Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ | Expedient & Xtravirt Deliver the Modern Private Cloud

More from Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ

Jonathan H. Rosenson

President & Chief Operating Officer

Expedient

Robin Gardner

Chief Commercial Officer

Xtravirt

play_circle_outline Unlocking Client Value: The Impact of VCF 9 and Strategic Partnerships in Broadcom VMware Solutions

play_circle_outline Maximizing VMware Cloud Foundation Potential: Expedient's Role as Your Full-Stack Cloud Services Partner for Enhanced Managed Services

play_circle_outline Renewed customer interest in private cloud driven by cost control and governance needs

play_circle_outline The significance of agility, availability, and risk mitigation for clients using VCF.

play_circle_outline The role of advisors in assisting customers to realize business value from platforms.

play_circle_outline VCF full stack integrates multiple software capabilities for enhanced operational efficiency.

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Expedient & Xtravirt Deliver the Modern Private Cloud

Jonathan H. Rosenson

President & Chief Operating Officer Expedient

Robin Gardner

Chief Commercial Officer Xtravirt

Robin Gardner, chief commercial officer of Xtravirt Ltd., and Jonathan Rosenson, president and chief operating officer of Expedient Holdings USA LLC, join theCUBE’s John Furrier at the “Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud” event to discuss how VMware Cloud Foundation 9 is shaping the next wave of cloud strategy. Their conversation blends perspectives from consulting and managed services to unpack the value of VCF 9 in today’s complex IT environments.

Rosenson shares how Expedient leverages VMware to deliver full-stack managed cloud solutions t... Read more

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What is the significance of partnerships in the context of Broadcom's VCF 9 and its customer success? add

What services does Expedient provide and how do they assist clients in utilizing VMware technology? add

What factors are contributing to the renewed interest in private cloud as a core cloud strategy among customers? add

What are the key outcomes that clients are looking for in relation to their technology and service needs? add

What are the benefits and drivers for customers using the VCF full stack, and how do these relate to current market trends and technologies? add

What are some key technologies and software capabilities that enhance the vSphere experience for clients? add

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Expedient & Xtravirt Deliver the Modern Private Cloud

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>> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here for a special presentation with Broadcom VMware delivering the modern private cloud. With the launch of VCF 9, we've got two great guests. Going to break down the enablement, the value to customers. Jon Rosenson, president and COO of Expedient; Robin Gardner, Chief Commercial Officer, Xtravirt here to break down all the action with VCF. Gentleman, thank you for joining us.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Thanks for having us.

Robin Gardner

>> Glad to be here.

>> The momentum with Broadcom for VCF 9 with customers is very strong and starting to see some measurable response from some of the feedback from the early customers. Actually, some of your customers we've interviewed, the success kind of depends on unlocking all this value within the platform. This is a key piece of the puzzle. The partners play a huge role in bringing that on. They say themselves, "We've got to have a good partner." Gentlemen, you are those partners and that's exciting to have you here. Without partners as a team sport as they say in cloud. So guys, introduce yourselves. Jon, we'll start with you, introduce what you do, what your company does, and we'll get into some of the action. Jon, we'll start with you and we'll go with Robin after.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Yeah, and thanks again for having me, John. Expedient is a full-stack cloud services provider. We built our company on VMware technology over the years. We've actually been providing managed VMware services for more than 15 years and now managed VCF. So we offer a fully managed services experience. And I think what we've found in the past is that clients who are largely doing it themselves, managing the infrastructure, were only taking advantage of a small portion of the components of what VMware had to offer. And so now with VCF 9 where they bring all of the components together... Customers need help, they need to unlock the full potential of all the stack in order to get that value. And that's where we really come to the table, delivering that end-to-end service. And then on top of that, we add some value-added services that sort of wrap around the VMware stack and give them that full cloud experience and operating model that they couldn't get on their own.

>> Robin, introduce yourself and what you guys do a big part of the puzzle as well. Take it away.

Robin Gardner

>> Hi there. Hi there, Jon. Also, great to be here. Yeah. So I'm Robin Gardner, I'm chief commercial officer Xtra. Responsible for our go-to-market, our alliance partnership, the relationship with Broadcom, and also executive sponsor for our largest customers. Here at Xtravirt, we are complimentary to the work that Expedient does. We're an advisory managed services and consulting business, taking customers on their VCF journey, focused on VCF anywhere; that's VCF on-premise, and across the cloud instances of VCF. And we really support and fill the gaps that the customers can't deliver to themselves. So when we manage and assist customers, it's on customer-owned licenses, customer-owned infrastructure, and in an environment where customers can put their arms around the compliance governance and value proposition of VCF's deployed for their own benefit.

