>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's the Cube. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is day two of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris, Alain Andreoli is here. He's the Senior Vice President and general manager of the hybrid IT group at HPE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you David, great to see you Peter. >> So, a lot of good energy here, the story Alain is coming together. >> Alain: Yes. >> We've seen it over the last five years but really fine-tuned the organization and seems like things are going well. >> We have more clarity on our strategy than I've ever seen in a company, and this was not easy to do because the market is changing so fast. We addressing $120 billion market in hybrid IT, we lead the market in compute, we lead the market in storage, we lead the market with private cloud, we have invented composable, we are ramping up our Harper converge offering, and now on top of the infrastructure, we building these layers of one sphere, which is managing a multi-cloud environment for the data, and we are adjusting our services to become advisory and consumption models. This is having such an impact on our customers, 74 percent of our customers are going for hybrid IT journey. So we have organized ourselves to make this journey to be basically the partner of choice for our customers as they go through that. >> I mean so cloud of the last five, seven years, cloud and open-source software have really disrupted our industry. You've had to respond to that, and basically bringing cloud-like operating models to your customers. >> Alain: Yes. >> How have you done that, how do you rate your progress and where are you to date in that regard? >> So the first decision we had to make is are we a neutral party to our customers? (laughing) >> Dave: Yeah. >> We need to redo it. (laughing) >> They're getting you back, right? So, I don't know if you can see that, alright? Alain came by on his scooter, here we go, let's catch this. Here we go, this is called payback. (laughing) During Dr. Tom's interview, Alain came by with his scooter. (laughing) >> I will get you, I will get you for this. (laughing) >> It's great fun on the Cube. >> We can kid, that's alright. >> That's good. >> So the decision we had to make is are we the partner for our customers to go to the cloud or are we saying on PRIM is better? >> Dave: Yeah. >> And we 'vedecided to be this partner. Because we believe there is value for everyone and we believe it is not a one-way street. And we see actually that 32 percent of the customers who have moved work loads to the cloud are bringing these work loads back on PRIM. So we had to advise them. We helped them go through this journey, we really mean it, we helped them to go on Amazon, we helped them to go on Azure, we helped them to go on Google, and we helped them make it work, and this is why it's a service-led journey. The problem if you go on the public cloud is that we don't really know how much it is going to cost you, and you don't really have a single pane of glass to have all your data being managed across, what is now an ecosystem. We enabled them to do that. And the market we are directly addressing on PRIM is not shrinking. We still see huge pockets of growth, in flash storage, in HPC, you've seen the results we have in HPC. In Mission-Critical X86, in Hyperconvert, so we are basically moving from the one-size fits all type of organization of freeing X86 and start off storage, to become a company that offers value to customers, in specialized pools of compute, of storage, of networking, and offering them the end to end journey across the different stack. What I think is going to make a huge difference, if you look at the five-year horizon, is the growth of The Edge and the fact that 70 percent of the data are going to come from The Edge, and then you will really see the power of our strategy of private IT which goes from The Edge, to the core, to the cloud, because we will be able to enable our customers to have their data moving seamlessly across this journey. And we have exactly organized the company that way. >> One of the obvious use cases from what I like to call machine intelligence or artificial intelligence is really infusing artificial intelligence into infrastructure for predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, IT operations management, Infocyte, you got through an acquisition of Nimble and have been impressed with the pace at which you pushed that throughout the portfolio, I wondered if you could address that. >> We've been almost surprised. We looked at, we wanted to become the flash company because we saw that the market over three years, would completely move to flash. And when there is such a pendulum shift, you want to be at the forefront. >> Dave: Right. >> So we looked at all these companies who were having very strong positions on flash and Nimble intrigued us because they had, by far, when we talked to their customers, the highest customer satisfaction, I think it was something like 87 percent. >> The NPS is off the charts. >> The NPS is off the charts, right? And then we peeled the onion and we saw Infocyte, which was almost enough to start south because it was not part of our list, right? Initially of our list of this is how we are gonna select a company we want to acquire, and when we got into Infocyte, how it works, how we can actually port easily these to three power and then to SimpliVity and then to the rest of the portfolio we felt this is the crown jewel that is going to be the foundation of us making >> Dave: And not just the storage portfolio. >> No, end to end so we're gonna do these for everything, now we cannot do it in one day. The priority was to give a seamless experience to customers going three power or Nimble, so we've done that very quickly. We acquired the company six months ago and it's already there for three power. Next one will be Simplivity, very