VMware Explore 2025 | Michael Watkinson, Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

Clips
More from VMware Explore 2025

Michael Watkinson

Chief Revenue Officer

Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

play_circle_outline VMware's focus on private cloud and on-prem infrastructure highlighted during the session.

play_circle_outline Enhancing Private Cloud Management with VCF-9: Partnerships with NVIDIA and Dell for Streamlined AI Architecture Development

play_circle_outline Future Tech's engagement with customers centers around technology solutions and user experience.

play_circle_outline Transition from traditional HPC to AI workloads at the edge is crucial for enterprises.

Info
Transcript

Michael Watkinson, Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

Michael Watkinson

Chief Revenue Officer Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

In this VMware Explore 2025 interview, Michael Watkinson, Chief Revenue Officer at Future Tech Enterprise, joins theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Rebecca Knight to share his perspective on how enterprises are navigating the next wave of private cloud and AI-driven transformation. Drawing on decades of industry experience, Watkinson outlines Future Tech’s role as a strategic VMware partner, particularly in the federal and financial services sectors, and explains how customer priorities are evolving in the wake of Broadcom’s acquisition.

The discussion e... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What topics were discussed during Bob's appearance at Dell Tech World regarding the impact of AI and infrastructure changes? add

What are the challenges and considerations regarding power consumption and cooling in the context of building high-density computing and storage solutions? add

What is the nature of customer engagement and the scenarios in which they interact with your services? add

What impact is AI having on high-performance computing (HPC) at the edge? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Michael Watkinson, Future Tech Enterprise, Inc.

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explorer, here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my co-host and co-analyst, co-founder of theCUBE, the extraordinary, the one, the only, John Furrier. John, we're both fresh from the main stage, Hock Tan was up there doing his thing. Any hot takes?

>> Well, first of all, the AI shift is causing a lot of business model, business transformation, that's the key message. Cost implications, application downtime, edge computing, and obviously private cloud shift to on- prem was the key message right out of the gate. Last year, we saw a private cloud, and that's what Hock Tan talked about. And of course, we've commented on our opening the business performance of VMware, double prices, cut expenses, deliver the product, subscription, all pumping on all cylinders. Now let's see how it looks in the field.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed, indeed. And with that, let me introduce our first guest of the show. He is Mike Watkinson, Chief Revenue Officer at Future Tech Enterprises. Welcome, Mike.

Michael Watkinson

>> Thank you both, appreciate being here.

>> Yeah. So you're relatively new at Future Tech,

Rebecca Knight

>> you've been there about a year now. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about the company and about your role.

Michael Watkinson

>> Sure, if I might first though, being back at VMworld is great. I was 18 years at Dell and EMC, and I remember the days of Chad Sakac yelling out in the crowd and Paul Fazzone at NYSERIA and NSX, and all those game changing technologies at the time. And I was really interested to come back and see what that VMUG community looked like and how it felt. So, it's good to see that they're all still here. Yeah. So I'm Chief Revenue Officer at Future Tech and I have been for about a year now. I joined, as I said, after 18 years at Dell and EMC, the last four of which were in Dell Federal. So I was working with one of our key customers and Bob and Chris Coker and the team, and really got to know Future Tech intimately. So, all good things happen for a reason. You've had Bob on before.

>> Of course. - And it's been a great year,

Michael Watkinson

>> we're doing some really exciting things.

>> Bob was on Dell Tech World,

>> and again, everyone knows the story line. AI is driving a lot of change, everyone's preparing their infrastructure. Huge, I would say replatforming reset, but essentially, people are looking at, what's the generational shift? How do I prepare? You guys are in the middle of it, Bob and I talked about it at Future Tech. The on-prem movement is happening. People see the value of their data and they go, okay, I need to have a cloud. So, VMware's story kind of hangs together. Now, the ecosystem's changed. VMUG's still here.

Michael Watkinson

>> Sure does. - And thriving, the community's here.

>> Hock Tan preserved those, and now the big players are here, Google, Azure. So the ecosystem's changed from 1,000 flowers blooming, fun, chaos, good, but different now. It's really blocking and tackling. What's your perspective now that you look at the maturization?

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah, and thankfully Future Tech is at the center of that. As you know, VMware consolidated their partner community to a few strategic vendors, and so we're lucky enough to be one of those 50 and really focused in the federal space with some FSI customers. We got to know Mike Kraft and that team really well. I think the communication and the collaboration is coming back. There was a period of time where Broadcom was looking very internally and changing how they would go to market, and now they're coming back out to the field. So, we're sensing that engagement and we understand their positioning relative to what the previous two years discussions were very much focused on pricing. So. We're looking forward to the next level of those discussions.

