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Alright. Let’s get to it. It’s time for today’s high intensity tech training, VMware disruption and exploring next gen alternatives for virtualization and cloud migrations.
The virtualization landscape, of course, undergoing a seismic shift. There’s mounting uncertainty around VMware’s roadmap, pricing, and long term viability. Today, we learn about alternative platform categories, the key factors driving change, and how to evaluate alternatives performance, scalability, and data protection. Also, migration strategies and how advisors can monetize this shift and provide additional value. I am very happy today to welcome back to our Tuesday call, Telarus field solutions engineer and cloud architect, Chad Muckenfuss.
He’s joined by a powerhouse panel of industry experts. We’ve got AJ Kuftic, field CTO at Expedient, Jeff Slapp, cofounder and CTO at SteelDome, and Kevin Carter, product director at Rackspace Technology. Chad, and all, welcome to each of you. Glad to have you here.
Thanks for having us. Appreciate it, Doug.
Important topic today. This has really caused a lot of concern in the industry, but also brought around a lot of opportunity.
It has, definitely. And what I’d like to do to kinda kick things off is really just, take us through a timeline review before we have, each of our panelists introduce themselves today and just go over how VMware has changed over the last couple of years just to set the stage, and then we’ll kick it off and go down the row here and have each of them introduce themselves and and what they see in the industry happening right now. So just taking a a trip back to twenty twenty three and remembering when Broadcom acquired VMware, it was, it was an interesting point in time, and everybody was just kind of questioning, hey, what is this going to look off look like? And as this took off as as a, an acquisition here. So twenty twenty three, Broadcom acquires VMware and immediately, lays off three thousand employees.
That was at the end of twenty twenty three when that all came to fruition.
Twenty twenty four, more layoffs continued. They they, laid off another eighteen hundred VMware employees. But more importantly, they eliminated fifty nine different product offerings in the VMware suite of services.
And what that changed into was a three x to twelve x cost increase to every customer that was utilizing VMware at that point. And that’s where we saw a huge immediate, very emotional response to this VMware takeover by Broadcom and a, I need to figure out a way to get off of this.
Then things started to settle down and the realization set in by a lot of organizations saying this isn’t a an easy migration or move off of VMware.
And here we are in twenty twenty five, and the planning has definitely begun end of twenty four and end of twenty five, and Broadcom continues their changes. So this year, they went from a sixteen core minimum to a seventy two core minimum, which once again changed the pricing aspect of things. And most recently, a couple of weeks ago, the, VMware did away with their, program that eliminated essentially a hundred percent of all of their their small CSP offerings.
And now only a small group of suppliers in our portfolio have the ability to offer VMware in a in a managed model. So all of these changes are driving and pushing a lot of customers in this space to make changes. And that’s why we have our panel here today to offer what those changes look like. So with that review, what I’d like to do is, go down the panel here and start with AJ. We’ll just do it in alphabetical order.
AJ, introduce yourself, what what you do specifically for Expedient, and then we’ll go down the line here.
So my name is AJ Kufdick. I am field CTO here at Expedience. We are a full stack cloud service provider. What I do is a lot of this, partner enablement, front messaging.
I’ve done a lot of our webinars. If you’ve seen any of our content, you’ve probably seen my face.
Sometimes, I’m sorry about that. And this is something that we have spent a lot of time on as a VMware service provider over the last, oh, I don’t know now, almost twenty years. We started with the VMware cloud service provider program in two thousand seven. So we’ve been through this entire process.
We did make the cut.
So we continue to be able to offer, VMware as a service.
And we are working with a lot of customers in the field, talking through what are their next steps, what are what do they need to do, going forward.
Great. So moving along, Jeff, can you introduce yourself and and SteelDome?
Absolutely. Thank you, Chad, and thanks for everyone, for being here. My name is Jeff Slapp. I am a cofounder, CTO, and head of product development here at SteelDome.
We are a infrastructure software company. So we focus on, as we’ll get into, I’m sure, in great detail here in this session, the underpinnings of the what the essential technologies that are required for any application. Right? Whether that’s VMs, containers, AI, everything in between.