soon in a few weeks, then we go to the whole computes platform as well, then finally to networking. I hope, it's not a commitment, but I hope that by the end of next year, and under a year, we will be done for the whole infrastructure portfolio. >> And explain the benefit to customers. >> And then the benefit is that you basically have, you eliminate the need for level one and level two support because it's proactively, now you have to be wanting to have your device calling home, right? Because otherwise, if you want your device to be in the data center and insulated from communicating with the network effect, that is not going to work, so but assuming you want your device to be connected centrally, so that it can be monitored centrally the artificial intelligence that is embedded in Infocyte is basically going to monitor the behavior of your device compared with hundreds of thousands of other ones and therefore anything that is deviant will be flagged as a potential problem and resolved before you even know about it. That's one. So when you end up having a problem eventually, which is becoming very, very rare, then you directly call the level three engineer who is an expert and who has, on the screen, the behavior of your device for the last month compared to others, and the resolution is in less than a minute. So it's a revolution in the way to do service. >> So, one of the things that we've observed as we've talked to customers is that the characteristics of the problems that they're now trying to solve have real world elements, and that's really what The Edge is about in many respects. For the first 50 years of IT, we were doing accounting, and HR, and supply chain, and we were able to define what the data models looked like, we could therefore say, the data's going to be here, the processing is going to be here, we could build data centers. Now as you said, 70 percent of the data is going to be coming from The Edge. It's not clear, necessarily where the best place to process that data is. Where's the compute going to be? How's it going to integrate with people? In many respects, hybrid IT is about diminishing the degree to which infrastructure dictates the way the problem gets solved. Would you agree with that? It's kind of like where does, let the data reside where it needs to reside, and make sure that the business is a natural infrastructure that reflects and corresponds to the work that needs to get done. >> I totally agree with your problem statement, and the way you position the question. In terms of semantics, I would just say we need to make infrastructure invisible. It's still there because it's all running on infrastructure. The iPhone is infrastructure, your PC is infrastructure, your camera is infrastructure, it's all there. >> A C.I.O said to me not too long ago... >> But you know what? We are having this interview, we are not thinking about what makes it happen. >> Peter: Right, right, right. >> Our business is to talk and communicate right now, this all has got to be seamless and that's how we need to make IT, seamless. >> I had a conversation with a C.I.O. >> Invisible. >> Yeah, who said that the value of my infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So, is that kind of what the HP promise is, is we're gonna let the data and the work loads define where the infrastructure goes and ensure we have those options? >> It's exactly right and the vehicle to do that, we call it autonomous data centers. Your phone is a data center. Your data center is a data center. Your off-frame cloud is a data center that you are subcontracting, right? So we want all of these to be autonomous, in terms of self-healing and everything else, and then the intelligence of where these data are being moved and how you use what and when is the single pane of glass that we are developing around one sphere. And how to get the customers to move their work loads and their business around that is what we do with point next with services. This is our strategy. >> So let me break that down a little bit. So, we've got devices that are powerful enough that we could put new types of control, new types of work loads there if we wanted to, we've got now the ability to package infrastructure, and have a single pane of glass, and have a common management framework. >> Right. >> But when you say the autonomous data center, it's we have a common business approach thinking about policy, thinking about value, thinking about how we're gonna do things, and we can put that into this entire vision, and let it actually execute how that manifests itself from a business standpoint. >> Exactly right. >> Have I got that right? >> It's exactly right. I love the way you put it. That's exactly what we are trying to do. it's not going to be done in one day, but that is our strategy, and we have organized, once again, the whole company around it, to execute this strategy and to make it happen for our customers. >> So if we think about what an HPE customer is gonna look like in, you know a really good HPE customer in 2023, what.. >> Alain: That's a long time. >> That's, five years, but I'm giving you that much run way, because you're right, it's not there yet and if it's too ambitious then so be it, but how is a business person going to think differently about working, about the role that IT is going to play in the business, and what it means to have a great partnership with a company like HP? >> Yeah, so we are basically, our motto is One size doesn't fit all, so we are first trying to understand the business of the customer, and then we will apply solutions to enhance this business, or to empower this business, right? So, we have the biggest brace of infrastructure that you can think of, think about this infrastructure becoming self-healing, but this infrastructure is more and more specialized, there is HPC, there is Mission-Critical, we just found Superdome flex, or SAP, we have all these specializations that, for those