(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to "The Cube"'s live coverage of "Women in Data Science 2023". As every year we are here live at Stanford University, profiling some amazing women and men in the fields of data science. I have my co-host for this segment is Hannah Freitag. Hannah is from Stanford's Data Journalism program, really interesting, check it out. We're very pleased to welcome our first guest of the day fresh from the keynote stage, Gayatree Ganu, the VP of Data Science at Meta. Gayatree, It's great to have you on the program. >> Likewise, Thank you for having me. >> So you have a PhD in Computer Science. You shared some really cool stuff. Everyone knows Facebook, everyone uses it. I think my mom might be one of the biggest users (Gayatree laughs) and she's probably watching right now. People don't realize there's so much data behind that and data that drives decisions that we engage with. But talk to me a little bit about you first, PhD in Computer Science, were you always, were you like a STEM kid? Little Gayatree, little STEM, >> Yeah, I was a STEM kid. I grew up in Mumbai, India. My parents are actually pharmacists, so they were not like math or stats or anything like that, but I was always a STEM kid. I don't know, I think it, I think I was in sixth grade when we got our first personal computer and I obviously used it as a Pacman playing machine. >> Oh, that's okay. (all laugh) >> But I was so good at, and I, I honestly believe I think being good at games kind of got me more familiar and comfortable with computers. Yeah. I think I always liked computers, I, yeah. >> And so now you lead, I'm looking at my notes here, the Engagement Ecosystem and Monetization Data Science teams at Facebook, Meta. Talk about those, what are the missions of those teams and how does it impact the everyday user? >> Yeah, so the engagement is basically users coming back to our platform more, there's, no better way for users to tell us that they are finding value on the things that we are doing on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, all the other products than coming back to our platform more. So the Engagement Ecosystem team is looking at trends, looking at where there are needs, looking at how users are changing their behaviors, and you know, helping build strategy for the long term, using that data knowledge. Monetization is very different. You know, obviously the top, top apex goal is have a sustainable business so that we can continue building products for our users. And so, but you know, I said this in my keynote today, it's not about making money, our mission statement is not, you know, maximize as much money as you can make. It's about building a meaningful connection between businesses, customers, users, and, you know especially in these last two or three funky, post-pandemic years, it's been such a big, an important thing to do for small businesses all over all, all around the world for users to find like goods and services and products that they care about and that they can connect to. So, you know, there is truly an connection between my engagement world and the monetization world. And you know, it's not very clear always till you go in to, like, you peel the layers. Everything we do in the ads world is also always first with users as our, you know, guiding principle. >> Yeah, you mentioned how you supported especially small businesses also during the pandemic. You touched a bit upon it in the keynote speech. Can you tell our audience what were like special or certain specific programs you implemented to support especially small businesses during these times? >> Yeah, so there are 200 million businesses on our platform. A lot of them small businesses, 10 million of them run ads. So there is a large number of like businesses on our platform who, you know use the power of social media to connect to the customers that matter to them, to like you, you know use the free products that we built. In the post-pandemic years, we built a lot of stuff very quickly when Covid first hit for business to get the word out, right? Like, they had to announce when special shopping hours existed for at-risk populations, or when certain goods and services were available versus not. We had grants, there's $100 million grant that we gave out to small businesses. Users could show sort of, you know show their support with a bunch of campaigns that we ran, and of course we continue running ads. Our ads are very effective, I guess, and, you know getting a very reliable connection with from the customer to the business. And so, you know, we've run all these studies. We support, I talked about two examples today. One of them is the largest black-owned, woman black-owned wine company, and how they needed to move to an online program and, you know, we gave them a grant, and supported them through their ads campaign and, you know, they saw 60% lift in purchases, or something like that. So, a lot of good stories, small stories, you know, on a scale of 200 million, that really sort of made me feel proud about the work we do. And you know, now more than ever before, I think people can connect so directly with businesses. You can WhatsApp them, I come from India, every business is on WhatsApp. And you can, you know, WhatsApp them, you can send them Facebook messages, and you can build this like direct connection with things that matter to you. >> We have this expectation that we can be connected anywhere. I was just at Mobile World Congress for MWC last week, where, obviously talking about connectivity. We want to be able to do any transaction, whether it's post on Facebook or call an Uber, or watch on Netflix if you're on the road, we expect that we're going to be connected. >> Yeah. >> And what we, I think a lot of us don't realize I mean, those of us in tech do, but how much data science is a facilitator of all of those interactions. >> Yeah! >> As we, Gayatree, as we talk about, like, any business, whether it is the black women-owned wine business, >> Yeah. >> great business, or a a grocer or a car dealer, everybody has to become data-driven. >> Yes. >> Because the consumer has the expectation. >> Yes. >> Talk about data science as a facilitator of just pretty much everything we are doing and conducting in our daily lives. >> Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think data science as a field wasn't really defined like maybe 15 years ago, right? So this is all in our lifetimes that we are seeing this. Even in data science today, People come from so many different backgrounds and bring their own expertise here. And I think we, you know, this conference, all of us get to define what that means and how we can bring data to do good in the world. Everything you do, as you said, there is a lot of data. Facebook has a lot of data, Meta has a lot of data, and how do we responsibly use this data? How do we use this data to make sure that we're, you know representing all diversity? You know, minorities? Like machine learning algorithms don't do well with small data, they do well with big data, but the small data matters. And how do you like, you know, bring that into algorithms? Yeah, so everything we do at Meta is very, very data-driven. I feel proud about that, to be honest, because while data gets a bad rap sometimes, having no data and making decisions in the blind is just the absolute worst thing you can do. And so, you know, we, the job as a data scientist at Facebook is to make sure that we use this data, use this responsibly, make sure that we are representing every aspect of the, you know, 3 billion users who come to our platform. Yeah, data serves all the products that we build here. >> The responsibility factor is, is huge. You know, we can't talk about AI without talking about ethics. One of the things that I was talking with Hannah and our other co-host, Tracy, about during our opening is something I just learned over the weekend. And that is that the CTO of ChatGPT is a woman. (Gayatree laughs) I didn't know that. And I thought, why isn't she getting more awareness? There's a lot of conversations with their CEO. >> Yeah. >> Everyone's using it, playing around with it. I actually asked it yesterday, "What's hot in Data Science?" (all laugh) I was like, should I have asked that to let itself in, what's hot? (Gayatree laughs) But it, I thought that was phenomenal, and we need to be talking about this more. >> Yeah. >> This is something that they're likening to the launch of the iPhone, which has transformed our lives. >> I know, it is. >> ChatGPT, and its chief technologist is a female, how great is that? >> And I don't know whether you, I don't know the stats around this, but I think CTO is even less, it's even more rare to have a woman there, like you have women CEOs because I mean, we are building upon years and years of women not choosing technical fields and not choosing STEM, and it's going to take some time, but yeah, yeah, she's a woman. Isn't it amazing? It's wonderful. >> Yes, there was a great, there's a great "Fast Company" article on her that I was looking at yesterday and I just thought, we need to do what we can to help spread, Mira Murati is her name, because what she's doing is, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs we may ever see in our lifetime. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. (Gayatree laughs) I also wanted to share some stats, oh, sorry, go ahead, Hannah. >> Yeah, I was going to follow up on the thing that you mentioned that we had many years with like not enough women choosing a career path in STEM and that we have to overcome this trend. What are some, like what is some advice you have like as the Vice-President Data Science? Like what can we do to make this feel more, you know, approachable and >> Yeah. >> accessible for women? >> Yeah, I, there's so much that we have done already and you know, want to continue, keep doing. Of course conferences like these were, you know and I think there are high school students here there are students from my Alma Mater's undergrad year. It's amazing to like get all these women together to get them to see what success could look like. >> Yeah. >> What being a woman leader in this space could look like. So that's, you know, that's one, at Meta I lead recruiting at Meta and we've done a bunch to sort of open up the thinking around data science and technical jobs for women. Simple things like what you write in your job description. I don't know whether you know this, or this is a story you've heard before, when you see, when you have a job description and there are like 10 things that you need to, you know be good at to apply to this job, a woman sees those 10 and says, okay, I don't meet the qualifications of one of them and she doesn't apply. And a man sees one that he meets the qualifications to and he applies. And so, you know, there's small things you can do, and just how you write your job description, what goals you set for diversity and inclusion for your own organization. We have goals, Facebook's always been pretty up there in like, you know, speaking out for diversity and Sheryl Sandberg has been our Chief Business Officer for a very long time and she's been, like, amazing at like pushing from more women. So yeah, every step of the way, I think, we made a lot of progress, to be honest. I do think women choose STEM fields a lot more than they did. When I did my Computer Science I was often one of one or two women in the Computer Science class. It takes some time to, for it to percolate all the way to like having more CTOs and CEOs, >> Yeah. >> but it's going to happen in our lifetime, and you know, three of us know this, women are going to rule the world, and it (laughs) >> Drop the mic, girl! >> And it's going to happen in our lifetime, so I'm excited about it. >> And we