Still don’t focus on making the acquisition and deployment of those core technologies, as easy, and as affordable as possible, regardless of where it is because it’s software. And that’s, that’s our primary focus is flexibility, compatibility, and, really the democratization, efforts around, adopting these types of technologies for the enterprise. So great to be here, Chad. Thank you.
Great. Thanks for joining us. And, Kevin, last but not least, take us through your role at Rackspace.
Everybody. Pleasure for me to be here as well. And and thank you very much for having us, on this panel and kicking this off. My name is Kevin Carter.
I’m a product director for our OpenStack business unit at Rackspace. And, if you’re not familiar with Rackspace, we’re a multi cloud, multi solution provider with data centers in and outside of, you know, the United States operating different solutions for customers in a broad portfolio of different systems and services. And my particular role we are operating our open stack solutions, our what we’d call our open source or open infrastructure solutions for customers where we’ll run it in our data centers, customer data centers or do build operate transfer models for customers so that they can get off of these, proprietary solutions and into an open source, open ecosystem for that that those future innovations.
And so that’s the, you know, quick TLDR of myself and again, thank you very much for having me.
Well, we’ll we’ll stay with you, Kevin, and and and talk us through that that open stack offering that you have here and and how that benefits customers. And also, do you offer the professional services to come alongside those customers and help them with this transition? Take us through what that looks like from from your side at Rackspace.
Definitely. So the open source solutions, OpenStack itself, right, is now part of the Linux Foundation.
It was its own standalone foundation, now part of the Linux Foundation, and it really has the mission of empowering the next decade of open innovation and technologies. And we believe in that mission wholeheartedly, not only as a founding member of OpenStack, but also as a current platinum member of the board there as well on OpenStack itself. And so what does that look like? I mean we have offered in a variety of different models and those professional services is actually a big part of that because I mean in the industry it’s open source or OpenStack engineers are sometimes hard to come by and so we have a ton of them.
We have a lot of the certifications around those capabilities and we can bring those into customer data centers. I think what’s unique about our platform and offering is that it itself is open source and so when we bring in a customer into the new open source, open stack ecosystem, we’re bringing them on, we’re onboarding their applications, we’re onboarding their infrastructure in their data center or giving them space and hours, and then training them to operate those different cloud operate the different clouds, you know, efficiently And that’s a big thing. We’re basically, you know, making sure that the, you know, the the the legacy VMware engineers or the, you know, the people who don’t don’t have that experience with that open ecosystem, get that experience.
They understand how they can operate the platform and they can take it forward. And so, one of the things that I like to say to our teams is that we’re building that open ecosystem but we have to earn their business every single day of the week because it is open source. It is open Cloud. The code is there publicly.
And so there there’s there’s no vendor lock in with our solutions. We’re we’re bringing them to the platform and then earning their business, like I said, every single day of the week.
That’s great. And and again, having that open source code, I’ve worked on that on the voice side early in my career and and understanding how that all works. So, you know, it’s a unique situation for a customer to make a change from a VMware and embrace that that model.
It it opens a lot of doors for them. So so thank you for that overview.
Jeff, from your side of things and and SteelDome, you have something, somewhat similar, but but on your own side. Can you explain what the offerings are from from SteelDome and what you bring to the table?
Yeah. Absolutely. And I I I think it’ll certainly complement what Kevin has already said. We, as a software company, we have focused on what is bringing, you know, the greatest deal of flexibility and accessibility, to the space. And and the the areas of focus that we have today with regard to the the technologies is around Stratus store, which is the, you know, we we call it the massively scalable, you know, scale out, scale up storage system, but it it doesn’t have to be the massive scale. Right? That’s a relative thing.
You can start with as small as, you know, a single node, and grow to hundreds of nodes. It doesn’t make any difference, you know, horizontally how how far you go, because the software was designed to be able to adapt to, any of the one of those conditions and really meeting the customer and their requirements, you know, where they are today, knowing that tomorrow, the requirements are very likely to change. Right? When you’re looking at companies that are growing, which if you’re a healthy company, you are growing, and you’re not gonna be in the same place, you know, a year from now or or five years from now.