>> Yeah, pricing is huge. I mean, right now the big thing I'm hearing is cost, but I don't need to, want to manage FinOps. Maybe I'll do that in the cloud, but on- prem I know my estate. Rein that in, cleaner product with VCF-9, that's the story here. What's your business look like for you guys? When you look at the revenue, what are some of the customer use cases? Can you share what it's looking like for you guys in the field?

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah. So, we put ourselves in the middle of this conversation in terms of how we operationalize, to your point, these ELAs and their spend, right? And operationalizing that means, how do we do the drawdowns and the chargebacks? But how do we also create some optionality? And that's what is happening in the new shift towards Broadcom and Nutanix and Red Hat and so forth. So understanding the workloads and the landing zones is what we want to do in a longer term view. It's about the transformation and not the transaction. Our customers too, they've invested in VCF over time, right? They've implemented NSX, and those things are hard to extract for say, large franchise parts of a business, but there's thousands of smaller networks out there that need to make decisions still. And so, we're really trying to put ourselves in the middle of those discussions is, how do you categorize the workloads and where they're going?

>> Talk about the building blocks of VMware's estate because you got a lot of compute demand, you got storage. I was talking to a customer last night, we're virtualizing everything, I still need more space. So there's a reckoning going on. If you don't get it right for AI or the needs of what's coming on the app side, the app dev side is continuing to grow from the Kubernetes side so you're starting to see that cloud native. But the infrastructure game is still on.

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah, it sure is. - I mean, share your thoughts on this

>> because I think this is a big continuing to check the boxes but also, get it right.

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah. So VCF-9, there's a lot of that reducing the friction between developers and IT. We think a lot about IT in terms of that enabling scalability and predictability across the enterprise. We built an RTX 6,000 GPU cluster for a customer recently. We're a great NVIDIA partner and Dell partner in building those reference architectures. One 4-U server is now consuming 40-U worth of power, right? So it's a 10,000 kilowatt server and a 10,000 watt server and a 10,000 kilowatt rack. So, the whole power cooling conversation-

>> Huge. - ...

Michael Watkinson

>> is reality and you need to consider

>> where we can get density out of the next generation of compute and storage and so forth. But you absolutely have to consider how you're going to do colo and data center going forward.

Rebecca Knight

>> So beyond the hardware, we heard Hock Tan up there talking about these friction points, and a lot of it is the people stuff. And he said, "I feel your pain. I also run a large organization. I know what it takes to deploy new technologies. " Beyond the hardware, what kinds of people and skills gaps are you seeing as companies take on more AI workloads?

Michael Watkinson

>> The skills gap is a big one. Again, as John said at the outset, there's a whole new ecosystem of tools out there. And so, we think a lot about how to create standards and governance, and we foster innovation in its silos. There's shadow AI happening everywhere, and how do we bring that to the surface? So when we do that, we start to see patterns. We start to see what's common and repeatable and scalable. And in doing that, we can start to create everything in a box and the right tools to do the jobs. And that's really informing what the training and the skills need to look like going forward. So, we were the first to transact an NVIDIA ELA and it had the effect of bringing that shadow AI to, I want that discount, I want that license. And we started to see what people were actually doing. We try to do that consistently.

>> The VCF's been called, I call it a beast. It's big, it's bigger than... because people are buying, they have to get it all now. So it's chock-full of value as VMware says. That's giving people confidence that are on VMware to manage in the shadow IT, the shadow AI, because there's a little bit of concern around governance, what's going on in the estate. So on-prem, having a cloud that you can flex with is a huge factor. We've heard that from the customers. How is that factoring into some of your deals with the customers? Because they got to get the power and cooling right, they got to get the density right, they got to get the compute clusters and XPU clusters nailed down. What does that look like? I mean, take me through some of the day-to-day customer conversations, because it's a systems problem.

Michael Watkinson

>> It's a systems problem, and it's not a light switch event. Right? So again, it goes back to trying to understand what those workloads are and where the placement should be, but it's that journey of understanding the refresh. Right? So many of our customers struggle with asset management in general and what those refresh milestones are, that we're trying to get ahead of that. And so we're leaning into our strategic ecosystem and saying, what if this customer was a more strategic partner to this OEM or that OEM? And what if we leaned into the next five years and not just the next refresh? And I think that's an important way, John, of not just looking at things transactionally, right? It's understanding a framework going forward and putting those things in place foundationally.