have responsibility in helping make that happen. You know, I'm curious, you were in STEM, you talked about Computer Science, being one of the only females. One of the things that the nadb.org data from 2022 showed, some good numbers, the number of women in technical roles is now 27.6%, I believe, so up from 25, it's up in '22, which is good, more hiring of women. >> Yeah. >> One of the biggest challenges is attrition. What keeps you motivated? >> Yeah. >> To stay what, where you are doing what you're doing, managing a family and helping to drive these experiences at Facebook that we all expect are just going to happen? >> Yeah, two things come to mind. It does take a village. You do need people around you. You know, I'm grateful for my husband. You talked about managing a family, I did the very Indian thing and my parents live with us, and they help take care of the kids. >> Right! (laughs) >> (laughs) My kids are young, six and four, and I definitely needed help over the last few years. It takes mentors, it takes other people that you look up to, who've gone through all of those same challenges and can, you know, advise you to sort of continue working in the field. I remember when my kid was born when he was six months old, I was considering quitting. And my husband's like, to be a good role model for your children, you need to continue working. Like, just being a mother is not enough. And so, you know, so that's one. You know, the village that you build around you your supporters, your mentors who keep encouraging you. Sheryl Sandberg said this to me in my second month at Facebook. She said that women drop out of technical fields, they become managers, they become sort of administrative more, in their nature of their work, and her advice was, "Don't do that, Don't stop the technical". And I think that's the other thing I'd say to a lot of women. Technical stuff is hard, but you know, keeping up with that and keeping sort of on top of it actually does help you in the long run. And it's definitely helped me in my career at Facebook. >> I think one of the things, and Hannah and I and Tracy talked about this in the open, and I think you'll agree with us, is the whole saying of you can't be what you can't see, and I like to way, "Well, you can be what you can see". That visibility, the great thing that WiDS did, of having you on the stage as a speaker this morning so people can understand, everyone, like I said, everyone knows Meta, >> Yeah. >> everyone uses Facebook. And so it's important to bring that connection, >> Yeah. >> of how data is driving the experiences, the fact that it's User First, but we need to be able to see women in positions, >> Yes. >> like you, especially with Sheryl stepping down moving on to something else, or people that are like YouTube influencers, that have no idea that the head of YouTube for a very long time, Susan Wojcicki is a woman. >> (laughs) Yes. Who pioneered streaming, and I mean how often do you are you on YouTube every day? >> Yep, every day. >> But we have to be able to see and and raise the profile of these women and learn from them and be inspired, >> Absolutely. >> to keep going and going. I like what I do, I'm making a difference here. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> And I can be the, the sponsor or the mentor for somebody down the road. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, and then referring back to what we talked in the beginning, show that data science is so diverse and it doesn't mean if you're like in IT, you're like sitting in your dark room, >> Right. (laughs) >> coding all day, but you know, >> (laughs) Right! >> to show the different facets of this job and >> Right! >> make this appealing to women, >> Yeah. for sure. >> And I said this in my keynote too, you know, one of the things that helped me most is complimenting the data and the techniques and the algorithms with how you work with people, and you know, empathy and alignment building and leadership, strategic thinking. And I think honestly, I think women do a lot of this stuff really well. We know how to work with people and so, you know, I've seen this at Meta for sure, like, you know, all of these skills soft skills, as we call them, go a long way, and like, you know, doing the right things and having a lasting impact. And like I said, women are going to rule the world, you know, in our lifetimes. (laughs) >> Oh, I can't, I can't wait to see that happen. There's some interesting female candidates that are already throwing their hats in the ring for the next presidential election. >> Yes. >> So we'll have to see where that goes. But some of the things that are so interesting to me, here we are in California and Palo Alto, technically Stanford is its own zip code, I believe. And we're in California, we're freaking out because we've gotten so much rain, it's absolutely unprecedented. We need it, we had a massive drought, an extreme drought, technically, for many years. I've got friends that live up in Tahoe, I've been getting pictures this morning of windows that are >> (laughs) that are covered? >> Yes, actually, yes. (Gayatree laughs) That, where windows like second-story windows are covered in snow. >> Yeah. >> Climate change. >> Climate change. >> There's so much that data science is doing to power and power our understanding of climate change whether it's that, or police violence. >> Yeah. (all talk together) >> We had talk today on that it was amazing. >> Yes. So I want more people to know what data science is really facilitating, that impacts all of us, whether you're in a technical role or not. >> And data wins arguments. >> Yes, I love that! >> I said this is my slide today, like, you know, there's always going to be doubters and naysayers and I mean, but there's hard evidence, there's hard data like, yeah. In all of these fields, I mean the data that climate change, the data science that we have done in the environmental and climate change areas and medical, and you know, medicine professions just so much, so much more opportunity, and like, how much we can learn more about the world. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, it's a pretty exciting time to be a data scientist. >> I feel like, we're just scratching the surface. >> Yeah. >> With the potential and the global impact that we can make with data science. Gayatree, it's been so great having you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Right, >> Thank you so much, Gayatree. >> So much, I love, >> Thank you. >> I'm going to take Data WiD's arguments into my personal life. (Gayatree laughs) I was actually just, just a quick anecdote, funny story. I was listening to the radio this morning and there was a commercial from an insurance company and I guess the joke is, it's an argument between two spouses, and the the voiceover comes in and says, "Let's watch a replay". I'm like, if only they, then they got the data that helped the woman win the argument. (laughs) >> (laughs) I will warn you it doesn't always help with arguments I have with my husband. (laughs) >> Okay, I'm going to keep it in the middle of my mind. >> Yes! >> Gayatree, thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, >> for sharing, >> Thank you both for the opportunity. >> And being a great female that we can look up to, we really appreciate your insights >> Oh, likewise. >> and your time. >> Thank you. >> All right, for our guest, for Hannah Freitag, I'm Lisa Martin, live at Stanford University covering "Women in Data Science '23". Stick around, our next guest joins us in just a minute. (upbeat music) I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the opportunity as a marketer to really understand and interact with customers across the entire buyer's journey. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm a host of theCUBE. (upbeat music) Being a host on theCUBE has been a dream of mine for the last few years. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff and Dave and John at EMC World a few years ago and got the courage up to say, "Hey, I'm really interested in this. I love talking with customers, gimme a shot, let me come into the studio and do an interview and see if we can work together". I think where I really impact theCUBE is being a female in technology. We interview a lot of females in tech, we do a lot of women in technology events and one of the things I.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. You're watching the cubes, uh, coverage where day two here at Dave ante with John furrier, HaCo Myers here. He's the executive vice president and chief sales officer, newly minted, relatively newly minted chief sales officer at HPE at HPE and Paul Hunter. Who's the senior vice president and managing director of north America for Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thanks having us. >>Hi coach. This is the first time back in Vegas in a while three years. I think it's been. And your first as the chief sales officer. Yep. What's the vibe like how how's, how's >>It feel? I can tell you. It's so cool. Is it you, you walk down the hallway, everybody's smiling and you see people from, you have seen three years ago or in this format on your screen the last three years, I think, uh, what is amazing. We had exactly three years ago, we had this event and Antonio mentioned, Hey, and by end of 20, 22, you will see everything being available as a service. Yeah. And nobody thought about that. We will not meet in person until 2022 at that point in time. Yeah, indeed. And that's what happened that I can tell you, what's the best decision to make an in person event here in vigor with so many people, uh, because it's about, Hey, the change in the market, the demand, the transition. And, uh, so I think it, I, couldn't be more happy to see the last two days and looking for, for the, to the rest of the event, >>Paul, you have a, a, a background in the, the channel, um, and now you're heading north America. What are you seeing in the ecosystem? Is it, is there a difference as HaCo was saying from 2019, is there a different, you know, feeling different conversations? What are you seeing? Yeah. >>Well, the good thing is like, because we haven't been here for three years, you've got a really marked moment of comparison. So you cast your mind back. What were the conversations like? I think three years ago we were talking about cloud services and partners were nodding their heads and thinking, yeah, but the world is gonna continue as normal and we fast forward three years and, uh, the partners are really talking about, uh, proactively how do they build up that cloud services? And, uh, they're also talking about customer experiences as well. We've landed and won new customers. So, uh, that's really sort of thrilling to hear that they're really excited about the journey on with us. >>You know, I'd like to get your perspective on the, what happened during the pandemic, because we saw, um, first of all, you know, zoom and video com saved the internet, uh, had meetings, but the partner, the partners delivered a lot of value. Um, customers had to pivot, or if they had a tailwind, they had, they took advantage of it. Some had headwinds with the pandemic everyone's working at home. So a lot of disruptions for all the companies, but a lot of the partners had success during the pandemic. And because they have that solution. What was the, uh, uh, the learnings that you guys saw during the pandemic, because now with cloud cloud scale hybrid, mainstream, and now steady state people lived it and partners delivered a lot of solutions in hybrid mode. Yeah. In virtual mode. What was the learnings for you guys out, coming out of that with customers and partners? >>I think first of all, we, we all learned during the pandemic that, uh, you can business, uh, do business in a different way, but