Right? Those requirements are gonna change. And usually when you meet those various inflection points, that’s where pain is introduced. Right?
There’s a lot of, you know, migration aspects, operational challenges, diversity within the in the environment, which makes that very difficult to to operate over, a a particular life cycle. Right? Whether that’s five, seven, you know, ten years, whatever the case is. So storage is a very important aspect and and one that if I was to roll back in my career, you know, if you were to categorize, you know, compute, storage, and networking, I would definitely in my from my perspective, I you know, I’ve been very focused on storage most of my career, followed by compute and then networking.
It’s all very, very important. But at the end of the day, when you look at a lot of the the the traditional hardware vendors out there, right, and we all know the names, you’ve seen a shift, over the last, you know, five to ten years or so going from advertising as a hardware vendor to now as a software vendor even though they still largely make hardware. Because hardware is, in in general, very, you know, largely commoditized, and software now differentiates. So, again, going back to, you know, the the steel dome side of this.
So our primary focus has been in just like when you build a house. Right? You you focus first on the foundation, and then you build the rest of the structure, and then, you know, you do the finer details. And that’s really how our stack is, is is laid out, in a very modular way to allow for adaptation to any one of those layers.
So once the storage has been taken care of with Stratastore, then Strataserv, which is our hypervisor, which is our VM, hypervisor and management and also container run time and management layer. And, again, the customer has choice depending on what they need to do. And everything’s an on off switch. So, you don’t have to be necessarily an expert in any one of these areas, although all that, all about the the apparatus that is that that underlies all those technologies are still there if you really wanna get into your power user mode, if you will.
But we’ve actually shielded the user at various levels from all that complexity because that’s one of the largest barriers to adoption. It’s it’s not that the technology concept is new in terms of clustering and scaling and what I call software defined, you know, two point o now that we’re in into this new era, of really software to find its scale.
It was really the challenges around how do you implement, what are the best practices, how long does it take, how much expertise does it take, and obviously the capital expenditure and operational expenditure to make all that happen. Right? So that time to value matters. So once you have both of those in place, now you can pretty much go anywhere you need based on the business requirements or the application demands or or, you know, the various pressure points within the organization. And we don’t talk about life cycle that much, because the software really doesn’t have a life cycle per se. Right? Normally, a a hardware life cycle is a typically five years.
We have a rolling release cycle, so that there’s no more rip and replace. There’s no more data migrations. There’s no more disruption. There’s no more concerns about performance and what that might be down the road or scale and what that might be down the road. All of those things, because the system is extremely flexible in nature and modular in nature, can adapt to whatever those conditions are. So that’s that’s the quickest one one breath of description I can give you, at this point.
That was a that was a heck of a breath. I don’t ever wanna speed dive with you.
I do that a lot.
No. I I appreciate that. And and both, you know, you and Kevin both described unique OSes, for lack of a better term, but but unique operating systems and unique virtual machines that are really tailored to the customer’s needs, more than just, hey, you have to fit within this box in order to operate the way that we, as the software provider, are telling you to operate. It’s more of the software is molded to what the customer needs along with riding on or residing on the hardware that is specific to those needs as well.
Yeah. And and and again, we’re gonna hear from AJ here in a moment, but again, the cost factor is is somewhat changed from that whole, again, CapEx model of I’ve got to go buy two hundred thousand dollars worth of servers every five years or put that into a lease purchase agreement, that type of thing. Now it’s not really an issue. It’s a monthly cost factor.
And then, again, just continuing to grow the business and focus on that growth model as opposed to worrying about an infrastructure, type of of situation. So, yeah, I I think it’s great and two two great unique alternatives here. And as we transition over to AJ, your you, AJ, are in a unique position as well because you are still a a very large VMware, organization, but you also have one of their largest competitors, and you’re extremely large in Nutanix as well. So can you go into and then we’ll address there’s a question in the chat here, and we’re happy to address questions as this go goes along.
But can you, take us through where Expediant is and and what your mindset is towards all of this?
So being a long time VMware provider, Rackspace is as well. So I don’t wanna say like, oh, hey. We’re not. We’re the only one here. Rackspace does this as well.