customers to optimize their business outcome. Then we have the single pane of glass that allows everything to seamlessly operate the data around, and then our point-neck services are going to work with the customers to architect their IT model in a way that their work loads are optimized. And one of the key is the right mix. The right mix of what you do yourself, what you got from multi-cloud, how much do you pay for it, how much do you anticipate that you're gonna pay for it, do you want this to be CAPEX, do you want this to be OPEX? And then how do you manage The Edge, and with Aruba and with Edgeline, and then with all your IT platforms that can manage the data across The Edge. We have the capability to also let the customer decide, do I want a lot of analytics and decisions to be made at The Edge, in my devices, and this is highly valuable depending on what customer business model we are talking about, or, do I want all the data from the analog world through the censors to come straight back to the ranch. All of these decisions, we are gonna have platforms to allow customers to make these decisions, to decide, kind of templates if you want, this is how I want it to run, and to be executed, and then to be automatically, autonomously operated. That's our vision of how we can help our customers moving forward. >> Last question, so the attendees of Discover, your customers, when they go back and he or she talks to their boss, what do you want them to say about Discover 2018? >> I invested two or three days of my time to come to HPE Discover. It was really exciting because I felt that it's like a new company, it's the company I know. I know they are customer first and customer last, and they are the ones who help me when I have a problem, whether they created it or not, they are here to help me. This is not going away, but they are taking us to the new world. They are gonna help us to build our hybrid IT model, and I think we need to trust them to have a seat at the table when we make these decisions, boss. >> Intimacy, innovation... >> Alain: Yeah, innovation. >> Trust. >> HPE's no longer wandering in the desert. (laughing) >> Alain Andreoli thanks so much for coming on the Cube, it is always a pleasure. >> It was a pleasure. Take care, thanks Peter. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Peter and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break, we're live from Madrid. You're watching the Cube. (techno music)

>> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (light techno music) >> Okay welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2017. This is SiliconANGLE's, theCUBE is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE with my co-founder and co-CEO Dave Vellante with Wikibon, and our next guest is Alain Andreoli, who's the Senior Vice and President General Manager of the DCIG, the Data Center Infrastructure Group at HPE. Great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here again. >> Great show, you guys have a lot of great innovations. Notable was the analyst press conference that we were at. You were feeling all the questions, the buzz around Gen10 and all the action you guys are putting inside the new service from security to all the innovation that's happening, pretty great opportunity and the true private cloud numbers coming out of Wikibon are showing fastest growth is cloud on-prem. This points to significant opportunities, your thoughts? >> Yeah, well, the need for compute is clearly growing and you continue to grow forever. What we see is that the compute points are also expanding so it can be on-prem, it can be off-prem, it can be in the edge, and on-prem there is a bit of a revolution which is coming from the experience of the public cloud, and so, private clouds are becoming very, very fancy. So you see on-prem compute basically turning into two families, very specialized for high-performance computing, for mission-critical, for AI, and others. The things that are really, very critical to the business. And then for all the other workloads, they need flexibility like a public cloud but on-prem because they can keep control, they want to mimic the agility and they want to have the same economic level. So we are playing on both fronts, we are doing very well on the specialized front with HPC Acquisitions of HDI and so on, and we are making a breakthrough on the private cloud with Synergy and soon with the new stack. >> So the whole notion of DevOps and cloud have opened up the doors and certainly you guys have been very clear with the simplicity message. Big data is big part of the application process, cloud providers, multiple clouds, so this right mix conversation-- >> Alain: The right mix, the right mix >> Is what Meg is putting out their is a nice message, and what you're saying is "hey the on-prem is not going "anywhere and we have the data to prove it." But you look at the big clients, they want the control. What is the conversation that you're having when you say, "Hey I need more capabilities," obviously high-performance computing, powering AI, and machine-learning, we're seeing, obviously those things. But from the business model side, what are the customers asking from you for solutions? What are the key things they want from HPE right now? What is that-- >> In terms of economic control? >> Solutions that are top priorities. When they sit down and say, "Well, you know, I need more compute." Okay, what does than mean? What specifically are you building for customers to help them with the digital transformation, to simplify the business model of on-prem with cloud and to deal with the multi-cloud world. >> So, they believe that the management of the mix between the different alternatives that they have right now with, certainly, a complexity and they rely on us to take this complexity away. So we are very bullish about the project New Stack because we think that this will allow data to be managed across the different horizons in