoughts on the changes that have gone on in the ecosystem, IBM's sort of position and your relationship with VMware, how that's evolved. So the relationship for us is very tight, whether it be the old days of VASA, VAI, vCenter, ops support, right, then VVOL1, now VVOL2, so we've been there every single time, and again, we don't fight the way we ride the way, virtualization is a wave, it's swept the industry, it's swept the end users, it's swept every aspect of compute, we just were riding that wave and making sure our storage always worked with it, with VMware, as well as other hypervisors as well, but we always supported VMware first. VMware also has a strong relationship with the cloud division, as you know, they've announced all kinds of different things with IBM cloud, so we're making sure that we stay there with them and are always up front and center. We are riding all the waves that they start, we're not fighting it, we ride it. You got the Hawaiian shirt, you're riding the wave, you're hanging ten, as used to say. Don't be driftwood. Toes on the nose, as the expression goes, as Patrick Gulsinger says, ride the new wave, you're driftwood.  Thanks for coming on. Great, thank you. Great to see you. All right, it's more Cube coverage here live in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier, Dave O'Lough, they stay with us. We've got Sanjay Pudin coming up, and we have all the big executives who run the different divisions, we're going to dig into them, we're going to get the data, share it with you, we'll be right back.