The big thing that we’ve seen over this period of time, especially with the acquisition happening, is a lot of people reevaluating the math.
And a lot of this isn’t just the my perpetual license. This is the other piece of this is the perpetual license went away. So you bought your license once, and then you just paid, like, a much smaller amount for support over time. The big thing that they did was by switching to a subscription model, it now means that people are paying effectively the full license price and support every single month.
That’s where a lot of that cost increase really comes from, especially when it comes time for support renewal. You’re going from this teeny tiny amount based on licenses you bought potentially a decade ago to now I have to rebuy all my licenses in essence. So I think a lot of the pain point was there. I think one of the other things VMware did not do a really great job of was explaining the value at all.
They kinda announced all the price increases first and then tried to backload it with what are you getting out of that instead of saying, hey. This is all the stuff we’re doing, and now here’s the price difference. So I think had they done it in the opposite direction, they probably would have had less heartburn in the field.
The big thing though that we saw was there’s gonna be a lot of people who are gonna be upset about this. And we started working on Nutanix support when the acquisition was originally announced in twenty twenty two. Because we knew there’s gonna be some people who are gonna be like, no. I’m oh, nope.
I’m not doing this. I am switching. I’m going somewhere else. And those switches do take time.
The other part of this is we saw a lot of organizations, especially last year, who were kinda under duress. They got their bill, their renewal, and they didn’t have a year to plan. They didn’t have two years to plan. They had two months.
And I’ve been through a lot of these before. That’s why I have all the gray and none of this. And that’s why a lot of times we see when you try to do a migration quickly, it doesn’t work. Or it causes impacts to the business. The risk is too high. And so a lot of organizations signed one year agreements or they signed three year agreements, and they said, you know what? We’ll get them in three years.
Now I’ve also been through a lot of those too.
The former employer of mine, Oracle would come around every three years and say, hey. It’s renewal time. And everybody would run around with their hair on fire and say, hey. We gotta get everything we can off of Oracle.
And then we’d get everything we can off of Oracle. And then they would go, alright. Fine. This is what we’re signing.
This is the lowered amount because this is all of what we have. And they would sign them. They say in three years, we’re not doing this again. And everyone would forget about it until two years and, like, nine months.
And then we’d do it all over again. And so a lot of organizations, what we when we started talking to them last year was if you sign a renewal in twenty twenty five or even twenty twenty four, you need to start planning what your renewal in three years is going to be. Is it going to be just a straight up renewal because you like what VMware is doing? And I would say that they are doing a lot of really great things.
These are things they should have been doing for the last five years, maybe a little bit longer than that, of VMware Cloud Foundation is not a new product. It was released in twenty eighteen. I was one of the first customers of it. I can tell you right now, it’s actually very good.
And what they did when they developed it was kind of amazing if if you knew what was going on inside of VMware. They were effectively six different businesses. And they got it all together for this one product. So a lot of that is now being rolled forward.
A lot of it is being put together. You don’t have six or seven different products. There is a lot of value across that portfolio.
On the flip side of that, we have Nutanix. Nutanix is the main vendor who was going at VMware feature for feature for the last ten years. And that was very clearly their main competitor.
They very clearly were, like, one a, one b. And since then, we’ve seen a lot of organizations looking at them because they fit into the ecosystem that that customer has. Their backups, their storage, their monitoring, their tooling, their ticketing systems.
A lot of organizations that we talk to are not necessarily prepared to make a huge jump. I’ve we, you know, we just to pull the curtain back, we did have a prep call and we all kind of agreed. I can throw a rock and hit a VMware engineer.
My walls are rubber. It’ll just hit me. But if if I throw the rock, I can hit a VMware engineer. Hyper v, less so.
Kevin, OpenStack, it’s there’s talent out there, but it’s not it’s nowhere near the quantity of VMware engineering talent because that’s been the de facto standard. I think the stat was, like, eighty five percent of companies were running VMware and their or ESXi and vSphere at some like, in some form or fashion. So it’s talking about moving away from the defacto standard and what was, like, the number one supported option for this entire ecosystem of things, and how do you fit into that? How does that fit into your Doctor strategy?