the data center, across multiclouds and with more and more data being created and eventually computed at the edge. So these three horizons together make intelligent distributed computing, which will be more self-tuning, which will be extreme data analytics, and ultimately, this will allow customers to manage data seamlessly across everything. We think that this is kind of strategically where our customers want to be. Then the way they get there depends. Some customers have a view, which is just modernization of what they have right now. Some of the customers want to be more dramatic and run everything they have as if it was a seamless cloud, and then they have to decide the mix between on-prem and on-prem. Most of the customers, I was looking at what is actually making the public cloud. More than 50% are born from the cloud, they are people who never had the data center and may never have one until they grow up because then when they grow up, they need one. >> John: (chuckles) For control? >> What we have learned, for control-- >> John: And expense-- >> Dave: The Cloud Cliff. >> Expense, That's The Cloud Cliff. So, more than half of the public cloud customers never had a data center. About 15%, 15, 16% of the customers of the public cloud are consumers. And then, you have a small third which are enterprises. That's the first thing to realize, right? That the move of the enterprise is still pretty small. I was discussing with the largest systems integrator in Germany yesterday, and their view is the German perspective, because here in the US we have a tendency to believe that everything is public cloud or will be. The German view is totally different, for instance. So, I think, you know, we have gone through a cycle which has been public-cloud-heavy in terms of marcom where the market believed that public cloud was going to be everything, and we are now landing in a reality zone where this mix is an opportunity for the customers. They have some trivial workloads that can go on the public cloud, but we see that on-prem remains, basically, what people are doing. >> That last point's really important because even though you said, "Well, less than maybe a third is enterprises "in the public cloud," if you look and feel the workloads that are going to the public cloud, it's not the core of enterprise IT workloads. >> So what I believe is that we are thinking it the wrong way when we think in public cloud and which workload goes there. The workloads are not going to the public cloud. It's that a lot of the workloads that used to be run on-prem are now coming from the cloud, SaaS-- >> John: Right. >> That's different, that is very different. So, customers are not deciding what is on-prem, off-prem, they are now looking at software packages that come from the cloud, like Salesforce, or others. And this means that while they're running their data center as vital applications that don't come from the cloud, so it's more and more specialized, and then they have a variety of applications that don't come from the cloud, that they will run on their public cloud. This is why I see these two topologies, if you want, of specialized-- >> John: Yeah. >> Super compute and data-centric, and then, very fluid, and this where Synergy plays so well, because Synergy allows this fluidity-- >> John: Yeah. >> Of pools of resources, and you can basically adjust to the various applications that you have. >> Oh, this is classic early adopter kind of behavior, you mentioned the SaaS coming in and being influenced because they're easy to get into right? You can get some subscription and get some value, but then I think the true private cloud is interesting to me because what it really shows, to extend your point, is that the business models are changing for the agility piece, that's the DevOps. So, as you see IT consumption changing to cloud-like, or true private cloud-- >> Dave: Yep, yep, yep, yep. >> Essentially, that is an OPEX business model. So, the business transformation is now where the rubber hits the road for what digital is. So to me, we see this dynamic so with that being said, what aspects of HP taking advantage of? You mention Synergy, what else do you guys have cookin' up? What's out there that customers are using to turn the knob and go faster on the acceleration on that? >> With customers, I wouldn't like us to look at customers only as being enterprises, because as more and more business is being generated from the cloud, people who do business from the cloud, whether they are enterprise service providers, or software providers, or business born from the cloud, these people also acquire technology, and they have need for services, and they require infrastructure. So, this is a segment of the market where we're going to to double down in the future. So, we are looking, we call them, like, Tier 2, Tier 3's, because the very large ones have a tendency to try to build their own things-- >> John: Yeah, service providers-- >> But, a lot of other service providers and there are-- >> John: Cloud service providers. >> You know, a small third of the market also demand technology and support from us. So, we are going to expand our cloud line strategy. We are going to offer open systems, and be very aggressive there, both for compute, storage and for networking. So there are kind of two prevalent markets. If you want more, there is a market of completely open systems, we call them whiteboxes, you know, we call them for the cloud, Cloudline, which is now a multi-billion dollar business for us. And then you have the people who want products that offer a lot of value that are differentiated, like Synergy, like Proliant, like Blade Systems, like 3PAR, like Nimble, and so on, and obviously we are doubling down on these as well with our Acquisitions and own development like Gen10. >> So the narrative from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and all of your competitors is, you know, hybrid is the reality, fair