as well, you learned, uh, how to pivot faster in the digital transformation. This makes a difference. And this creates value. And I think together with our partner ecosystem, we were able to develop faster solutions there while we developed everything as a service and came up with more and more cloud services. The good thing is it resonates. And our history with the partners is I donors, as long as I can, uh, think back in my career. And you only can do that together with the channel partners. And I think they appreciate that. We learn from each other. We do the same enablement from my guys, like from the partner guys and this close relation, I think made a difference, >>You know, in 2019 GreenLake, as a service was really a financial vehicle right now that's, that's evolved. And now, you know, two years on three years on it's actually a cloud service. Absolutely. And so what's the resonance been with customers because I mean, every everybody says they want that cloud experience. They may not all want OPEX. Yeah. But so what have you hearing from customers? So >>First of all, what I hear is, um, not the, if, so the strategy is clear, the customer they'll love it. They like it. They have, they want to have the cloud-like experience and guess what? We have 70 cloud services now. Yeah. And we have announced a lot of new one the last couple of days, but it's not so much that if they should do this, it's more the question, how can we help me to scale faster? Yeah. And, uh, that's the, the, the, the feedback I got the last couple of days, and for us, it's a motivation. We are on the right track. There is, this is a moment where you have a demand from the market and a strategy that fits, and this is so strong and you can do this with the partner through the partners and you see the, the customers, they love it. I have never seen an event where I got so many requests the last two days where I say, I thought that, can you help me to get there faster? It's perfect. >>Yeah. I think, I think it was also a landmark moment when we presented the cloud platform as part of the Antonio's keynote, I've had a lot of partners say this was sort of really marked the moment where we felt there was there's real substance to the offering now. And, uh, I had one of the sales guys relate to me a story where they have a, a, a client in the audience. And, uh, they're thinking about how they might, um, have a relationship with us and through seeing the kind of significance of it for us, we're able to close deals. So that's also, you know, a really exciting thing. We're actually know we're closing deals and, and winning new >>Customers, Hey, being agile and closing deals fast is a good thing. Right? I mean, that's what you guys like. Yeah. >>I mean, that's >>What it, so I, so I love the channel conversation partners because one of the things that I've observed and, and, and, and, and knowing the HP channels so strong, they're obviously they want make money. Gross margin is all about the profit, the profit motive, but the enablement that you guys have, how is that translated into this, this, this shift everyone's aligned behind GreenLake and as a service, cuz this seems to be a good fit for partner. Cause they're gonna go to the customer, the ultimate end customer and bolt on services. >>Yeah. >>How is that going? Cuz this is, to me, seems like a dream scenario for services, which we all know is high gross margin. >>Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a journey. What's a journey for our sales organization. Like it is for the partners, but it's a journey worth to do that. And um, so what, what is our, our strategy to have this together with our channel partners in mind, uh, to, to combine their strengths and they can, we, we have a kind of modular approach so that they can plug in their strengths, their IP, or as well, their services, which makes them sticky and, uh, relevant to the customer. And it drives profitability. And I think that's the, the, the secret behind the model, working with the channel, not, uh, separate to the channel. And I think this resonates this story, it's, it's a journey. And, uh, we learned a lot the last three years how to sell it. We, in the past we were selling, uh, transactional hardware. Yeah. Now we are selling services, cloud services, like you mentioned different game and this is an enablement. And we, we, um, we offer the same trainings we are doing with our folks to our channel partners because we are together in this journey. >>Yeah. It, you, you described it really well. And uh, so did, Hico essentially, this is, it requires a lot of persistence because you, you're not gonna get it right the first time. And so we now seen partners try and fail several times, but now try fail and succeed. So that's exciting. Um, and also I think what we're also seeing is partners is doing quite a good job of building services that integrate into the cloud services. So they're right into the APIs. I was, I was with a meeting with a partner called CBTS and they talked about the whole of their services portfolio now is embedded in, in GreenLake. So that certainly was not the case three years ago. >>Yeah. And the other, the big tailwind too, as you got the open source software movement, you're seeing, you know, the ability for partners and ultimately the channel being software enabled they're adding services, not just professional services, but cloud services where they have the domain expertise. Yeah. They're close to the customer. Yeah. And they could really be, um, customizing solutions. Um, and that's gonna always be great for the customer. The question I have for you guys is do you see that domain specialism with machine learning and with software, do you see partners start to get vertically focused and like, and start, get more targeted towards save verticals? >>Yeah. >>You go, no, go first. Yeah. >>Well, again, I was, uh, it's funny, your questions are completely resonating with the conversations we've been having all day. Like I was with our partner called connection and they're talking about how do they build practices in four areas? And they're, I'm quite closely allowed to aligned to our areas of edge cloud and data. Um, they have another one which is also workplace transformation. So, and they're thinking, how do we add expertise? How do we hire, recruit and retain the best talent? And, uh, that again, that wasn't a conversation we were having two, three years ago. So where partners really add value to us is through their services and their expertise and progressive partners are hiring and doing that. >>Yeah. And this transformation I mentioned earlier, it's selling outcomes, business outcomes for the end customer. And, uh, I think selling outcomes means you need to be specialized in something, be it on a domain area or be on a vertical. And I think, uh, when you focus on that, uh, that's the best way you can add value to a customer. This creates this trust, this trust relationship. Yeah. >>So edge cloud and data, obviously, I, I think edge, you guys, you got sending stuff and outta space, that's the ultimate edge. So you got some proof points there. Deep edge, I think. Deep edge. Yeah. >><laugh> I is very good. >>I think cloud, you showed the console Alma. It was very, had a very clear and strong platform message say, okay, now go build the data piece to me is the least mature when I walk around. Although I did see Starburst. Yeah, yeah. Out there. I think Starbursts a very advanced leading edge thinker. So that was a good sign. What do you see as having to happen to really build out that data ecosystem now? >>So I think what is important, this, this is all connected to each other edge cloud and data. And at the end, it's about, uh, how we can create insights out of the data, uh, and uh, where they, they live, where they come up, the data, how we structure them, how we get insights out of the data. So I think this is an area we see much more. It's not only about AI, but it's about having a data strategy as a customer. This is one of those areas. We have customer advisory bots that tell us, Hey, help us. We want to create our data strategy. And this is something where I think we can play together with our partners to really create value, get these insights out of the data. >>Are you hearing conversations where cus customers or partners are saying, okay, I wanna get insights out of the data, but I actually want to build a data business. I wanna build data products on, on, on GreenLake. Are you hearing that yet? >>Yeah, we are. Um, particularly the sort of, we, we think of them as sort of information, um, modern companies, um, they're building out new service lines. I mean, you, you, we see it in a lot of industries. Now you can see like how car manufacturers are increasingly thinking about how do they monetize their data, they're getting from it. And, uh, so there are new businesses being established, like in lots of different verticals. Pharmaceuticals will be another one where, um, traditional players are really being challenged and there are big businesses growing very rapidly based off data. So we're seeing it quite extensively. And, and we have to think about how do we access those new customers? How do we intersect them? And it's not just the people that we've been dealing with for 10, 20 years. They're very new companies, >>Which, which announcement's got the most buzz in your conversations with customers, partners. >><laugh>, it's funny. So I, I had, uh, when, when, when I started my conversation at a couple of, uh, meetings now, the last two days always started and said, what, what resonates? Yeah. And first of all, the funny thing is everybody told me the clarity of the message, the strategy second, uh, the consistency that we do, what we promise to do. Um, a couple of them, I know that down ISS, private cloud enterprise, uh, it's a great solution here. And, uh, then, uh, what, what I hear as well with our clarity and the strategy we are leapfrogging the competition. That's what I get out of these meetings. And I think that's the best compliment we can get for the two days. