Sarbjeet Johal VMware Explore 2022
Transcript
>> Welcome to VMware Explorer 2022 with the CTO advisor studio. Come on in and consume some content. >> All right, Melissa, I'll take it from here. Welcome to VMware Explorer 2022. We are super excited. This is day one of our coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 we're back. It's been three years since the CTO advisor has been at a VMware world, VMware Explorer whatever you want to call it. It is where the conversation around infrastructure IT happens. It is the premier conference and we're for the first time ever on the show floor we have the CTO advisor flying cloud inappropriately.
I have one of my most engaging friends. (Sarbjeet laughs) >> On Twitter. >> Front, on Twitter. front on Twitter, Sarbjeet Johal. Sarbjeet we've had classic conversations. >> Sarbjeet: Yes. >> Like you are an independent analyst. You have years of experience doing data center migrations, application development. You've worked for some of the biggest brands in the space, Rackspace, VMware et cetera. So, you've seen a lot of transition. >> Yep. >> We talk a lot about application modernization on Twitter and I think this is a great opportunity to make it real for the VMware customer.
Customers coming out of VMware, VM-centric application models needing to move the public cloud in mass. What are the factors customers need to consider as they're doing not data center to data center migrations but data center to cloud migrations. >> Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that distinction at the end of the data center to data center versus data center to cloud but in many ways, there's a lot of, lot more similarities. There is a perception out there that the data center, data center migrations are a lot different than data center to cloud migrations.
But I think it's like 60 to 70%, same thing. You have to vacate your data center. If you go from one data center to other or from data center to cloud you have to shut down these applications. You have to find the dependencies. You have to understand how these applications are integrated with each other. What are the dependencies and criticality of the application needs to be understood. The few things which change actually are the licensing of the operating system, the licensing of the application cause many times the cloud providers will let you bring your own license.
If you are already in contract with you know, OS vendors and or application vendors. And many times, they don't. Not only the software licenses but also, the spot contract. Sometimes you can transfer as is sometimes they cannot. So, you have to change those things when you move. And there's so many other things you have to consider. >> So, let's focus in on licensing for a little bit. You know, we hear the joke about Oracle licensing and even Microsoft licensing from time to time.
>> Sarbjeet: Yeah. >> Is that a consideration though? When you're picking kind of a cloud? Like if I'm a big Oracle shop. >> Sarbjeet: Yeah. >> Is it more advantageous for me to look at an Oracle cloud infrastructure versus an AWS or a Microsoft Azure? >> Actually, I don't think it's your choice. It is the deal is sweetened by the vendor. So, vendor will give you better pricing if you are sitting in their cloud. It's you know, that's the nature of the game they play, right?
And many times, they will give you huge discount on their cloud when you're consuming their non-cloud portfolio, you know? Or vice versa. So, they can sweeten the deal for you like a total deal, if you will. So, your number one software vendor slash applications vendor, right? If they have their native cloud it's very tempting to go there with all your applications. Having said that we know that top three cloud providers have been innovating at a much higher pace than rest of the stack.
Stack if you will, or rest of the pack if not stack, you know? Number four to number 10, right? So, there's a term I actually am trying to get that popularized that's the feature proximity. So, when you are doing certain kind of workload certain you need certain kind of compute and storage and network networking network slicing and all that stuff programmable networks and all that stuff, right? So, you can have infrastructure as code. On top of that, now you need to do data science and you know, the sort of voice recognition and or NLP and stuff like that.
You need those features as well. So, the tier-two cloud providers don't have those bells and whistles. So, for that reason, most of the people gravitate towards top three cloud providers. >> So, let's dig into this feature proximity. I like this concept. If I'm thinking price first versus feature third where am I missing out on opportunity for that transformation? If I'm thinking price like it first, wow. Microsoft or Oracle has given me such a sweet deal on my database licensing, but that cloud doesn't necessarily have the features that I need to transform my business.
What am I missing out on? >> Yeah. I mean like, the, most of the tech spend, say most, a big majority of that is future-proofing your, investments. It's not the spend. So, there's, you know the distinction between like investment versus the, you know, just expenses. So, you are making investments into future. You are building your new, stronger platforms. You will build on top of that in future, right? So, if a leader, tech leader thinks of this spend, if you will, as the investment they are gravitating more towards futuristic platforms.
If they are more like operational in nature they have that background they focus more on operations only. So, for example, some CIOs come from that background. Some CIOs come from the dev background, right? And some CIOs come from business background as well, right? So, I think it matters based on the leaders or many leaders there, right? They're sort of personalities and what they value as well as what vertical you are in. And so many other factors are there. >> So, you're hitting such a key spot especially for this community.
This VMware community, because we're typically operators we're incentivized to cut costs, to control costs not necessarily make that investment that you're talking about making. So, that mind shift has to happen so that we're not necessarily thinking about well, where do I best optimize my spin versus how do I best enable my developers to get the feature in proximity to the features that they want? >> Sarbjeet: Yes, exactly. >> What conversations should I be having with my developers to discover kind of what features and what value they're looking to extract from the infrastructure in the cloud?
>> Yeah, I think the main thing is what developers love is number one is that their employability, right? They're like developers are the kind of creatures I call them in a nicer way that they want to be on the cutting edge all the time. So, they want to build their resumes, right? And that's what keeps them motivated and marketed well. So, they want to be on the cutting edge. That's number one. Number two is that actually say that we have been on the militarization sort of journey all along on the hardware side, as well as the software side.
So, going from server to VM VM to containers now serverless. So, having all those flavors of compute is very important for developers I believe. And on top of that, cooking up the recipes which are not the application recipe in the coding from a point of view, from that point of view but the recipe of the infrastructure as code. Like what language do you use? Do you use Terraform? Do you use Ansible? You have to pick the platform, what your developers are gravitating towards.
And many times, like you have to, if you are new shop or something or you want to do some new initiative and we are starting from scratch, you have to find out okay which language you pick for infrastructure as code and stuff like that. So, there's so many factors basically boils down to your current velocity of your developers like how fast they're moving, how many you have in-house. The one gripe I have with the industry pundits and analyst is I'm new to this, by the way, do I end up criticizing?
>> Keith: You're doing a great job actually. (Sarbjeet laughs) >> I don't know. So, is that we end up sort of mushing up the software which is developed in-house and the software which we get from the vendors. >> Keith: The COTS software. >> Together, yeah. We put it together in one bucket. No, don't do that. We have to analyze what we build in-house. Of course, I understand that the COTS applications need integration for that any development as well, right?
So, but still, you have to keep these two things separate. You have to understand what is the demarcation or percentage of spend going to the COTS application. What is going towards in-house development and who is using those applications at which are being developed in-house? Is it your partners? Is it your employees? Is it, you know, the whole customer base? So, based on that, you want to take those steps, you know? Some things are small and scale. Some are big, right?
>> So, Sarbjeet, we need to have you on a second time to talk about that follow on conversation, which is the skills get gravity which is what you talk about consistently. How does that create like a skills gravity challenge? >> Sarbjeet: Yeah. >> And scarcity challenge across the industry and how should CIOs CTOs talk about that challenge. But we'll save that conversation for another day. You're watching coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 the CTO advisor studios. Stay tuned always. We're going to have conversations with CEOs, CTOs, industry analysts, cloud architects.
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