enough-- >> Alain: That's for sure. >> And we agree, but there is an aspect of zero-sum game here in that the markets at the macro level are not growing like they used to. So, market share becomes very, very important. You've put up a slide in your keynote, 81 straight quarters of leadership. Now, we all know that you can play games with the numbers, but the most important metric we would argue is revenue share. If you're number one in revenue, that's the true market leadership. So you've had 81 straight quarters of leadership, as we've just defined leadership. That's 20 years. >> In this quarter, we had leadership, and next quarter I think we'll have leadership as well-- >> Dave: How have you been able to do that? >> We are not looking at market share for the sake of market share. We want to bring value to our customers and to our shareholders. So if there is, moving forward, a part of the market that does not yield value for either party, we may not want to measure our market share against that because we may not define this as being our own market. But so far, we are leading the overall market in compute. We are now a strong number two in storage, with the acquisition of Nimble, and we're happy to be there. But our strategy is not being number one for the sake of being number one. >> Now on Dave's point, I'm very critical on this, I've been readin' about it, and again I may be overstepping my boundaries here, but I believe that if we're going to a new era of modern computing, dull metrics don't apply because everybody seems to be number one at something. I go to so many shows where I go to Dave where I'm number one in this, I'm-- So, the question is if the old is shifting to a new model, and it's horizontally scalable, vertically specialized kind of a marketplace, which you guys are addressing with some of your tech, what are the metrics? So that we're asking ourselves the question, what should be the benchmark standard? >> So I have a strong point of view and I was discussing with an analyst last night, we had dinner, and I've had the same point of view for the last couple of years. The history of the market is to measure by product category: rack, towers, old flash arrays, disk arrays, mixed arrays, and so on. I think this is a rear mirror view, it doesn't matter. The decisions that customers are making are: what is my specialized computing? Which includes computing, storage, networking. What is my specialized data center, basically. What is my private cloud? Then what is my consumption of IT coming from service providers and therefore, you have the service provider market, which itself can be separated into different segments. That's the way to measure the business. So, I want to be leader in specialized compute. I want to be leader in private cloud because this is what enterprise will be consuming. And basically, we're already leaders there, but I want to be continue to be leader in providing gear to service providers, who have decided to rely on partners to build their data centers and not build them themselves. This makes sense, because then you look at the market differently, you're not looking at micro-territory-- >> John: I agree, I 100% agree with you. >> Density, optimized whatever, you're saying, okay, what is a service provider going to need in the future? What is going to be specialized computing in the future? What is going to be a private cloud in the future? Once you have covered that-- >> John: Yeah. >> What is going to be compute at the edge in the future? And what do you need to orchestrate all the data? These are the clusters of the market that matters. They are the ones we are pressuring and they are the ones-- >> And you could be building technology-- 100% agree with you, I would also add, by the way, I agree with you 100%, and I would even amplify it by saying you could be building something new, like a server, chips, silicon security, that has no category. So how does that relate into things-- (laughing) >> Well, Synergy is the category. >> Dave: Right. >> You know, it's-- >> 'Cause it's horizontally scalable, so again, you could be number one, two, or three by the old categories, but be wholistically number one in the market. >> So, I think it's more, you know, it's more categories of business outcomes. >> John: Yeah. >> Like, specialized high performance, you know, flexibility, agility of a private cloud. I think that's, you know, so, if you make a parallel with the car industry, you can say is the market, like, diesel engine, or gas engine, or electric engine, or is it like sport cars, SUVs, or whatever. I want us to look at SUVs and sport cars, how do we do the best SUV? How do we do the best sports car? Versus, you know-- >> John: The components, and do how you have-- >> This technical view of it's a rack or it's a tower. >> Yeah. >> And how do you add the most value for customers-- >> Yeah. >> That is profitable for shareholders? >> At the end of the day, when we have our argument in our office about this on the research side, we say, "Look, at the end of the day, "let's identify some of these new catego-- and try 'em, not measurement points, but customers and revenue can't lie. If you have customers, here it is, number of customers. >> And so, the problem then is to measure it. Once you have defined what is right metrics, can you measure it? >> John: Right. >> And so, unfortunately, the analyst today cannot measure the market where it has evolved. So we are still looking at rack and towers, and so on, and I think this is wrong, the wrong view. >> Okay, so, talk about the hot thing that we like is the Root of Trust product, the silicon thing that's called the Root of Trust, you know, with the firmware thing. This seems to be getting a lot of buzz to show. It's innovation, we had some independent testers on with your guys, and the Gen10, this is pretty impressive. Thoughts on, is this the kind of direction you continue to go with, what's your thoughts on this