>> Great job guys. I just want to get started by just acknowledging that we're seeing... Always had value with partners and to customers. Having that channel directly to the customers, building solutions, providing scalable partners, but now more than ever, there's a lot more operations, a lot more scale going on. We've seen examples with VCF 9 where the role of what you guys do is not only instrumental, it's a key value activity that's going to really determine whether the value is captured, right. So really key points. Let's get into it right away. Robin, we'll start with you. We just talked to one of your customers. They're really happy with the results and the value that's been enabled. They're starting to see extraction from that. Why are the customers aligning with private cloud? What are you guys seeing? Why is there such a renewed interest with customers right now with private cloud as a core overall, core cloud strategy? What is the reason?

Robin Gardner

>> I think it's very much coming from a number of different lenses depending on the customer, and it's very much about customer's own journey. The old days of cloud first just being a premise without a reason and an understood value statement for an individual customer, those days are gone. So customers really need to understand what's in it for them. Financial services, public sector, it's about sovereignty, it's about control, governance, being able to manage their own compliance. The implementation of cost control, cost in the cloud is starting to run away. We're seeing cottage industries of spend management and infrastructure optimization to try and bring costs back into a manageable state. Post-Covid, we're also seeing the real estate investments stabilize. Customers aren't looking to close offices anymore. They're not looking to data center exit. So that force drive to cloud is going away. And more importantly, the VCF licensing model that Broadcom's brought into place is that customers now have an opportunity to explore and to find out what private cloud can mean for them and the opportunities and values it's going to open up.

>> So you're saying that there's more headroom to do higher level services or create new use cases?

Robin Gardner

>> The use cases that they had assumed previously, they had to move to public cloud to obtain, which entailed migration, new operating models, new skill sets, take them out of their comfort zone. They were hearing stories of cloud migration stalling because they couldn't be successful. Well, VCF is bringing those success opportunities back into an environment that they control and they can adopt pilot and trial the features at a pace that makes sense for them.

>> Yeah, it's interesting. The market's changing so fast, there's more value creations happening. It's hard to go through a migration process when you've got new stuff coming in on the other side. Jon weigh in on this because having a complete managed service, it's not for the faint of heart. You guys provide a great role to help people through that journey. Specifically, what are the customer profiles do you see that VCF map to and then what do you guys fit in?

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Yeah, I think Robin hit on cost control. Whenever we go into a client engagement, we're ultimately trying to understand what are the outcomes that they're looking for from the relationship and from the platform. So cost control is one of them, and I think he hit on that. It's the predictability of cost, not necessarily a lower price, but obviously controlling that cost and understanding where you're generating costs from helps you be able to optimize. But there are really three other areas that we use VCF to lever for our clients. One is for agility. When they buy as a managed service, they get more agility because we can use our scale to deliver them an experience that they couldn't necessarily do on their own because we're doing it for so many other clients. That includes the ability to provide more resources on demand, but it also includes the know-how of our people to turn the knobs and dials on the software to get the most value out of VCF possible. Availability is another one. Inherently inside of VCF and VMware technologies are high availability and redundancy capabilities. Again, we build those at scale and we do it with geographic dispersion to deliver them and their applications, the ideal environment on VCF 9 for those applications to be as performant as possible. And then the fourth area is really risk mitigation. When you talk about the compliance mandates that many industries have, and tying that back to specific verticals such as healthcare, financial services, even manufacturing now relative to some of the SCADA and other requirements that clients have with IoT devices, clients want to transfer as much risk as possible to a partner so that they don't have to worry about it. And because we as a provider are doing this for many of the customers in those types of industries, we inherently know what they're looking for. And so the outcomes our clients are looking for are: agility, availability, cost control, and risk mitigation. And we're practiced at providing all of those to them.