Rebecca Knight

>> But what you're talking about sounds so much like change management, in terms of taking this more long-term holistic approach instead of just working for the next update or working to hit the next quarter's numbers. I mean, that really involves an entire philosophy change on the part of the leadership and the organization.

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah, I mean, so much of it is finance, right? I mean, we hear that Grinnell on the stage talking about how to manage budgets. And so we think a lot about CapEx to OpEx and what that shift is like, but also how do you operationalize drawdowns across business units? And that's a global procurement issue, right? That's a global supply chain issue as much as it is IT. And so we've got to make sure that we're talking in all circles in order to make, effect that type of change.

>> Talk about what you guys do on the customer side. What's the engagement? How do customers engage with you guys? Who are you targeting? Take us through a customer scenario.

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah, great. So our best customers are, we're great at PC as a service. We deliver PC as a service globally, and we have six US domestic depots. So we know how to deliver those types of end user experience types of services at scale. And I think that is now transitioning to edge conversation. So what is happening in the data center? How many of those workloads can we now run at the edge? What was VDI could now run in a large workstation? What is HP and HPC in AI? We're seeing a lot of convergence between HPC and AI now. And so, new architectures, edge discussions, and then ultimately frameworks for the data center. Our discussions are across all of those, but generally, it starts with that sort of end user experience. What is the application trying to do?

>> Yeah. The edge is exploding

>> because HPC was moving inch by inch every year. It's like move the ball down the field, move the chains as they say in football, but then boom, AI hits. AI then pushes HPC to the edge, so you're starting to see compute at the edge in ways we never saw before. What's the difference at the edge? What are some of the factors? Because it's not just virtualizing a desktop or having VDI, it's a little bit more complex now with AI.

>> Yeah. Well, and the HPC traditional university model was

Michael Watkinson

>> shared services and that worked okay, but in a lot of more complex, highly regulated environments, that's not the case. They had unique algorithms and unique applications to run, and so they were all built in silos. And now, okay, we can add GPUs, we can do more, but that's more expensive. And so, how do we get more utilization out of those? And it becomes, again, that chargeback issue. And so, we think we've got some partners that are helping us solve for that.

>> Well, federal and universities, it's kind

>> of like public sector. You think about it, they can buy the gear with cloud, they can manage it like a service, move compute cycles to that... You know what I'm saying?

>> Yeah. - There's more flexibility in how

>> to manage the CapEx.

Michael Watkinson

>> There is on that sort of public side, the commercial side

Michael Watkinson

>> of the business, if you will. And then to your edge comment again, there's different personas than there used to be. There's different folks that are, we can't just hand them a laptop and expect them that over the next eight hours they're going to add some new application to help them run. We have to change the way we think about images and personas and deliver that experience. So, all of that is tying into, how do we do on- prem ChatGPT? How do we do code assist at the edge? Those are the applications that I think are most interesting because it ties into security, it ties into model leakage and those new AI things, right? But it can't be left alone to the one end user.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. So, one of the things you had talked about earlier in your career was working in federal. And in federal markets, speaking of highly regulated, complex environments, compliance and data integrity matter as much as performance. So, how are agencies thinking about AI differently today, would you say?

Michael Watkinson

>> Oh, it's a good question. I mean, it's always going to be classified versus unclassified and what classified networks there are. There's a lot more interest in multi-level secure type of solutioning, multi-tenant solution thing, but multi-level security is the ideal opportunity. Right? And so delivering that could open up whole new types of frameworks for our customers.

>> Exactly, exactly.

>> On the enterprise side, you mentioned models.

Rebecca Knight

>> I was talking to someone last night, they didn't want to say where they work, but it's a big bank model. Model poisoning is a huge issue right now, so security. Combine that with on-prem data is the asset. A lot more people are keeping the data on premise for the AI for one, security reasons, governance, but also intellectual property. That's causing behavior to be, okay, I got to have more clusters, prepare the data. Did VMware get a good lucky strike here or did they have some knowledge maybe from the chip side because VCF-9 literally is your private cloud. It's like, here's some cloud. But it's not just siloed, it's connecting to public, it's got edge.

Michael Watkinson

>> Sure. - So there's all now distributed computing.