security-- >> Well, we think security's super important and, you know, you open the newspaper or the TV today, and you see what's happening, it's quite amazing, including today, what's happening today, here in the US. So, it's incidental the we come in just today with our new generation of compute, but it's taken two years of interviews with customers to really understand what's most important to them. And the risk of cyber threat has turned enormous, and I think that you have been interviewing experts from the FBI, and so on-- >> John: Yeah, right. >> During this session, who came here and help us to build this solution. And I think we're coming at the right time with the right solution that will take a few years to our competitors to try to match that, and then we'll go in this direction because that's the only way technically you can do it. >> John: Yeah. >> It's at the silicon level, so you basically have unique encoding on your server in silicon, and the firmware always, you know, compares itself throughout the whole life cycle of the server, even before the server is finally built through this Root of Trust. I think we've done this extremely well, I'm very, very proud of our ingenious. >> And it's been validated against the The NIST, NIST Securities Team, and so, congratulations on that. >> Alain: And these are the most stringent startups in the industry, right? >> It's pretty impressive, I mean, this has been a trend that we've been seeing, the silicon, the silicon angle, no pun intended. But it's interesting, and always, security's come up in the past, people want that. And with IoT, the support, the attack vectors can be sealed up pretty well-- >> And so are our Edgeline products, they have IDOL 5, and so, they will also have access to this technology. >> Great innovation, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate you share the insight. I'll give you a final word here. Share with the audience something you think they should know about HPE right now that they may not know about, I know the messaging's pretty simple, you got the nice messaging, but going beyond the messaging, what would you like to share with the audience about your group and HPE's innovation coming out of Discover 2017? >> You feel the buzz here, you can see, I think we have never been in such a focused and clear position, we exactly know the businesses we are pressuring, the Hybrid IT make it simpler, and the edge, and the service to make it happen. We are just crystal clear. But when you put the three together, you get to this dimension of intelligent distributed computing, and this is a market that we will lead in the future. Also, we are such a strong and stable company. We will have over $12 billion of cash net in our balance sheet by the end of next month. And this puts us in a position to continue to double down on these bets we have made for the future of the market. So we are very, very confident that we are in a great spot, and frankly, it's great now because it feels like we are starting to be a destination. The last 18 months, we separated from some of our legacy friends, and now, not only are we on our own, but we have a clear strategy moving forward. We are proving that we are implementing it with the six acquisitions that we have made over the last few months, and more in the pipeline, continuing to deliver the capability to integrate these acquisitions, and the capability to continue to motivate our customers to be with us. >> And the spotlight is on you guys, we'll be tracking it, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Infrastructure Group, sharing his opinion here on what's happening and where's it going in the future for HPE. We'll be back with more live coverage with theCUBE, here in Las Vegas after the short break. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back, stay with us. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by: Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover, 2017 in Madrid. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here to rap with my co-host, Peter Burris. >> Hey, Dave. >> Dave: Good couple a days. >> Oh, you know what I just discovered. I discovered The Cube is the antidote to jet lag. (laughs) >> That's right, when you get interesting people on. >> Oh, man. >> It pumps you up. >> Totally. Just unbelievable, exciting and it's all framed by... Well let's start where we talked about yesterday, we proposed that increasing what we're seeing in the industry is the new model of computing being established by Amazon and then the other poll, where it was known, we know that it's not all gonna be one cloud, it's not all gonna be a central cloud model, or essentialize cloud model. There's gonna be other places where data's gonna need to be processed. >> Dave: Well, that's what we believe. >> That's what we believe, and... There's physics behind that statement. There's legal regulations about data residency, behind that statement. But, we didn't know who was gonna step up and lead that other side and it's nice to see this conference indicate that HPE is in a position to help demonstrate, or help show the industry how cloud truly can go from centralized down to the edge. >> Yeah, and I think as I said a number of times, the strategy's coming into focus, you could debate it. You could say, "well, splitting it up was the wrong thing to do. "They lost their supply chain." But, Meg's argument, and then Antonio's argument always was, "look, we're gonna be more focused, "it's gonna allow us to do "a better job for our customers. "Yes, we're gonna be service's lead." They didn't say this. "Our margines are gonna be lower, "you don't have software anymore, "but that's okay, we can learn how to make money at that." And you know, the old HPE went through a similar transition. Kinda, got out of the HPEX business and got out of building it's own OS, and relying more on Microsoft and Intel and it made a lot of money. In those days. >> Peter: It did