Wednesday, February 7, 2018

How VMware, HPE, and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to a global audience

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer optimized cloud design interview explores how a triumvirate of VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to global audiences. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

Learn how Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services capabilities to Latin American and European markets has proven so successful. Here to explain how they developed the right recipe for rapid delivery of agile Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) deployments is Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of VMware EMEA, and Antonio Oriol Barat, Head of Cloud IT Infrastructure Services at Telefonica. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.


Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What challenges are mobile and telecom operators now facing as they transition to becoming managed service providers?

Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this moment is to help customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have local platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms, hyperscale public cloud providers, and data communications networks. We want to help our customers manage these in a secure way.

Gardner: How have your cloud services evolved? How have partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?

Oriol Barat
Oriol Barat: We have had to transition from being a hosting provider with data centers in many countries. Our movement to cloud was a natural evolution of those hosting services. As a telecommunications company (telco), our main business is shared networks, and the network is a shared asset between many customers. So when we thought about the hosting business, we similarly wanted to be able to have shared assets. VMware, with its virtualization technology, came as a natural partner to help us evolve our hosting services.

Gardner: Joe, it’s as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as Telefonica in mind.

Baguley: You could say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop what was originally called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for me, it’s an operating system (OS) for clouds.

Baguley
We’re bringing together storage, networking and compute into one OS that can run both on-premises and off-premises. You could be running on-premises the same OS as someone like Telefonica is running for their public cloud -- meaning that you have a common operating environment, a common infrastructure.

So, yes, entirely, it was built as part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her clouds.

Gardner: To have a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.

Baguley: That’s entirely it. Like someone said, “If all of the clouds are running the same OS, what’s the differentiation?” Well, the differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in Latin America. You want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys that can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can’t give. They can give you over-the-top services that other cloud providers don’t provide. They can give you an integrated solution for your business that includes the cloud -- and other enterprise services.

It’s about providing the tools for cloud providers to build differentiated powerful clouds for their customers.
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Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our listeners and readers that aren’t that familiar with Telefonica, tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.

Oriol Barat: Telefonica is one of the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21 countries. We have fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data.

We used to think that our core business was in communications. Now we see what we call a new core of our business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that come on top.

Gardner: And, of course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When it came time for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the right combination of technologies, to produce your new managed services capabilities, why did you choose HPE and VMware to create this full solution?

Sharing requires trust

Oriol Barat: VMware was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start providing shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched “virtual hosting” in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we have been evolving from this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a shared platform for customers, to the cloud services that we have today.

The hardware part is important; we have to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it’s very important to provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and HPE as partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the applications, and they know it will work fine.

Gardner: HPE is very fond of its Synergy platform, with composable infrastructure. How did that help you and VMware pull together the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?
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Baguley: We have been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since before cloud was a thing. We don’t have a test environment that’s as big as Telefonica’s production environment -- and neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together -- and like any of these journeys, there have been missteps along the way. We stumbled occasionally, but it’s been good to work together as a partnership.

As we have grown, we have also both understood how the requirements of the market are changing and evolving. Ten years ago providing a combined cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was unheard of -- and people wouldn’t believe you could do it. But that’s what we have evolved together, with the work that we have done with companies such as Telefonica.

The need for something like HPE Synergy and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the work that we have done together, along with what we have done in our management stack, with the networking, compute, and storage.

Gardner: The combination of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong tag team.

Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and the agility that a cloud provider needs to then meet the agility requirements of their customers, definitely.

Gardner: When it comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud with as much ease as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many markets with its vSphere Hypervisor, how does that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these clouds?

Seamless migrations

Oriol Barat: Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can be confident that it’s going to work well when it is in place. The other thing is that VMware is providing us with the tools that make these migrations easier.

Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is our hybrid cloud connector. It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a Layer 2 [network] level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are IBM and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers like Telefonica in 2018.
The important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud.

So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because some of the fear is about getting locked in: “I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform.” Right here, there isn’t that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.

Gardner: It sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the provider’s cloud. In the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services and integration, knowing that the venerable vendors like VMware and HPE are behind the underlying services.

Do you have any examples where you have been able to bring this total solution to a typical managed service provider account? How has it worked out for them?

Everyone’s doing it

Oriol Barat: We have use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal technology, it’s the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies of all verticals are in this process of transformation.

We have a lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had, for example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our platforms.

For example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel chains that are also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and for more of their IT.

We have use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.

We have use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their businesses grow.

A lot of people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms that they have on-premises.

I would say that all verticals are into this transformation.
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Gardner: It’s interesting, you mentioned being able to gain global reach from a specific home economy by putting data centers in place with a managed service provider model.

It’s also important for data sovereignty and compliance and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other issues for that to happen. It sounds like a very good market opportunity.

And that brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in 12 months?

Gaining the edge

Baguley: There has been a lot of talk at recent events, like HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos, the edge is going to become something quite interesting.

What we are talking about is taking that same blend of storage, networking and compute, and running it on as small a device as possible. So think micro data centers, nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud? How much can we distribute this cloud? How close to the point of need can we get our customers to execute their workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI), to do their data gathering, et cetera?

And working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic network just means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of distributed edge-to-cloud core capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next 12 months. That could be really, really strong.

Gardner: Antonio?

Oriol Barat: In this transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20 percent of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of us. The potential is huge.

Looking ahead with our services, for example, it’s very important that the network is also in transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. These networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good position to put together cloud services with such network services -- with security, also with more software-defined capabilities, and create really flexible solutions for our customers.
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Baguley: One example that I would like to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid C.F. are playing at home next weekend ... It’s theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom of those network base stations -- because of VMware Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), it’s no longer specific base station hardware, it’s x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn around to a betting company and say, “Would you like to move your front-end web servers with running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid’s stadium, for the four hours in the afternoon of that match?” And suddenly they are the best performing website.

That’s the kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new application infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies like the network all coming together. So those are the kind of things you are going to see from this kind of solutions approach going forward.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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