One of the big things that we can do as a service provider is provide flexible licensing for our Doctor services where it’s not in use, you’re not paying for it. So there are ways for us to alleviate some of the pain that we see from the industry.
I did see one of the questions in there. Can Expedient off can Expedient do licensing and renewal for existing on premise server environments? The answer to that is no.
This was actually one of the big changes that came out of the last, chain the last big announcement, which was the elimination of white label licensing, which was to service up from larger service providers to smaller service providers. That was a big one that came out. But also, we don’t wanna be in the licensed reselling business. We are a service provider.
We I’ll say this. We don’t make any more money selling VMware licenses. Right? VMware has their cost. We have our cost.
It’s not much different, I’ll be honest. And a lot of this comes down to being able to leverage this as a way to move to an OPEX model into a service provider model because I can tell every IT director and CIO right now what their what their work is for next year. Everybody’s talking about AI, so you have to put your focus on that. You have whatever the business is going to come up with in terms of these are the things that we need to do to improve efficiency, etcetera. Most of that’s gonna be tied to AI, and you still have to maintain everything you’re doing.
Those lights have to stay on. You don’t get a choice in that.
Your projects are dead last on that list. You don’t get to take those away. The like, your projects, can they get put in the back burner very, very quickly. Your patching doesn’t.
So if you want to move that up the stack and keep your things and your improvements going that you wanna make as an as a department and as an IT organization, this is where leveraging the service provider space comes in because we’re taking care of that hardware. I’m managing that relationship with Broadcom. I’m managing that relationship with Nutanix so that you can focus on how are you delivering outcomes to your company. How are you delivering that efficiency?
How are you delivering those resources? And if you can leverage technology stacks that you recognize today and that your team already knows today, you can get that bigger jump and not have to worry about, okay. Well, this is a really great technology, but I’m not really sure if my people are gonna get it. I’m not really sure if this is going to work out for us.
And a lot of organizations don’t wanna take a ton of risk, especially right now. So this is a way to take a much lower risk jump from managing things on prem and, you know, Chad, you mentioned it. Nobody wants to pay two hundred k for hardware every four or five years. This is where the service provider space really comes in, and that’s why companies like us at Expediant can help along that path.
Yeah. Thank you, AJ. I think that’s a that’s a great transition into, you know, the next part of this conversation because I see both Kevin and Jeff nodding their heads in in moving to this, OPEX model of allowing IT, IT managers, CIOs, all that type of thing to move their projects up that stack.
Jeff, can you can you talk here, about, you know, coming alongside companies that are willing to make this transition and are are being guided by their TAs to this type of transition and how that’s how your setup has helped those IT organizations really kind of move their projects up the stack to AJ’s point.
Yeah. Yeah. No. That’s great great perspective. So, you know, again, as as a purely software driven organization, we are very interested in, again, not only removing the barriers and making it easy and getting getting people, essentially, out of the out of the trenches dealing with the the the time consuming and costly, you know, technicals around deploying and and operating the technology and just getting to work on whatever the thing is that they’re trying to do, whatever their mission is. Right? Focusing on the applications and and and what they’re trying to achieve.
But it’s what’s interesting is that with software, and this is really a philosophy. I can’t say that it is across the board for every software company, but certainly for SteelDome.
Our one of our primary missions of among many, is to allow organizations to go where they need to go based on their requirements. Right? We’re not in the business of dictating, you must do this. You must do it in this silo, this silo, or this silo, or as the industry, has dubbed, you know, the various t shirt sizes that you have to choose from. Right? The software, if the if done right, should be able to take you wherever your requirements go, whether that’s, you know, financial requirements, operational requirements, etcetera.
And you should be able to do that anywhere. Right? Of course, software needs hardware to run, and being, you know, hardware agnostic, taking that approach from a software perspective, of course, is kinda goes without saying, but we have to say it because there’s some nuance there.
Again, like I mentioned before, it doesn’t matter where you start or where you’re, you know, where you’re going. That’s all based on your requirements, and that’s really kind of our focus there. So, when we talk with clients, a lot of times, you know, first of all, we’re we’re not the first one to talk. Right?