well. >> Did very well. It didn't invest under the herd regime the way it could have or should have and that hurt and then it spun out and made a lot of missteps but... Meg, to her credit, didn't make a lot of missteps. There was the initial entrance into the public cloud, they pulled back fast, they failed fast on that, good. Yeah, maybe there was some organizational issues early on but in general, the acquisitions have been solid, the strategy... >> And well integrated. >> And well integrated, absolutely. >> Peter: They've gotten value out of 'em. >> The strategies has been... I think clear internally, it wasn't always clear externally but they stayed calm about that, they didn't freak out about that. Helped that the stock price was going up a little bit, 'cause it was pretty depressed for a while. >> And shareholders weren't incontestable like they were for many years. >> That's right, and so, that gave them a little bit of time to bring it all together... It's finally here and I think Meg is stepping down at absolutely the right time. >> Or at a... She's stepping down at a good time, she's leaving a company that is much stronger than it was when she took it over. >> And that's what you want, one of the things I'm personally proud of when I left IDC it was in really good shape when I left, it wasn't a mess that I handed to somebody else. Had a lot of messes and IDC that I turned around as you well know. So, I think, I feel as though the company's in good shape and good hands. And, again, I think the... I don't know if you're a stock analyst or if you're pounding the table saying "buy this stock." 'Cause it is a relatively low margin business and there's a lot of competition, there's knife fights out there, it's not a high growth business, but on the flip side, it's clean, it throws off a lot of cash, they got a decent balance sheet and the customers love 'em. >> And that's the most important thing, it's the customers. Look, I... Disclosure, I actually did a significant consulting stint, here at HPE, right around the time of the compact acquisition and I saw what happened and for many years, the senior manager and team of HPE behaved as though they presumed that scale was it's own reward. If we get bigger, we'll find efficiencies, we'll find opportunities. Just being big, is the objective and I think that they have wandered in the desert trying to find those opportunities, that were the consequence of just being big and they never materialized. >> They weren't there. >> They never... It was like mirages on the horizon, they never materialized and I think if there's anything to your point that Meg has successfully done, is she's gotten the company to say, "don't chase the mirages, chase the customer. "Let's come back to what made HPE great for so long." And the idea that, if we stay focused on the customer and focus on technology, we can put them together in unique and interesting ways that will bind us to what customers are doing. And if you take a look at this event and the new messaging, and the things that they're focusing on it feels like, to me, that HPE is no longer wandering in the desert. You and I are smart guys, we are... Typically we can look at a company and we can see whether or not they know what they're doing and when you said, "well, you know what. "Maybe they had it all figured out inside, "and the rest of us couldn't see it." No, that's not the case. It was not figured out inside and that's what we saw but under Meg, it has become increasingly more figured out and the consequence of that... And it's been very, very plan full. She first was figured out and then she told Wall Street and Wall Street was happy with the numbers, and then she figured out and she started talking to customers when customers were there and now she's figuring it out, she's telling a broader market place. >> Well, and when she stopped by- >> And Antonio's got a great big story to tell. >> And both of those guys stopped by to see us. Meg spent 10 minutes with us, we were chatting here on the open mics and she was very good. Meg, one on one situation, in a small crowd is phenomenal. I've always said that about Meg. Not the greatest presence on stage, not a super dynamic speaker, she's not a Steve Jobs, obviously nobody is, but... But, man, is she credible in a one on one situation. One of the things she said to us was, "Y'know, we kinda got lucky..." My words, "with Aruba, we bought him "because we thought we could compete with "Cisco better, we bought him obviously "because it was a great business, a growth business," and boom all of a sudden, this intelligent edge thing hit. You sprinkle in a little Dr. Tom Bradicich and boom, off you go and you've got not only a great business, you got something that is becoming increasingly strategic for organizations. Great example, I mean the nimble acquisition. We heard, yesterday, Bill Philbin talking about, "well, when we got nimble-" was it Bill Philbin, no it was somebody else today it was... Alain Andreoli. He said, "we picked up nimble 'cause it was a great "flash company, but then we saw this inside thing, "we said, wow, we can spread this thing "across our entire portfolio." That's where- >> And the example he gave was: in six months, it's not running on... >> On three par and then it's gonna run... His goal, he says, "I'm not committing to this, "but my goal is by the end of the next year "it's gonna be running across the entire "server and storage and networking line." That would be a major accomplishment. If in fact, we'll see how much of this stuff is actually impactful to the business, how much it can actually save money you know, anticipate failures, I don't know. We'll see, it's AI, it's a perfect application. You guys have written a lot on the Wikibon team about AI for ITOM. >> Oh yeah, look... >> Dave: And this is a good example. >> I'm not the kinda guy, as you know, that gets all excited about technology for technology's sake. I like thinking about