>> How do you guys view that? Are customers sensing that? Do you have customers that are talking like that now, or are they more blocking and tackling, just get through the day kind of thing?

>> Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of like AI adoption

Michael Watkinson

>> in the enterprise is slower than adoption in the hyperscaler data centers. Right? And so we're seeing it come into the enterprise business. The same thing is now with Broadcom and virtualization and the blocking and tackling piece, I think people are still trying to get through that part. The AI possibilities are there. Virtual private clouds seem pretty cool, global deduplication seems pretty great. And so, I'm sure that those frameworks are going to get implemented, but I'm not sure that folks are fully understanding how they might integrate VCF- 9 yet at this point. Right? I think we're starting to have those conversations, but it's more the blocking and tackling at this point.

>> Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking, Rebecca too, John Roese, the CTO of Dell.

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah, yeah, great. - And we're seeing a lot

>> of POCs in a lot of the large sectors, financial services and life sciences, areas where they had data tagged just for the compliance reasons are actually getting a good tailwind for AI. And I said to him a comment, I want to get your reaction to my comment to him. I said, "It seems to me that we're in a POC purgatory. " Some people are like, don't like that term, but there seems to be a lot of sprawl going on with POCs.

Michael Watkinson

>> Right, right. - Enterprise, so there's a whole stack

>> and the startups want to work on the enterprise. So there's a lot of action happening, a lot of tire kicking. We used to call them kick the tires, but they're real startups. So, there's some real tech coming in. So the enterprises are now trying to figure that out. Do you agree that we're kind of in a POC purgatory, you're seeing some path to production on some use cases? What's your view on this? Because there's a lot of POCs out there, but what's converting or is it converting?

Michael Watkinson

>> The last time I heard John Roese speak, he talked about a dystopian event around 5G, and it was like this, the world is going to end if we don't come up with an IT solution.

>> What's he watching on Netflix? Yeah.

Michael Watkinson

>> Now he's talking about purgatory,

Rebecca Knight

>> but so we look to invest in our customers, reinvest in our customers in these POCs. We encourage them to look at high value targets, right? Something that's going to change the organization, and we invest with the ecosystem. So I mentioned the RTX 6,000 adventure that we're on right now. NVIDIA, Dell, our partners are investing in those environments. You got to have success criteria, you got to understand what the outcome is for the organization, but you've got to start somewhere. Right? And that's where we're really encouraging our customers to accelerate adoption. We're even doing that at the edge, right? So we mentioned at the edge before. There are GB10 Spark type of devices that can be useful at the edge in addition to your laptops and desktops. Those are easy ways to encourage adoption of AI. So yeah, the POC purgatory, we didn't see the purgatory so much as just get going. Right? It was analysis paralysis as to which use case was going to be most impactful. Just get going.

>> Yeah. I mean, my take was, it's velocity

>> of deals coming in, more POCs are coming in. It's easier to do a POC now, but it's hard to get the acceptance criteria to your point about that. I guess-

>> Right, right.

Michael Watkinson

>> And the OEMs too, I mean, they're investing a lot of money into those seeds and POCs, but they're not production ready infrastructure. Right? They're a single node GPU and so forth. So, we really think that a full architecture is the right value and that's what we try to pull together.

>> My final question for you, Mike, is on the-

>> Sorry to cut you off.

>> Oh, no, no worries. Because it comes back

Michael Watkinson

>> down to what, are you ready? The power and cooling and knowing your environment, what you have is bounded by power, power and cooling. Obviously, there's mass involved in that too. What are some of the cool things that you've seen customers do to manage the power and cooling, that footprint kind of constraint, which people are designing around with the new systems?

Michael Watkinson

>> Yeah. I mean, so far we're seeing them extend out racks, right? And that's not a sustainable longer term solution. So, what have I seen that's cool, maybe that's not so cool?

>> It's innovative and clever. - But we're hearing about

Michael Watkinson

>> rear door head exchangers as an alternative to full data center liquid cooling and so forth, that seems like it's pretty cool. Larger scale racks are pretty cool, but I'm not sure that those are sustainable longer term either. I think colo relationships are going to be really important for our customers. And so for our specific set of customers, those colos need to have the right controls in their environment, and we've got a few of those.

>> Awesome. - Excellent, excellent. Well, Mike,

Rebecca Knight

>> thank you so much for your insights. A pleasure having you on theCUBE.

>> Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Michael Watkinson

>> All right. - I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier.

Rebecca Knight

>> Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage

>> of VMware Explorer. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise news and analysis.