We’re the first one to listen because every customer requirement and every conversation is completely novel, you know, across the board. Right? I’ve been involved in thousands of conversations over my career, and I have not heard the same one once. Right?
It’s it’s all different.
So being now in the position of delivering software that can say, listen. Okay. Based on what I’ve heard, based on where you are today, based on where you want to go tomorrow, this is what the software can do in terms of being able to fulfill that mission. And, also, hopefully, if we’ve done this right, which so far we’ve it is proven to be true, that we can reduce the cost.
Again, these barriers that I talked about earlier, The technical overhead, the cost, the time to implement, because, again, we are focused on getting customers, you know, primarily out of the weeds and focused on what matters most, which is delivering results and delivering outcomes, comma, sooner rather than later. And that’s that’s very key. So regardless of whether we’re talking about public cloud, building your own private cloud, running at the edge, running literally on prem, if that’s still a thing. Right?
We over the years, if you look back, there’s multiple pendulum swings that we see in technology. Pendulum swings swings that happened within the box itself. Right? The CPU, the memory, the disk network.
And one thing pressures another thing, which pressures another thing, which pressures another thing, and then it comes back around again. And then you have the pressure and the pendulum swing of scale. Right? We went from on prem to public cloud, back to the edge, back to the public cloud, and there’s all these different pressure points.
And now AI, which is probably the most significant, development in the recent years, which we’re we’re very much involved with. There’s there’s this idea of now sovereignty. Right? Because of the sensitivity of the data that these AI models use, companies are shifting from using simulated AI models now, which could run basically anywhere because there was no proprietary or super sensitive information that was running there.
So there was no concern about trust and who could see the data. But now as these models are demanding more accuracy, they they actually are now operating on real customer data, sensitive data, whether that’s financial or health care or otherwise. So there’s this this sovereignty shift now that’s happening.
But the problem is is that in order to in order to make that a sovereign type of infrastructure, that means that you have to do things yourself in in some form or fashion. And doing those things, again, are, they’re very, very technical, and they’re very time consuming, and they cost a lot of money typically to deploy. So that’s really what the focus is around driving software to alleviate a lot of those those barriers.
So that is where we see again, when I use the word democratization, that’s what I mean by that, is now taking technology that the Fortune two thousands really have access to and making that accessible to anybody because it doesn’t require them to have massive budgets, and it doesn’t require them to have, a lot of in house expertise to do it. Right? Anybody could do it. And if we’ve done it right, then that’s really what, you know, what we’re what we’ve achieved in the in the industry, and that’s what we’re seeing today.
So Great. And and going over, Kevin, you know, as as Jeff is talking about this and and talking about the ability to come in, I don’t wanna say regardless of budget, but but but it’s not, necessarily budget constraint situation for smaller organizations to now leverage cloud. As we get into, all of this and get into this discussion here, a little bit deeper, and we’ve got, you know, about ten minutes left to to handle some of the q and a here. But, you know, talk about talk about your transition, some maybe a a real world example here in a couple of minutes of of what you’ve done to help a customer move from the VMware space over.
And then AJ is politely raising his hand to, to join in the conversation here too, and we can address these questions. So we’ve got ten minutes here. We’re gonna address the questions. But, you know, take us through, Kevin, a a win that you’ve had here and and, you know, quickly, and then we’ll hit the questions.
Absolutely. I mean so with our I mean, everything that we’ve talked about so far definitely deeply resonates with everything that we’re also seeing in the market as well. People trying to move up stack, trying to figure out hybrid, trying to figure out on prem. And one of the things that we do with our product strategy and portfolio is that we have an enterprise, a business segment, and a flex segment.
And what that does is that makes it so that I can run different OpenStack workloads on prem in a customer environment. I can do it in our data center. I can give them a truly, you know, shared control plane dedicated compute experience and I can also give them a fully multi tenant environment. But the big sticking factor across those three things is the fact that they’re all using the same API and the same capabilities there.