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think the platform and the conversations around machine learning, AI, we even had an HP executive talk about quantum. Yeah. So you guys are already starting to think about what's around the corner. And I think if the platform works, the test will be, and the results will be enablement ecosystem will be flourishing, and we're gonna watch that. So I wanna get your, your take on the early, um, shift. Cause I think this year with GreenLake and the platform it's, it's maturing enough to the right. No doubt about it. We see the momentum, but there's still a lot more to do than go. So how do you guys envision the ecosystem developing? Because that'll be the true test, the flourishing, cuz if you enable people will get value out of it and it's gotta be a step function, not incremental value. >>Yeah. I think we, we, we, we always talk about, Hey, we landed and then we expand from there. That's the beauty of the model. And the good thing is there's no window looking for the customer. So they are free. That's a modular system. And what we see it's uh, really first of all, to understand the customer digital journey, where are the journey and they're all in a different place. And we have this digital, uh, uh, next advisor workshops when we have this anchor point mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you start there, you really can grow. And then you add workloads based on where the customer sits, what are the partnerships we have to bring to that? So it's really a model which starts and is, uh, designed for the future. >>The field must love it. The folks in the field, we love it. Yeah. You guys love that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Give it the customer plan future and >>I can tell you the partners love it the, well, yeah, >>Got it. When I talk to CIOs, I, I, and I ask them, you know, what's changed, you know, with Ukraine and supply chain and inflation and rising interest rate, what's changed in terms of your assumption from the beginning of the year, you know, let's say, you know, in, in terms of it spend and they're saying, well, not a lot, actually we're gonna continue to spend, we are reprioritizing. You know, we got, we're taking Robb a little bit from over here to put it into security. Yeah. Okay. But generally speaking, it's, it's the same as we expected, let's call it six, 7% growth, which is pretty good on top of last year. Um, and, and maybe there's some dry powder there, depending on how business goes. It also seems like there's, there's a lot of headwinds at the macro and B to C you know, some of the consumer companies, but B2B is booming. >>So I think >>That what do you guys are seeing? >>Absolutely. I, I completely agree that the demand will continue. Mm-hmm <affirmative> for different reasons. It could be a little bit shift within the demand as you described, but, uh, they know exactly they're on a journey in the digital transformation. If they stop now, they have a competitive disadvantage. So they are wisely in investing. So I think that the, the demand will stay here. Yes. Everybody talks about macroeconomics recession. Uh, we are confident we will see in our B2B >>Part continued demand and they're well capitalized as are a lot of the ecosystem partners. >>Yeah. And it's not a nice to have. It's a must have, I mean, I dunno of any customers that are deinvest in technology, deinvest in the life blood of their business >>Business. Exactly. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the cube. Great. Great to see you. Yeah. Congratulations on being here and, and, and best of luck with all the follow up from the show. I'm sure that lot we're gonna update next year. You see how it turned out? Yeah. >><laugh> numbers >><laugh> thanks for having us. Thank you for watching this segment. This is Dave ante for John furrier, the cubes coverage of HPE discover 22 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE. Discover 2022 from the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand convention center in Las Vegas, Dave ante, with John furrier. We're here with Brad parks. Who's the chief product officer at morphia data and Brian Thompson. Who's the vice president of GreenLake cloud product management at Hewlett Packard enterprise gentlemen. Great to see you first time on the queue first time. Wow. I just assumed we've known each other for, so >>We've been around a long time now. I'm happy to be here and thanks for, thanks for making the >>Time. Yeah, you've put a lot of people on the queue, but Morpheus data, when we, you know, we first met, I mean, with your new role here several years ago, tell, give us the update what's Morpheus do, why are you, so why does people, why do people need Morpheus? Think >>People need Morpheus, cuz it is messy, right? Technology promise, you know, simple, better, faster, but it's only gotten more complex, more heterogeneous over the last decade. We are a unified orchestration and automation platform that makes kind of the, the messy labyrinth that is enterprise. It kind of simpler to navigate primary use case. Self-service for developers who wanna push a button, get a database and an abstract deployed into their on-prem or their public cloud without having to wait on it. >>So you've, you've, you've been through the hyper-converged world. You've seen all that hardware come together. The VMware Nutanix of the world's kind of hardware. Now you got this software abstraction where you got operations, you've got AI, you got all kinds of ops AI ops dev ops data ops ops machine, >>You >>Know, they're all there. And so you got developer environments, you got operating environments. It's just getting more complicated at scale. Yep. This is a huge challenge. You guys are tackling this and then by the way, throw in automation in there too. Right? So, so all that's kind of coming together. How does self-service work put all that complication? >>Well, so I was just talking about Robert Christiansen. I know he's probably think he's been on the Q he's on S team and the ven diagram that we see in hundreds of enterprises we talk to is there's a need for central platform engineering at an enterprise to enable developers, to hit a button, get their database, run an I API line, you know, get their app stack deployed. They also wanna do the same thing with Kubernetes, right? Micro clusters deployed, you know, at a service, same thing with Terraform and Ansible. And they're just there aren't enough skilled operators who have moved up that stack. So you have to automate and canonize that knowledge and, and make it easy. >>Brian, one of the sort of pillars of GreenLake is, and as a service is data and we see a change in the way data is data platforms are being architected, data organizations. And one of the things that is a critical principle of sort of what we see as the new data era is self-service infrastructure where the operation of the technical details are an operational detail, not the be all end, all, you have to go beg and get data out. Okay. So you guys are building out, I think, consistent with that principle self-service infrastructure. That's right. So where does Morpheus fit in, in terms of that objective, what's your relationship like and, and help us understand >>That. Yeah. Within GreenLake, specifically think of this as a broad portfolio of different as a service offerings. Part of that key is meeting customers where they are and where they want to be. So we have that array of things which are fully self-service if you will, but serving an it admin type of persona. So it's where as a enterprise, I still have those resources. I want that granular of control all the way through, how do we deliver some of our more advanced cloud services, really trying to serve the end user to your point, how do I empower application owners, developers to, to bring in and, and work with those services? This is key in, in some of those cloud services, we're delivering more of VSC is a key component that we work as we bring to again, provide those interfaces. How do I provide everything from API CLI through a gooey experience that can span across multiple form factors, bring together that more of a homogenous experience? >>What, what options are out there to solve this problem today? I mean, what are the best practices? Is it do it yourself? Is it, you know, a little bit of VMware here, a little bit of, you know, other tooling there, what, what do you see out there in the marketplace? >>I'll give kinda my perspective kind of yeah. Outside the, the tools that we see when we walk into an enterprise, you've got a company that's got a lot of VMware, maybe a little Nutanix, we've got some AWS, they wanna use OpenShift for their clusters. They got Terraform Ansible, and they got service now. And there's a, there's a poor it ops team in the middle, trying to wire all that together. And each of those domains have tried to go up this hill, right. VMware's done with vRealize automation, you know? Yeah. OpenShift will say no where the way, and you use cube vert to >>Do your virtual service now will say the same thing. Right? >>So our goal is, you know, we started in the middle right. Middle out, right. We started unifying that for self-service for developers and finance teams. And we're we're agnostic. We don't have a dog in the fight, right. We don't have a hypervisor business, a hardware business, an ITSM business. We're all about bringing the pieces together. But that said, we work with partners like HP, you have a footprint of thousands of customers who are solving that same problem and need to need to move up stack. So it's been a good win-win. So >>You're not trying to be the cloud operating system per se. I mean, right. The way, the way a VMware wants to be, or you could even argue, well, I guess open, you >>Got, you got the hyperscalers coming down, you got VMware moving up. But again, they all at the end of the day are trying to control their cash cow, right. Their hardcore business. We wanna make them all transparent. So >>Your bet is it's gonna be all of the above. Yeah. That's not gonna change. Right. That's the complexity is, is that right? Or do you think they're gonna consolidate? >>No, I think there's definitely something to that. I also think there's enough. Disparate. Technology's not gonna be one size fits all or one to rule them all. In fact, I think that's part of the examples in the past, like private cloud is we announced yesterday private cloud for enterprise. It's not a new term. People are doing that for quite a while now, but they are typically fairly brittle hand rolled disparate technologies, some poor it team trying to hold it together. So where we can provide that kind of life cycle management in a cloud operating model, remove that complexity and provide that stability. And in that experience across what will be interchangeable parts at times, I think that's really that direction in, >>Yeah. You guys talk about this whole starting in the middle. I like that because there's a skills gap as well. Right. Not only is there for a challenge on it that transforms, there's not enough. People actually know how to manage a Kubernetes cluster spin one up. Yeah. So there's been a rise of managed services. We're seeing come outta the woodwork almost in all areas where it's complex. Yeah. How does that fit into the makeup of as customers, engineer or rearchitect or, or just evolve to edge on premises and public cloud? Yeah. In a cloud operating way, because if I got managed service, do they just plug in, I mean, new orchestrating services, managed services all the above, take us through this dynamic because we're seeing more and more customers saying, just gimme the service. Yeah. >>I, I know manage perspective. This, this kinda goes back to that portfolio of meeting customers where they are. There are some that, that have that expertise in house they're opinionated. They just want a different consumption model. But on the other side of that, it's difficult to attract and retain that type of talent. And if I have limited resources, am I gonna focus on the care and feeding of that underlying infrastructure? Or am I gonna try to up level and focus on things more strategic to the business? So that's where we've certainly been focusing. And I think this type of management capability is what feeds into that. Right? >>Talk about the trust aspect, because if I'm gonna go manage service, it better work. I need to trust it. It's not a zero trust environment. It's actually a trust and verified, but you're seeing the software supply chain is a big discussion point. Developers don't wanna have to get back off their CDC pipeline to go in and manage stuff. So a managed service has to be verified. Yeah. There's a huge trust factor in there. How does what's the status of this now? Is it real? >>I think one of the, one of the pieces we see in terms of trust organizationally, I mean, people in process is always harder than the tech usually. And, and a lot of the trust is just internal. You get, you know, developers don't trust the ops team, right? Security doesn't trust anybody, you know, finance doesn't trust, you know, who's billing them. Part of what we do as a stack is we give each of those stakeholder groups, the ability to get their core needs met without getting each other's way. And from a delivery perspective where we partner with HPE is we are, you know, we're a platform framework, we're a technology provider we're inside, you know, products like the private cloud. We work their GMs team, the