>> That's a great point. And again, I think one of the new things we're seeing certainly with theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and our research team is that the operations of the cloud are going deeper into the customer. Jon, you just pointed that out. Robin, you were talking about some of the value. I have to ask both of you to elaborate on the value of the VCF full stack. Okay. You both kind of touched on it. We're hearing that from customers, "If I have the VCF full stack, I get certain benefits." What are the drivers on the customer side, Robin? And Jon, what's the technical, where does that come together? Because you're seeing a lot of market forces, obviously trends, AI is an easy one to point out, but just operational benefits and use cases and then the technology trends. Kubernetes has kind of settled in, nice platform engineering. What else is out there? How does the VCF full stack fit into the customer and what's driving it? Jon, we'll start with you.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Sure. So you mentioned my name with the technology. So when I think of that topic, I think of things like vSAN and NSX on top of vSphere and giving clients the availability to have that integrated experience where they can deploy their applications in a consistent manner using vROps, for example, as the automation and orchestration layer. These are some of sort of the foundational elements that are on top of the vSphere experience that I think our clients of the past were leveraging heavily but weren't necessarily using that integrated experience of the other software capabilities that Broadcom with VMware brings to bear. So I think in terms of getting value, our clients with the VCF bundle are getting all of the software together. And so by working with a managed cloud services provider like Expedient, they're going to unlock that full value with the expertise to ensure that they can get those four outcomes that I mentioned before of agility, availability, cost control, and risk mitigation inherently from the full stack bundle. So they don't have to use as many third party software applications or even hardware components to get what they need out of their applications. And I think partners are the way to do that. And one thing we didn't talk about yet is this bring your own license capability that Broadcom offers and the ability for clients to sort of mix and match where their workloads need to be. And I think Robin mentioned their strategy for VCF anywhere. Exactly that, making sure that those operating platforms are consistent so that no matter where the client needs that application to operate, they're going to have the same experience.

>> Okay. Robin, now you've got to tie the bow on this. You've got the VCF full stack. The customer wants to have an objective. They have operational challenges; it could be team, it could be business related. Tie it together. What's the exciting piece here that connects VCF to these private cloud challenges?

Robin Gardner

>> I think... Bringing together what... I'm building from what Jon just said, it's the fact that VCF doesn't follow a single playbook. If your challenge is security, then you start with NSX. You look at your east-west security model application and workload level security, and you start there. If your challenge is your skills in your organization, then it's VCF operations, it's automation, it's self-service, accelerating the control of deployment into the hands of the users. If it's the demand to start to pilot AI and bring in those big data stores, then it's private AI and it's data services manager. There's not one approach and taking... and the ability to move from the vSphere, vSAN capabilities and build into VCF 9, all of those strengths, but pick them at your own pace, to your own priorities based on your own business need. I think that the last thing, Keith may have mentioned this earlier, is that our customers don't know what they're going to need in two years time. The pace of introduction of gen AI means that we can't assume that we know what our strategy will be in three years. And so investing in VCF 9 in the knowledge that Broadcom is going to bring capabilities to the forefront as technology drivers change gives a level of confidence that they're investing in a platform for the use case they don't yet know.

>> That's a great point about the innovation because the innovation headroom... Well, first of all, the point about entry points, it's just beauties in the eye of the beholder. If they wanted this, they'd give them the air, but I want to talk about the innovation because this is a big overlooked conversation. What's next is a big part of VMware Broadcom strategy. They're saying, "We're going to bring more goodness to the stack." Explain the opportunity there, what that means, the foundations there. What does that look like for the customer? What does that mean technically or in the platform? That seems to be their innovation roadmap. Paul Turner talked about that in a deep, meaningful way. What do you guys see as that headroom?

Robin Gardner

>> I think that's an art of the possible there, Jon. You're putting me right on the edge of it. Right now the customers are looking to get the platform into place, get the foundation for what they don't yet know. There is a strong feeling in our customers that gen AI isn't yet what it will be in a year or two years time. We're seeing comments around the scalability of models and what's going to be the right LLM for their needs. They can't lock themselves into any cloud provider. They can't lock themselves into any technology and they need flexibility because I don't think anyone around this table knows or would put their neck out to predict two years ahead.

>> Well, Jon, I'll throw a few easy ones out for you. The advanced managed services like DR. Okay, you got private AI out there. You got models that are going to be... have to have cyber resilience bar hurdles to cross over. I mean, there's a lot of platform engineering stuff coming into the whole data world. You don't have to move data around. There's a lot of things that are built in here that have advantages that can create enablement. What's your thoughts?