technology and how it's gonna be applied, more problems are gonna be solved and so as we, in Wikibon, started running around and getting all excited about AI, my challenge to the guys was: Well, show me the two concrete cases, where it's gonna have a material business impact and one of the most important cases is, it's got a material business impact and how IT runs itself because you cannot... IT cannot reduce the number of people it's got and take on these increasingly complex application, problems, and portfolios unless they get a lot of help and the best, most likely source of that help is by bringing a lot of these new AI technologies that are capable of taking concrete, real time action in response to what's happening within the infrastructure and the applications at any given time. >> Yeah, now... Couple other things, just observations. Ana Pinczuk came on, great leader, woman in tech, big proponent of advancing women's causes, especially in tech. She had mixed feelings about Meg stepping down, obviously you have a woman leader, I thought her comments there were... Were quite interesting, but she said, "But I am up for the challenge "to continue the mission." Which leads me to Antonio. Antonio is outwardly a humble guy, he may have a big ego I don't know, he's been on The Cube a number of times, but he certainly doesn't come across as a guy who's looking to get credit. He's a quiet but very competent leader, he knows the business very well. Really interesting to see what his relationship- >> Peter: Homegrown. >> Homegrown, which is 22 years at HPE, technology background, not a U.S... Born individual, now living in the U.S. obviously. But, somebody with international experience which is always been an attribute that's valued at HPE. Gonna be interesting to see what his relationship is with Wall Street. Will he be sort of a quiet leader that lets the CFO take front and center, which would be fine. Or will he slowly sort of advance, he's not been sitting on the earnings calls. I'm interested to see how he handles it, or he may just say, "you know what, "I'm gonna go execute in the business "and let the results speak for themselves." So, I'm kind of curious as to how that all... All plays out. It's a big job, it's a big role as you pointed out with me the other day. Big role for him, big job for him. Serious opportunities to make a mark in the industry. >> Again, and you raise a really great point. Meg had a very good reputation on Wall Street, the knock on her when she came on, was she didn't know customers. Antonio's got a great reputation with customers, you're asking the question: is he gonna get to know Wall Street? A great CEO has to be able to take care of customers and owners He seems very... Look, this is a, this whole simplification of how they're gonna bring cloud technologies to where their data's gonna require is apparently, based on what we heard, in large part Antonio's brain child. He conceived it, he invested in it, he nurtured it, he took risks for it, he put some skin in the game and now it's coming to fruition, that's great, and he's got customers lining up behind it. We'll see, this is another place where we'll see, but I don't think that there's... There's no reason to suspect, just looking at Antonio's track record, why Wall Street would abandon him. On the contrary, there's reasons to suspect that he will also be able to develop that set of skills that Wall Street needs to do their job. But, clearly this is a guy that's gonna turn on a lot of customers. >> Yeah, and as I say, it's gonna be interesting to see what his relationship, like look at a guy like Frank Slootman, who had a great relationship with Wall Street, everybody loved him 'cause he just performed but he's a hard-driving, in your face kinda guy, who developed close relationships with the street. It's gonna be, as they say, I gotta watch that, to see how Antonio interacts with them. I think it's important to have a relationship with... >> Peter: With your ownership, yeah it usually is. >> And I think that's the one big question mark here is, where has his presence been there but so we'll watch and I'm confident he'll step up to that. Okay. Let's see, The Cube... Next week? Cube-con? >> Peter: Yeah. >> Next week in Austin. Right, so development. You'll see The Cube expanding way beyond it's original infrastructure route, so obviously HPE Discover, big infrastructure show. But we're at Amazon Reinvent this week, it's our big cloud show. We obviously... All the IBM shows are being consolidated into one show called Think. This year The Cube will be there. But CES is gonna be January, we were there last year, likely be there again. Cisco live is on the radar, we're gonna be at Cisco live I think both in Barcelona and most likely in the states this year, so that's another big thing. A lot of developer shows, Docckercon, Kubecon, working with the Linux Foundation, developers are really the lynch pin, developers in cloud. Really big areas of growth. IOT, some IOT conferences that we're gonna be doin' this year. Obviously, our big data heritage we still do a lot of work there, so. It's been an unbelievable year, I think a 125 shows for The Cube. TheCube.net, new website, our new clipper tool, you see the clips that come out, so. A lot of innovation comin' out of Siliconangle Media, check out Siliconangle.com. Peter, the work that your team is doing on the Wikibon side, Wikibon.com. Unbelievable amounts of research that you guys are crackin' out. Digital business, AI, AI for ITOM stuff that we talked about, we still do some stuff in infrastructure, true private cloud. >> New computing architectures, memory based computer architectures. >> So, fantastic work there and... Yeah, so we're looking forward to another great year. Thanks everybody for these last two days, thanks to the crew, great job. Everybody at home. We're out. Dave Vellante for Peter Buriss from Madrid. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)