And so we, you know, when a customer is coming in and they’re running those enterprise workloads and they would need that burstable compute capability or they need help moving workloads easily into a, you know, a multi tenant environment so that they can refactor their their hardware footprint, you know, change things around a little bit and then redeploy their enterprise stack on top of it for that on prem. That that unified API experience gives customers that that quite literally that that sticky factor, that capability that they’re looking for. And in that win space, right? That is the customers who are doing exactly what I just described.
And a lot of customers are they’ve got HP Gen nine gear, they’ve got an old Supermicro kit, they’ve got Dell r740s or brand new seven thousand six hundred and twenty six servers, right? It’s a mix of this, you know, totally, you know, mixed environment. And they’re trying to repurpose that capex in in new meaningful ways because of this rug pull that’s happened from them. And so, a lot of these customers are coming in and they’re looking at different technology solutions and saying, This all sounds great.
You know, I want everything that you’re talking about. Can you do it on a you know, R710?
And, you know, some of the I would probably try to talk them out of, you know, running it on some of that older hardware. But the reality is, is that some of the times, those older machines are mission critical to their applications. They don’t have the additional money to go buy new hardware or capabilities. And so, the open source ecosystem that we’re putting out there, that we’re working on, has a very similar, you know, we’ll call it strategic appeal to being able to put on, modern software on older hardware, get them through these, you know, tumultuous times and then repurpose those applications or put new hardware in place as they grow. And we can do that in, you know, in in a mixed environment, creating availability zones and aggregates and things like that.
And so I can’t give you specific customer names on where we’ve had these No.
But I can tell you that we’re doing exactly this on a on a pretty daily basis for customers where they’re they’re figuring out how to shift an application, learning the APIs, repurposing hardware in their data centers, and then pulling it all back. And, John in the in the questions talking about AI, right, and and and that the sovereignty of that data, like, that’s that’s paramount to everything that we’re doing. It’s it’s table stakes, right? It’s like Jeff’s working on the storage components and capabilities there.
Data is reality for all things going forward. It always It’s the old saying that metadata is data. Right? But data is what is really separating customers being able to be successful or not, and rapid access to that and having the sovereignty of that data in their environments.
And so being able to have those different break points across the different stack, to have that hybrid experience, but we keep their secure data in their secure environments, in their four walls, is really a paramount thing. And I think that we do it pretty well in terms of how we address it with these open ecosystems.
But, yeah, it’s definitely something that we’re seeing in the market and that success is growing. It’s a crescendo of success that’s happening.
Great. So going further into the questions here and and, appreciate getting a a really a deep dive into what each of your specific offerings has and what it brings to the table that’s a little bit more unique, to each one of you. But going in here, John, as you mentioned, Kevin here, John mentioned the the hybrid model where some of the information is is being kept on prem. They they like that because of the security aspect to it.
Again, we’re gonna have to keep these answers short and sweet. But, you know, starting with AJ, you know, what what are your thoughts on on the AI model and security in and around that? Because AI is driving the conversation. Even though in the back room somewhere under a water heater or something like that is an AS four hundred in a lot of companies still, AI is is the topic of conversation currently. So what what are you seeing there?
Yeah. And this is, I think, one of the things that we as a service provider help with. So we actually rolled out our own suite of AI tooling that leverages public models to connect to private data. But what I have seen is that a lot of organizations struggle with getting out of their own way.
And that’s why I think a lot of this shift of folk moving focus away from whatever Broadcom has done now to cause a lot of heartburn, to moving into is that something I wanna use going forward? Do I wanna move over to a platform like Nutanix or even the platforms offered by the other members of the panel here? But moving away from that level of focus allows you to focus on the things that the business is really asking for. The c suite only cares about Broadcom stuff because of the price increase.
That’s it. Otherwise, if there was no change in the price, they wouldn’t be talking about anything that way.
The AI piece, though, comes into play and say, hey. I want to go do these things, but data is really important. How do I make sure that that’s all secured? We built an entire platform in terms of storing data securely, HIPAA HITRUST certified, having attestations with all of the various public models, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google and perplexity to be able to say, let’s bring in the best tools that people know and like with the data that they actually use and need.