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Yeah. I think what we're doing internally and what we always try to do is look at the use cases that would benefit our business that we then think we can take to our clients and test our experiences with what they're going to need. AI is huge. Everyone wants to talk about AI. For us, inferencing seems to be the area where most of our clients need the most help. They're using these large public models today. In the future, it's likely they will have their own smaller private models. Kubernetes, there's a lot of interest from. We moved our own internal apps to Kubernetes about five years ago, and all of it runs on our cloud platform that is underpinned by VMware. So when you talk about DR and creating resilience models for AI, we are literally building that foundation with VCF 9 and making sure that as new capabilities are released, that the lifecycle management of the platform and that expertise is running in parallel so that we can help our clients meet their own goals.

>> Talk about some of the trends around why private cloud exists. I mean, I go back 15 years when theCUBE started, private cloud was kicked around because hyperconvergence was happening, right. Now, you have full-blown hybrid distributed computing globally and you have private clouds as a key strategy for managing data, managing intellectual property around that data. We obviously, we all see AI coming, but the platforms are leveling up. What's the inspiration now around private cloud? Certainly, cloud repatriation isn't just a save money issue, it's more of other things are driving it. What are you guys seeing that's a pattern around private cloud? Why is it fitting in? What are some of the general trends around the technology? Is it to be ready for AI? Is it sovereignty? Is it control and costs? Are there common traits that you see? Yes, all the above. Well, unpack.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> It is.

>> Let's unpack this.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> I would say control is sort of the first thing that we hear about from our clients, especially when you talk about AI. There is a distinct concern about compliance and security. "Where is this data going? Who has access to this data? Is it going to get to my competitors and am I going to be cut off because I gave something away that could have been my differentiator?" Differentiation is key for us and for our clients. Cost is certainly important to everyone. I don't think anyone would tell you that they just want to throw money away. So I think when you look at hyper-converged infrastructure and how things have kind of evolved, it's sort of gone almost 360 degrees in terms of, we went all the way to outside to cloud and then we came all the way back to the data center. Now we're hybrid and I think we're going to be hybrid forever. Jon Rosenson thinks that. I think Expedient thinks that too, and I think probably my colleagues at Xtravirt are feeling that as well with their everywhere strategy. The predictability that private cloud offers is complimentary to all the other types of computing that are available and customers are going to be using many of them because they're not going to be able to do it all themselves as well as the experts are going to be able to do them. So these different delivery models inclusive of private cloud are going to enable new outcomes that weren't possible before because of that module... excuse me, because of that approach.

>> Yeah, I would agree. I think hybrid cloud is here forever. I think it's standard done. Robin, what's your take on this? Because what he's pointing at is that the environments are now set, okay? Now that the data and business logic starts to come in to the stack in a whole nother way, I mean, everything you're seeing on supercomputing, whether it's clustered systems or supercomputing data centers, they're all looking the... Like supercomputers, the data center is the computer.

Robin Gardner

>> I think that's the key thing. And you used the word stack. I think if we go back five years and thought about what private cloud was, then it was ethereal. Customers had to build a private cloud. They had to source technology from different vendors. They were being automation specialists, and there was no one place to go to buy private cloud. With the next generation of VCF, since the Broadcom acquisition and skew standardization, buy it once and you get the stack, customers now can put their arms around private cloud. They can understand the concept and they can focus on deployment management and then taking advantage of that as an operating model. It also stands alongside the public cloud capabilities. We're seeing Broadcom focus on the recognition of the importance of the data. So data services manager brings access to management and control of those open source databases that are so critical to unlocking private AI, that are so critical to delivering containerized applications and modern application services on premise. And so there's a level of maturity that VCF and VCF 9 is bringing to the term private cloud that allows it to stand alongside and deliver true hybrid capability.

>> You know it's interesting, it's almost counterintuitive. Control used to mean no innovation. Now, control means accelerate innovation because you want to go slow to go fast. You got to really nail that data. I have to ask you guys while we have you on, the view on sovereignty. We're seeing, after we came back from Mobile World Congress with theCUBE there, all the private conversations in the hallway and some on theCUBE were specific, sovereign cloud is on-country, or it's like... I hate to use that word. It's like on premise, the country is the premise. So the country's the data center. So I mean it's kind of a little bit over the top, but there's a real push for having a cohesive, non-disruptive, sovereign cloud. What's your guys take on this?