manage services team. If they wanna take on more of that operational concern, right. They use us or if the customer wants to manage it themselves. So we we're all about enabling them at the end of the day. And, and HP brings >>And how hard bread is it to unify? UN unification is a great word. I love let's unify everybody. Right. So how, how hard is that? Can you scope that problem statement for us? What does that mean? >>I'll separate it from a technology perspective and then the people process. So a lot of the traditional people that have played in that space that do it yourself, you mention right. Scripting it all together is hard, right? And if you change from cloud a to cloud B, you're set back six months, like why we exist is we wanna very quickly pull the pieces together. We can usually get a POC up and running in about two hours, right? That's a, self-service VMware private cloud, right? That doesn't mean you've solved the organizational inertia. You know, that's, that takes time, weeks, months. And that's where people are like Accenture GreenLake, other SI other channel partners bring that together to, to help make that change happen. >>How mature is the platform? Where are you in terms of determining product market fit? Are you, are you scaling at this point? >>Well, the, the great part about our origin story, right? We got our start as an internal tool set inside a two and a half billion dollar private equity firm that was transforming it at dozens of companies. So we were built for the use case product market fit happened, cuz a bunch of guys needed to get their jobs done. So we've been an outbound since 2015, right? We were top of the stack ranking, you know, all the MQs, all the quadrants, all the analysis. So we think we're their product market fit. The nice thing is customers have actually moved to where we are. Right? Five years ago, cloud management meant cleaning up the lift and shift mess. Now it's automation platform engineering. So it it's a fun time. >>It's it's operational. Yeah. It's they're operationalizing it. >>What's your go to market model. Maybe you could double click on those through >>Partners. So honestly through HP is a big one. We're small, right? We want to be the best unified platform we can be. Our go to market is via technology partners like HPE, right? The other systems integrators, other channel partners globally. So, so yeah. It's >>So then you've got kind of a tiger team overly. Yep. Salesforce is that, that >>Yeah, we've got teams globally. So we've got about 700,000 workloads under management around the world. About 70% of those are OnPrem VMware Nutanix. The rest are up in the public cloud. So we work with partners, solution providers, services, engines to, to help deliver that to >>Customers. What do you make of the 61 billion acquisition of VMware from Broadcom? >>We're, you know, I think your analysis was spot on. It is gonna be a, a war of, you know, what is the, the most profitable to that new Broadcom business and things like vRealize automation, some of these fringe products that are core at a customer use cases, but may not be driving a lot of bottom revenue for VMware, I think are gonna be gonna be on the bubble. And we've seen more interest in the last few weeks from people who just want to hedge their bets. Right. They want to be able to switch from hypervisor a to hypervisor B or cloud a to cloud B without being locked into anyone's stack. And that is, that is why we exist. Mm. >>You wanna comment on that? >>I mean, it's, you know, for HP and from a GreenLake and even just historically, right. It's about customer choice. Mm. We have a strong relationship with VMware. Sure. We have, I don't know how many bajillions of servers out there running VMware that we, we support with. So, you know, it's, it's, it's all just looking at that ecosystem and helping deliver those customer solutions and outcomes is our focus. Yeah. >>Thank >>You. Brian. Talk about the GreenLake success with partners. We're seeing ecosystem is a big part of that and we know the formula for ecosystems create value. What is the pitch that green lakes making to the marketplace right now to attract more folks to build and or integrate into the >>Platform? Yeah. I mean, GreenLake started with a, a vehicle of how do I start to deliver an OPEX model, a consumption model for traditional infrastructure that we've been providing more and more as the services and solutions really have emerged and evolved. It's gone from, how do I just give you kit and a consumption model for it to now looking at embedded solutions with third party ISV software building or wrapping those services around it, really delivering outcomes and solutions you're seeing. And hopefully you'll solve just from announcement more and more of that, where we have kind of turnkey solutions with key partners, how do we bring a marketplace ecosystem together? How do we help enable those kind of full solutions? Because we're not gonna build it all ourselves, right. We wanna make sure that we can deliver those outcomes. >>So marketing is often and should be ahead of the actual product, early days of GreenLake. It was really a, you know, financial model. Sure. Right. Where do, where do you see GreenLake today? How far is it matured? We saw some of the, the announcements yesterday. We saw some demos. Where are we at? >>Yeah. So this actually, I think really the exciting part is you might have heard Antonio refer to as that journey to one each of our different businesses within green or within HPE, they've all been building these cloud services in GreenLake enabled services. But as you saw Alma share the path to the HPE GreenLake cloud platform that really is bringing these services together into a functional platform, right? Common identity, common telemetry services, bringing these together as now, integrable interoperable services. Like you're starting to see that come together and you can really see the Chrome trail of, of where we're going with a very powerful hybrid cloud experience, right? Spanning private public on-prem colo and a, and a full solution set within there. So it that's, that's the exciting part >>For me and Brad Morpheus will be a capability inside of GreenLake that a customer can consume. Do you have to write to GreenLake APIs to enable that? Or is it, is it more just certify that you work inside a GreenLake? What has to get done? I'll say a lot >>Of what they've done is actually written into, into our APIs. Like we've normalized hybrid it. We have a, a database model of every load balance or a cloud endpoint automation tool. So we are, we're all about making it easier to consume it. And the vision that Alma and HP has around GreenLake fits very well with why we exist. So they're able to extract metering data from our, you know, from our API, we know who provisioned what, where how much they spent. So we're a good repository and platform partner for them to, to build on. It's >>Great for that console that you guys have. Yeah. >>You got the, you got the open APIs, you publish those, you guys take advantage of 'em and then sure. Boom. Then you can consume. Got it. All right, guys. Hey, great to see you again, red. Thanks for, for >>Coming on. Thanks. Thanks for having us on >>Our pleasure. Great stuff. Congratulations. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Valante for John furrier. Are you watching the cubes coverage of HPE discover 2022 from Las Vegas? We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 22 live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. I got a power panel here, Lisa Martin, with Dave Valante, John furrier, Holger Mueller also joins us. We are gonna wrap this, like you've never seen a rap before guys. Lot of momentum today, lot, lot of excitement, about 8,000 or so customers, partners, HPE leaders here. Holger. Let's go ahead and start with you. What are some of the things that you heard felt saw observed today on day one? >>Yeah, it's great to be back in person. Right? 8,000 people events are rare. Uh, I'm not sure. Have you been to more than 8,000? <laugh> yeah, yeah. Okay. This year, this year. I mean, historically, yes, but, um, >>Snowflake was 10. Yeah. >>So, oh, wow. Okay. So 8,000 was my, >>Cisco was, they said 15, >>But is my, my 8,000, my record, I let us down with 7,000 kind of like, but it's in the Florida swarm. It's not nicely. Like, and there's >>Usually what SFI, there's usually >>20, 20, 30, 40, 50. I remember 50 in the nineties. Right. That was a different time. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting what people do and it depends how much time there is to come. Right. And know that it happens. Right. But yeah, no, I think it's interesting. We, we had a good two analyst track today. Um, interesting. Like HPE is kind of like back not being your grandfather's HPE to a certain point. One of the key stats. I know Dave always for the stats, right. Is what I found really interesting that over two third of GreenLake revenue is software and services. Now a love to know how much of that services, how much of that software. But I mean, I, I, I, provocate some, one to ones, the HP executives saying, Hey, you're a hardware company. Right. And they didn't even come back. Right. But Antonio said, no, two thirds is, uh, software and services. Right. That's interesting. They passed the one exabyte, uh, being managed, uh, as a, as a hallmark. Right. I was surprised only 120,000 users if I had to remember the number. Right, right. So that doesn't seem a terrible high amount of number of users. Right. So, but that's, that's, that's promising. >>So what software is in there, cuz it's gotta be mostly services. >>Right? Well it's the 70 plus cloud services, right. That everybody's talking about where the added eight of them shockingly back up and recovery, I thought that was done at launch. Right. >>Still who >>Keep recycling storage and you back. But now it's real. Yeah. >>But the company who knows the enterprise, right. HPE, what I've been doing before with no backup and recovery GreenLake. So that was kind of like, okay, we really want to do this now and nearly, and then say like, oh, by the way, we've been doing this all the time. Yeah. >>Oh, what's your take on the installed base of HP. We had that conversation, the, uh, kickoff or on who's their target, what's the target audience environment look like. It certainly is changing. Right? If it's software and services, GreenLake is resonating. Yeah. Um, ecosystems responding. What's their customers cuz managed services are up too Kubernetes, all the managed services what's what's it like what's their it transformation base look like >>Much of it is of course install base, right? The trusted 20, 30 plus year old HP customer. Who's keeping doing stuff of HP. Right. And call it GreenLake. They've been for so many name changes. It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of like nice that you get the consume pain only what you consume. Right. I get the cloud broad to me then the general markets, of course, people who still need to run stuff on premises. Right. And there's three reasons of doing this performance, right. Because we know the speed of light is relative. If you're in the Southern hemisphere and even your email servers in Northern hemisphere, it takes a moment for your email to arrive. It's a very different user experience. Um, local legislation for data, residency privacy. And then, I mean Charles Phillips who we all know, right. Former president of uh, info nicely always said, Hey, if the CIOs over 50, I don't have to sell qu. Right. So there is not invented. I'm not gonna do cloud here. And now I've kind of like clouded with something like HP GreenLake. That's the customers. And then of course procurement is a big friend, right? Yeah. Because when you do hardware refresh, right. You