And this is something where by putting those tools together, we’re able to handle both the patching and maintenance of the infrastructure. So the worry and the time constraint or the time constraint or the time burden comes off, and that focus can go over there, but we’re helping on both sides. So we’re helping solve their tactical problems today of where do I run my workloads, and then where do I see my business leveraging AI going forward? And I think that is a huge, differentiator for us in the space because we are trying to get people to the solution to their problem, not the solution to what their resource needs are.
We can provide the resources. We can provide the staff. We can provide the the support around that. But this is where the difference really turns into, hey.
Here’s a full suite of services to work off of and also looking at things like disaster recovery and data protection. One of the things we’re now looking at is resilient AI. All of that data that’s super duper important, is it all protected?
Are you backing up your Office three sixty five data correctly if that’s where the majority of your data lives? Like, seventy five percent of our customers are leveraging the SharePoint connector from us.
That’s a big deal. So how do we make sure that Office three sixty five backups are happening properly and correctly so that in the event that something goes terribly wrong and Microsoft blows up Office three sixty five or something, that all of that data is protected and can be restored somewhere else? That is a huge, thing that people are now starting to turn their focus to in terms of how do I make sure that my business can continue to take advantage of the value that’s coming out of these AI tools.
So, Jeff, we’re gonna pivot a little bit here to answer one of the other questions, which I think fits into into your wheelhouse here. Brian Walsh asked, in your opinion, where do you see the hypervisors playing a role in AI compute? Is isn’t there less importance on using hypervisors in an AI landscape?
Yeah. It’s all over the map because it depends on what the customer’s doing. That’s a that’s a great question.
So some of the workloads do reside in in the VM space, and we have, part of our stack is to build in a very high level security. So the confidential computing framework that we that we have that the industry is basically standardized on, which does require, you know, it’s all modern based processors that support this capability, but there’s offload capabilities and and hardware requirements around that. But that provides, you know, in memory encryption, you know, complete, you know, VM to kernel isolation, all sorts of things to support that space.
But the large part of AI workloads do reside in container based workloads typically, just because that’s how they were originally designed to be deployed and deployed at scale.
So the platform supports, being able to do both of those things, depending on what your needs are. And, really, that’s that’s largely gonna be centered around how you wanna leverage, the the specific a you know, a AI based hardware, the GPUs, and everything related to that. So being able to either pass through hardware, pass through the GPU to the VMs, or to virtualize or to essentially slice the the the GPUs into smaller pieces that can be shared amongst many, very similar to how containers work. The platform will will support both of those and meet you again where you’re where you’re currently at. Because everybody’s requirements are slightly different. Again, AI AI landscape is is very, very broad.
There’s thousands of moving parts, and that’s really the the last thing I’ll say here to keep my my answer short. One of the one of the analogies I like to use is there’s it’s particularly around AI. Right? A lot of companies talk about how they wanna go down that road.
They wanna implement these technologies, but they don’t even have the first idea where to begin. It’s like someone literally just drunk dropped a a thousand, you know, car parts in your driveway and said, okay. Have fun putting that together. But the difference is that our operating system will take those pieces and then ask you, what do you want to build?
Do you want a four door sedan? Do you want a Ferrari? Do you want an eighteen wheeler? And it will self assemble itself into that construct so that the customer doesn’t have to worry about how do I put it together and all of the nuances around making that engine work.
Because really AI is is is just another application, albeit a very highly specialized one. It’s another application that has very specific requirements.
And taking the guesswork out of what’s required to support that application. Right? The framework underneath, again, is the one of the principal missions of the software to to be able to get the customer there quicker, So they can actually get to work doing meaningful things rather than, you know, assembling and piecing together and testing and and then undoing and redoing again. All that time is wasted. Just get get to the end result and get focused on the application and the end result that you want to actually drive to with the AI frameworks that you’re deploying.
So Well, I see Doug here. That means we’re coming to the end of our time. So, you know, again, I wanna thank Kevin, Jeff, and AJ, specifically.
We’re happy to continue this conversation offline.
I know, Telarus, the marketing team will provide all of our contact information, but this is what we see in the marketplace, and we really appreciate all three of you being a part of the hit series today. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Doug to, to move on to the rest of the show.
Thanks so much, Chad. Great presentation. Appreciate to you and all of our panelists today.