Robin Gardner

>> I think certainly from a European's perspective, we started with GDPR, then we've had the demand for sovereignty driven by the governments and we're seeing the DORA. So for financial, the Operational Resilience Act, that requires leaders in the business and the board to understand where their data is, what their operational control is, ensuring business resilience and recoverability. And that's not just about the location. It's about understanding the skills and capabilities of the organizations and the individuals that are managing their environments and making sure that they're using the right tools for the job that build trust and are able to evidence the fact that the organization is compliant with the demands of their customers and their regulatory regimes. And this is only going to get more and more critical. In the press in the UK over the last three weeks, we've seen significant retail organizations be subject to cyber attacks and the level of focus and demands isn't now staying within financial services. It's moving into retail, it's moving into higher education. It's always been in healthcare where the critical data is. The national governments are starting to up the requirements and expectations of the vendors that they work with and demand levels of engagement data and transparency that the global cloud providers are really going to struggle to provide. And so that demand to bring it back on premise or bring it to smaller partners or trusted hosting providers where they can scratch the surface, visit the premises, and feel and touch things for themselves, I think they're going to become more and more critical.

>> Yeah, big forcing function there. I think it's going to be massive sovereignty. Jon, what's your take? You got to operate. We have some regions. Now, you got countries. Scale matters, data matters, intelligence matters. What's your take on the whole sovereign thing?

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> So sovereignty from my perspective is mostly about the data. And so the applications in many ways have to be aware of what is the data that we're working with and where does it need to be. And we do offer what we call our Edge solution to help our clients cope with the sovereignty challenge. Manufacturers have this challenge where they have facilities all over the world where they're sourcing materials and creating the final assembly. Some of these compute clusters will run their operational technology for their manufacturing lines in as much as they'll run some of the IT systems or the IS systems that they have with customer data in them. And all of that needs to be up all the time, basically, because a lot of these manufacturing facilities never stop producing based upon their demand against their supply. So we're helping them by keeping the data in the country where it needs to be. We are also helping them with the DR and ransomware strategy for that data, because as Robin, again said, these risks are real and they are existential to some of these companies. We also have to comply with GDPR rules for some of our clients that have operations in Europe, for example. And there are real consequences from a legislative perspective, but reputationally and revenue-wise, companies are counting on providers like us to help them keep these platforms available so that their applications are always running-

>> Yeah, great point....

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> no matter where they have to run.

>> Great point. They have two pressure points, fines and going out of business. Pick your poison on that one. Great insight, gentlemen. I really appreciate the time. I think I'll just end it with a question on the ecosystem. You guys represent, in my opinion, the future of how partners will be deploying and operating and providing value. Share your thoughts on how the relationship between what you guys do and the customers has changed as we move into this global modern era. Robin, we'll start with you. Just to close us out here, what's the new thing? Why is it so important? What's different?

Robin Gardner

>> I think customers are starting to recognize that, A, they want to be involved in driving their own destiny. So for us, a lot of our customers are stepping away from the, "I'm going to outsource everything to a single provider." They want to work with specialists in their area, and also they want to contribute their own skills and ensure their own employees contribute value to their business. So what we are doing is we are increasingly allowing customers to apply their internal skills to driving business value in adoption and business change and innovation. And we are providing those operational skills, the advisory, and the understanding of what the platform's capable of and how it can increase business value for them and drive their growth. And it's all about trust, transparency. I mean, they're classic old words, but true trust and transparency because we're in this together. Our success isn't measured just by selling a license and ensuring it gets deployed. Our success is managed 6, 12, 18 months later when value starts to get realized and the business starts to understand that this is a platform that they can use to drive change and acceleration.

>> You're in the driver's seat for the capture and creation. Jon, close us out. The new modern era, what's different? Why is this so important now?

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Well, when you mentioned ecosystem, the first thing that came to my mind was choice. And I think I align with what Robin said. And in the past that choice was mostly aligned around the technologies of storage and data protection and maybe databases. And in the new world, it's fast platforms, it's APIs, it's microservices, it's LLMs, and all of this stuff is coexisting together. So it's not this or that or one or the other. It's an and. All of these things have to work together in the modern platforms of the future.

>> Gentlemen, thank you so much. Again, and great insights on what's going on at the front edge, with the innovations happening, with the value creation and capture is being realized. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it.

Jonathan H. Rosenson

>> Thanks for having us.

Robin Gardner

>> Thanks John. Great to be here.

>> Okay. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here at our Palo Alto Studios for the Broadcom VMware, delivering the modern private cloud with the launch of VCF. Thanks for watching.