have to have two or three competitors who are the two or three competitors left. Right. There's Dell. Yeah. And then maybe Lenovo. Right? So, so like a >>Little bit channels, the strength, the procurement physicians of strength, of course install base question. Do you think they have a Microsoft opportunity where, what 365 was Microsoft had office before 365, but they brought in the cloud and then everything changed. Does HP have that same opportunity with kind of the GreenLake, you know, model with their existing stuff. >>It has a GreenLake opportunity, but there's not much software left. It's a very different situation like Microsoft. Right? So, uh, which green, which HP could bring along to say, now run it with us better in the cloud because they've been selling much of it. Most of it, of their software portfolio, which they bought as an HP in the past. Right. So I don't see that happening so much, but GreenLake as a platform itself course interesting because enterprise need a modern container based platform. >>I want, I want to double click on this a little bit because the way I see it is HP is going to its installed base. I think you guys are right on say, this is how we're doing business now. Yeah. You know, come on along. But my sense is, some customers don't want to do the consumption model. There are actually some customers that say, Hey, of course I got, I don't have a cash port problem. I wanna pay for it up front and leave me alone. >>I've been doing this since 50 years. Nice. As I changed it, now <laugh> two know >>Money's wants to do it. And I don't wanna rent because rental's more expensive and blah, blah, blah. So do you see that in the customer base that, that some are pushing back? >>Of course, look, I have a German accent, right? So I go there regularly and uh, the Germans are like worried about doing anything in the cloud. And if you go to a board in Germany and say, Hey, we can pay our usual hardware, refresh, CapEx as usual, or should we bug consumption? And they might know what we are running. <laugh> so not whole, no offense against the Germans out. The German parts are there, but many of them will say, Hey, so this is change with COVID. Right. Which is super interesting. Right? So the, the traditional boards non-technical have been hearing about this cloud variable cost OPEX to CapEx and all of a sudden there's so much CapEx, right. Office buildings, which are not being used truck fleets. So there's a whole new sensitivity by traditional non-technical boards towards CapEx, which now the light bulb went on and say, oh, that's the cloud thing about also. So we have to find a way to get our cost structure, to ramp up and ramp down as our business might be ramping up through COVID through now inflation fears, recession, fears, and so on. >>So, okay. HP's, HP's made the statement that anything you can do in the cloud you can do in GreenLake. Yes. And I've said you can't run on snowflake. You can't run Mongo Atlas, you can't run data bricks, but that's okay. That's fine. Let's be, I think they're talking about, there's >>A short list of things. I think they're talking about the, their >>Stuff, their, >>The operating experience. So we've got single sign on through a URL, right. Uh, you've got, you know, some level of consistency in terms of policy. It's unclear exactly what that is. You've got storage backup. Dr. What, some other services, seven other services. If you had to sort of take your best guess as to where HP is now and peg it toward where Amazon was in which year? >>20 14, 20 14. >>Yeah. Where they had their first conference or the second we invent here with 3000 people and they were thinking, Hey, we're big. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think GreenLake is the building blocks. So they quite that's the >>Building. Right? I mean similar. >>Okay. Well, I mean they had E C, Q and S3 and SQS, right. That was the core. And then the rest of those services were, I mean, base stock was one of that first came in behind and >>In fairness, the industry has advanced since then, Kubernetes is further along. And so HPE can take advantage of that. But in terms of just the basic platform, I, I would agree. I think it's >>Well, I mean, I think, I mean the software, question's a big one. I wanna bring up because the question is, is that software is getting the world. Hardware is really software scales, everything, data, the edge story. I love their story. I think HP story is wonderful Aruba, you know, hybrid cloud, good story, edge edge. But if you look under the covers, it's weak, right? It's like, it's not software. They don't have enough software juice, but the ecosystem opportunity to me is where you plug and play. So HP knows that game. But if you look historically over the past 25 years, HP now HPE, they understand plug and play interoperability. So the question is, can they thread the needle >>Right. >>Between filling the gaps on the software? Yeah. With partners, >>Can they get the partners? Right. And which have been long, long time. Right. For a long time, HP has been the number one platform under ICP, right? Same thing. You get certified for running this. Right. I know from my own history, uh, I joined Oracle last century and the big thing was, let's get your eBusiness suite certified on HP. Right? Like as if somebody would buy H Oracle work for them, right. This 20 years ago, server >>The original exit data was HP. Oracle. >>Exactly. Exactly. So there's this thinking that's there. But I think the key thing is we know that all modern forget about the hardware form in the platforms, right? All modern software has to move to containers and snowflake runs in containers. You mentioned that, right? Yeah. If customers force snowflake and HPE to the table, right, there will be a way to make it work. Right. And which will help HPE to be the partner open part will bring the software. >>I, I think it's, I think that's an opportunity because that changes the game and agility and speed. If HP plays their differentiation, right. Which we asked on their opening segment, what's their differentiation. They got size scale channel, >>What to the enterprise. And then the big benefit is this workload portability thing. Right? You understand what is run in the public cloud? I need to run it local. For whatever reason, performance, local residency of data. I can move that. There that's the big benefit to the ISVs, the sales vendors as well. >>But they have to have a stronger data platform story in my that's right. Opinion. I mean, you can run Oracle and HPE, but there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do a deal with, with snowflake. I mean, we saw it with Dell. Yep. We saw it with, with, with pure and I, if our HPE I'd be saying, Hey, because the way the snowflake deal worked, you probably know this is your reading data into the cloud. The compute actually occurs in the cloud viral HB going snowflake saying we can separate compute and storage. Right. And we have GreenLake. We have on demand. Why don't we run the compute on-prem and make it a full class, first class citizen, right. For all of our customers data. And that would be really innovative. And I think Mongo would be another, they've got OnPrem. >>And the question is, how many, how many snowflake customers are telling snowflake? Can I run you on premise? And how much defo open years will they hear from that? Right? This is >>Why would they deal Dell? That >>Deal though, with that, they did a deal. >>I think they did that deal because the customer came to them and said, you don't exactly that deal. We're gonna spend the >>Snowflake >>Customers think crazy things happen, right? Even, even put an Oracle database in a Microsoft Azure data center, right. Would off who, what as >>Possible snowflake, >>Oracle. So on, Aw, the >>Snow, the snowflakes in the world have to make a decision. Dave on, is it all snowflake all the time? Because what the reality is, and I think, again, this comes back down to the, the track that HP could go up or down is gonna be about software. Open source is now the software industry. There's no such thing as proprietary software, in my opinion, relatively speaking, cloud scale and integrated, integrated integration software is proprietary. The workflows are proprietary. So if they can get that right with the partners, I would focus on that. I think they can tap open source, look at Amazon with open source. They sucked it up and they integrated it in. No, no. So integration is the deal, not >>Software first, but Snowflake's made the call. You were there, Lisa. They basically saying it's we have, you have to be in snowflake in order to get the governance and the scalability, all that other wonderful stuff. Oh, but we we'll do Apache iceberg. We'll we'll open it up. We'll do Python. Yeah. >>But you can't do it data clean room unless you are in snowflake. Exactly. Snowflake on snowflake. >>Exactly. >>But got it. Isn't that? What you heard from AWS all the time till they came out outposts, right? I mean, snowflake is a market leader for what they're doing. Right. So that they want to change their platform. I mean, kudos to them. They don't need to change the platform. They will be the last to change their platform to a ne to anything on premises. Right. But I think the trend already shows that it's going that way. >>Well, if you look at outpost is an signal, Dave, the success of outpost launched what four years ago, they announced it. >>What >>EKS is beating, what outpost is doing. Outpost is there. There's not a lot of buzz and talk to the insiders and the open source community, uh, EKS and containers. To your point mm-hmm <affirmative> is moving faster on, I won't say commodity hardware, but like could be white box or HP, Dell, whatever it's gonna be that scale differentiation and the edge story is, is a good one. And I think with what we're seeing in the market now it's the industrial edge. The back office was gen one cloud back office data center. Now it's hybrid. The focus will be industrial edge machine learning and AI, and they have it here. And there's some, some early conversations with, uh, I heard it from, uh, this morning, you guys interviewed, uh, uh, John Schultz, right? With the world economic 4k birth Butterfield. She was amazing. And then you had Justin bring up a Hoar, bring up quantum. Yes. That is a differentiator. >>HP. >>Yes. Yeah. You, they have the computing shops. They had the R and D can they bring it to the table >>As, as HPC, right. To what they Schultz for of uh, the frontier system. Right. So very impressed. >>So the ecosystem is the key for them is because that's how they're gonna fill the gaps. They can't, they can't only, >>They could, they could high HPC edge piece. I wouldn't count 'em out of that game yet. If you co-locate a box, I'll use the word box, particularly at a telco tower. That's a data center. Yep. Right. If done properly. Yep. So, you know, what outpost was supposed to do actually is a hybrid opportunity. Aruba >>Gives them a unique, >>But the key thing is right. It's a yin and yang, right? It's the ecosystem it's partners to bring those software workload. Absolutely. Right. But HPE has to keep the platform attractive enough. Right. And the key thing there is that you have this workload capability thing that you can bring things, which you've built yourself. I mean, look at the telcos right. Network function, visualization, thousands of man, years into these projects. Right. So if I can't bring it to your edge box, no, I'm not trying to get to your Xbox. Right. >>Hold I gotta ask you since in the Dave too, since you guys both here and Lisa, you know, I said on the opening, they have serious customers and those customers have serious problems, cyber security, ransomware. So yeah. I teach transformation now. Industrial transformation machine learning, check, check, check. Oh, sounds good. But at the end of the day, their customers have some serious problems. Right? Cyber, this is, this is high stakes poker. Yeah. What do you think HP's position for in the security? You mentioned containers, you got all this stuff, you got open source, supply chain, you have to left supply chain issues. What is their position with security? Cuz that's the big one. >>I, I think they have to have a mature attitude that customers expect from HPE. Right? I don't have to educate HP on security. So they have to have the partner offerings again. We're back at the ecosystem to have what probably you have. So bring your own security apart from what they have to have out of the box to do business with them. This is why the shocker this morning was back up in recovery coming. <laugh> it's kind like important for that. Right? Well >>That's, that's, that's more ransomware and the >>More skeleton skeletons in the closet there, which customers should check of course. But I think the expectations HP understands that and brings it along either from partner or natively. >>I, I think it's, I think it's services. I think point next is the point of integration for their security. That's why two thirds is software and services. A lot of that is services, right? You know, you need security, we'll help you get there. We people trust HP >>Here, but we have nothing against point next or any professional service. They're all hardworking. But if I will have to rely on humans for my cyber security strategy on a daily level, I'm getting gray hair and I little gray hair >>Red. Okay. I that's, >>But >>I think, but I do think that's the camera strategy. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff that's beginning to be designed in, but I, my guess is a lot of it is services. >>Well, you got the Aruba. Part of the booth was packed. Aruba's there. You mentioned that earlier. Is that good enough? Because the word zero trust is kicked around a lot. On one hand, on the other hand, other conversations, it's all about trust. So supply chain and software is trusting trust, trust and verified. So you got this whole mentality of perimeter gone mentality. It's zero trust. And if you've got software trust, interesting thoughts there, how do you reconcile zero trust? And then I need trust. What's what's you? What are you seeing older on that? Because I ask people all the time, they're like, uh, I'm zero trust or is it trust? >>Yeah. The middle ground. Right? Trusted. The meantime people are man manipulating what's happening in your runtime containers. Right? So, uh, drift control is a new password there that you check what's in your runtime containers, which supposedly impenetrable, but people finding ways to hack them. So we'll see this cat and mouse game going on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the need for being in a secure, good environment from that perspective. Absolutely. But the key is edge has to be more than Aruba, right? If yeah. HV goes away and says, oh yeah, we can manage your edge with our Aruba devices. That's not enough. It's the virtual probability. And you said the important thing before it's about the data, right? Because the dirty secret of containers is yeah, I move the code, but what enterprise code works without data, right? You can't say as enterprise, okay, we're done for the day check tomorrow. We didn't persist your data, auditor customer. We don't have your data anymore. So filling a way to transport the data. And there just one last thought, right? They have a super interesting asset. They want break lands for the venerable map R right. Which wrote their own storage drivers and gives you the chance to potentially do something in that area, which I'm personally excited about. But we'll see what happens. >>I mean, I think the holy grail is can I, can I put my data into a cloud who's ever, you know, call it a super cloud and can I, is it secure? Is it governed? Can I share it and be confident that it's discoverable and that the, the person I give it to has the right to use it. Yeah. And, and it's the correct data. There's not like a zillion copies running. That's the holy grail. And I, I think the answer today is no, you can, you can do that maybe inside of AWS or maybe inside of Azure, look maybe certainly inside of snowflake, can you do that inside a GreenLake? Well, you probably can inside a GreenLake, but then when you put it into the cloud, is it cross cloud? Is it really out to the edge? And that's where it starts to break down, but that's where the work is to be done. That's >>The one Exide is in there already. Right. So men being men. Yeah. >>But okay. But it it's in there. Yeah. Okay. What do you do with it? Can you share that data? What can you actually automate governance? Right? Uh, is that data discoverable? Are there multiple copies of that data? What's the, you know, master copy. Here's >>A question. You guys, here's a question for you guys analyst, what do you think the psychology is of the CIO or CSO when HP comes into town with GreenLake, uh, and they say, what's your relationship with the hyperscalers? Cause I'm a CIO. I got my environment. I might be CapEx centric or Hey, I'm open model. Open-minded to an operating model. Every one of these enterprises has a cloud relationship. Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic. What do you think the psychology is of the CIO when they're rationalizing their, their trajectory, their architecture, cloud, native scale integration with HPE GreenLake or >>HP service. I think she or he hears defensiveness from HPE. I think she hears HPE or he hears HPE coming in and saying, you don't need to go to the cloud. You know, you could keep it right here. I, I don't think that's the right posture. I think it should be. We are your cloud. And we can manage whether it's OnPrem hybrid in AWS, Azure, Google, across those clouds. And we have an edge story that should be the vision that they put forth. That's the super cloud vision, but I don't hear it >>From these guys. What do you think psycho, do you agree with that? >>I'm totally to make, sorry to be boring, but I totally agree with, uh, Dave on that. Right? So the, the, the multi-cloud capability from a trusted large company has worked for anybody up and down the stack. Right? You can look historically for, uh, past layers with cloud Foundry, right? It's history vulnerable. You can look for DevOps of Hashi coop. You can look for database with MongoDB right now. So if HPE provides that data access, right, with all the problems of data gravity and egres cost and the workability, they will be doing really, really well, but we need to hear it more, right. We didn't hear much software today in the keynote. Right. >>Do they have a competitive offering vis-a-vis or Azure? >>The question is, will it be an HPE offering or will, or the software platform, one of the offerings and you as customer can plug and play, right. Will software be a differentiator for HP, right. And will be close, proprietary to the point to again, be open enough for it, or will they get that R and D format that, or will they just say, okay, ES MES here on the side, your choice, and you can use OpenShift or whatever, we don't matter. That's >>The, that's the key question. That's the key question. Is it because it is a competitive strategy? Is it highly differentiated? Oracle is a highly differentiated strategy, right? Is Dell highly differentiated? Eh, Dell differentiates based on its breadth. What? >>Right. Well, let's try for the control plane too. Dell wants to be an, >>Their, their vision is differentiated. Okay. But their execution today is not >>High. All right. Let me throw, let me throw this out at you then. I'm I'm, I'm sorry. I'm I'm HPE. I wanna be the glue layer. Is that, does that fly? >>What >>Do you mean? The group glue layer? I'll I wanna be, you can do Amazon, but I wanna be the glue layer between the clouds and our GreenLake will. >>What's the, what's the incremental value that, that glue provides, >>Provides comfort and reliability and control for the single pane of glass for AWS >>And comes back to the data. In my opinion. Yeah. >>There, there there's glue levels on the data level. Yeah. And there's glue levels on API level. Right. And there's different vendors in the different spaces. Right. Um, I think HPE will want to play on the data side. We heard lots of data stuff. We >>Hear that, >>But we have to see it. Exactly. >>Yeah. But it's, it's lacking today. And so, Hey, you know, you guys know better than I APIs can be fragile and they can be, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the quality of APIs and the documentation, how they work, how mature they are, what, how, what kind of performance they can provide and recoverability. And so just saying, oh wow. We are living the API economy. You know, the it's gonna take time to brew, chime in here. Hi. >><laugh> oh, so guys, you've all been covering HPE for a long time. You know, when Antonio stood up on stage three years ago and said by 2022, and here we are, we're gonna be delivering everything as a service. He's saying we've, we've done it, but, and we're a new company. Do you guys agree with that? >>Definitely. >>I, yes. Yes. With the caveat, I think, yes. The COVID pandemic slowed them down a lot because, um, that gave a tailwind to the hyperscalers, um, because of the, the force of massive O under forecasting working at home. I mean, everyone I talked to was like, no one forecasted a hundred percent work at home, the, um, the CapEx investments. So I think that was an opportunity that they'd be much farther along if there's no COVID people >>Thought it wasn't impossible. Yeah. But so we had the old work from home thing right. Where people trying to get people fired at IBM and Yahoo. Right. So I would've this question covering the HR side and my other hat on. Right. And I would ask CHS let's assume, because I didn't know about COVID shame on me. Right. I said, big California, earthquake breaks. Right. Nobody gets hurt, but all the buildings have to be retrofitted and checked for seism logic down. So everybody's working from home, ask CHS, what kind of productivity gap hit would you get by forcing everybody working from home with the office unsafe? So one, one gentleman, I won't know him, his name, he said 20% and the other one's going ha you're smoking. It's 40 50%. We need to be in the office. We need to meet it first night. And now we went for this exercise. Luckily not with the California. Right. Well, through the price of COVID and we've seen what it can do to, to productivity well, >>The productivity, but also the impact. So like with all the, um, stories we've done over two years, the people that want came out ahead were the ones that had good cloud action. They were already in the cloud. So I, I think they're definitely in different company in the sense of they, I give 'em a pass. I think they're definitely a new company and I'm not gonna judge 'em on. I think they're doing great. But I think pandemic definitely slowed 'em down that about >>It. So I have a different take on this. I think. So we've go back a little history. I mean, you' said this, I steal your line. Meg Whitman took one for the Silicon valley team. Right. She came in. I don't think she ever was excited that I, that you said, you said that, and I think you wrote >>Up, get tape on that one. She >>Had to figure out how do I deal with this mess? I have EDS. I got PC. >>She never should have spun off the PC, but >>Okay. But >>Me, >>Yeah, you can, you certainly could listen. Maybe, maybe Gerstner never should have gone all in on services and IBM would dominate something other than mainframes. They had think pads even for a while, but, but, but so she had that mess to deal with. She dealt with it and however, they dealt with it, Antonio came in, he, he, and he said, all right, we're gonna focus the company. And we're gonna focus the mission on not the machine. Remember those yeah. Presentations, but you just make your eyes glaze over. We're going all in on Azure service >>And edge. He was all on. >>We're gonna build our own cloud. We acquired Aruba. He made some acquisitions in HPC to help differentiate. Yep. And they are definitely a much more focused company now. And unfortunately I wish Antonio would CEO in 2015, cuz that's really when this should have started. >>Yeah. And then, and if you remember back then, Dave, we were interviewing Docker with DevOps teams. They had composability, they were on hybrid really early. I think they might have even coined the term hybrid before VMware tri-state credit for it. But they were first on hybrid. They had DevOps, they had infrastructure risk code. >>HPE had an HP had an awesome cloud team. Yeah. But, and then, and then they tried to go public cloud. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, just made them, I mean, it was just a mess. The focus >>Is there. I give them huge props. And I think, I think the GreenLake to me is exciting here because it's much better than it was two years ago. When, when we talked to, when we started, it's >>Starting to get real. >>It's, it's a real thing. And I think the, the tell will be partners. If they make that right, can pull their different >>Ecosystem, >>Their scale and their customers and fill the software gas with partners mm-hmm <affirmative> and then create that integration opportunity. It's gonna be a home run if they don't do that, they're gonna miss the operating, >>But they have to have their own to your point. They have to have their own software innovation. >>They have to good infrastructure ways to build applications. I don't wanna build with somebody else. I don't wanna take a Microsoft stack on open source stack. I'm not sure if it's gonna work with HP. So they have to have an app dev answer. I absolutely agree with that. And the, the big thing for the partners is, which is a good thing, right? Yep. HPE will not move into applications. Right? You don't have to have the fear of where Microsoft is with their vocal large. Right. If AWS kind of like comes up with APIs and manufacturing, right. Google the same thing with their vertical push. Right. So HPE will not have the CapEx, but >>Application, >>As I SV making them, the partner, the bonus of being able to on premise is an attractive >>Part. That's a great point. >>Hold. So that's an inflection point for next 12 months to watch what we see absolutely running on GreenLake. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of the, the last couple events this past year, and I'll bring this up, we'll table it and we'll watch it. And it's early in this, I think this is like even, not even the first inning, the machine learning AI impact to the industrial piece. I think we're gonna see a, a brand new era of accelerated digital transformation on the industrial physical world, back office, cloud data center, accounting, all the stuff. That's applications, the app, the real world from space to like robotics. I think that HP edge opportunity is gonna be visible and different. >>So guys, Antonio Neri is on tomorrow. This is only day one. If you can imagine this power panel on day one, can you imagine tomorrow? What is your last question for each of you? What is your, what, what question would you want to ask him tomorrow? Hold start with you. >>How is HPE winning in the long run? Because we know their on premise market will shrink, right? And they can out execute Dell. They can out execute Lenovo. They can out Cisco and get a bigger share of the shrinking market. But that's the long term strategy, right? So why should I buy HPE stock now and have a good return put in the, in the safe and forget about it and have a great return 20 years from now? What's the really long term strategy might be unfair because they, they ran in survival mode to a certain point out of the mass post equipment situation. But what is really the long term strategy? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it gonna go on the HPE, the frontier side? It's gonna be a DNA question, which I would ask Antonio. >>John, >>I would ask him what relative to the macro conditions relative to their customer base, I'd say, cuz the customers are the scoreboard. Can they create a value proposition with their, I use the Microsoft 365 example how they kind of went to the cloud. So my question would be Antonio, what is your core value proposition to CIOs out there who want to transform and take a step function, increase for value with HPE? Tell me that story. I wanna hear. And I don't want to hear, oh, we got a portfolio and no, what value are you enabling your customers to do? >>What and what should that value be? >>I think it's gonna be what we were kind of riffing on, which is you have to provide either what their product market fit needs are, which is, are you solving a problem? Is it a pain point is a growth driver. Uh, and what's the, what's that tailwind. And it's obviously we know at cloud we know edge. The story is great, but what's the value proposition. But by going with HPE, you get X, Y, and Z. If they can explain that clearly with real, so qualitative and quantitative data it's home >>Run. He had a great line of the analyst summit today where somebody asking questions, I'm just listening to the customer. So be ready for this Steve jobs photo, listening to the customer. You can't build something great listening to the customer. You'll be good for the next quarter. The next exponential >>Say, what are the customers saying? <laugh> >>So I would make an observation. And my question would, so my observation would be cloud is growing collectively at 35%. It's, you know, it's approaching 200 billion with a big, big four. If you include Alibaba, IBM has actually said, Hey, we're gonna gr they've promised 6% growth. Uh, Cisco I think is at eight or 9% growth. Dow's growing in double digits. Antonio and HPE have promised three to 4% growth. So what do you have to do to actually accelerate growth? Because three to 4%, my view, not enough to answer Holger's question is why should I buy HPE stock? Well, >>If they have product, if they have customer and there's demand and traction to me, that's going to drive the growth numbers. And I think the weak side of the forecast means that they don't have that fit yet. >>Yeah. So what has to happen for them to get above five, 6% growth? >>That's what we're gonna analyze. I mean, I, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I wish I had a better answer. I'd tell them <laugh> but I feel, it feels, it feels like, you know, HP has an opportunity to say here's the new HPE. Yeah. Okay. And this is what we stand for. And here's the one thing that we're going to do that consistently drives value for you, the customer. And that's gonna have to come into some, either architectural cloud shift or a data thing, or we are your store for blank. >>All of the above. >>I guess the other question is, would, would you know, he won't answer a rude question, would suspending things like dividends and stock buybacks and putting it into R and D. I would definitely, if you have confidence in the market and you know what to do, why wouldn't you just accelerate R and D and put the money there? IBM, since 2007, IBM spent is the last stat. And I'm looking go in 2007, IBM way, outspent, Google, and Amazon and R and D and, and CapEx two, by the way. Yep. Subsequent to that, they've spent, I believe it's the numbers close to 200 billion on stock buyback and dividends. They could have owned cloud. And so look at this business, the technology business by and large is driven by innovation. Yeah. And so how do you innovate if >>You have I'm buying, I'm buying HP because they're reliable high quality and they have the outcomes that I want. Oh, >>Buy their products and services. I'm not sure I'd buy the stock. Yeah. >>Yeah. But she has to answer ultimately, because a public company. Right. So >>Right. It's this job. Yeah. >>Never a dull moment with the three of you around <laugh> guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your, an analysis from day one. I can't imagine what day two is gonna bring tomorrow. Debut and I are gonna be anchoring here. We've got a jam packed day, lots going on, hearing from the ecosystem from leadership. As we mentioned, Antonio is gonna be Tony >>Alma Russo. I'm dying. Dr. >>EDMA as well as on the CTO gonna be another action pack day. I'm excited for it, guys. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and for letting me join this power panel. >>Great. Great to be here. >>Power panel plus me. All right. For Holger, John and Dave, I'm Lisa, you're watching the cube our day one coverage of HPE discover wraps right now. Don't go anywhere, cuz we'll see you tomorrow for day two, live from Vegas, have a good night.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE. Discover 22 live from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, here with Dave Velante of a couple of guests from red hat. You may have seen some news yesterday. We're gonna be talking about that. Please. Welcome Ryan King, the senior director of hardware partner ecosystem, and Lori Fontine joins us as well. The senior director of global commercial partner ecosystem. Welcome to the program guys. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, >>Thank you so great to be back in person and nobody word has summit was just last month or so. That's right. Ryan. Talk about hybrid cloud. It's all the buzz. We've been talking a lot about it in the last hour and a half alone. What are some of the trends that, that red hat is seen with respect to hybrid cloud? >>Well, I, I mean, hybrid cloud of red hat has been a trend for quite some time. In fact, we were very early in setting our course towards hybrid cloud with our products and platforms. And that's been a key part of our strategy in terms of the number of transformations have been happening in the enterprise. And with HPE, we're super excited about, you know, we're hitting our stride with OpenShift. I've been working with OpenShift for the better part of my 10 years here at 12 years at red hat, 10 years with OpenShift. And we're very excited about seeing the pattern of going where customers want to build their cloud. It's very important that where, where the market is going. So we're seeing trends from the public cloud now go into edge and telco and 5g and really exceed, see them expanding their infrastructure footprint out to those use cases. And again, we see REL everywhere. So re has continued to expand as well. And then Ansible automation platform has also been a great means of kind of bringing together community for that last mile of automating your entire infrastructure. >>Well, the Lin, the functionality of Linux continues to improve OpenShift is everywhere. I mean, I remember at the red hat summit, I mean, well, we, we, we coined this term super cloud, which is this layer that floats, you know, on-prem took across clouds out to the edge we had Verizon on. They were talking about, you know, 5g developers and how they're developing using, you know, a combination of, of, of OpenShift. So guys have been really crushing it with, with OpenShift. I remember, gosh, I mean, we've been covering, you know, red hat summits for a long time now. And just to see that evolution is actually quite amazing. >>Yeah. It's actually really neat to see our CEOs align too. Right. So the messaging that we've had around hybrid cloud from red hat, like you said, we were kind of the pioneers, honestly, this we've been talking about hybrid cloud from the very beginning. We always knew that it wasn't gonna be public cloud or private cloud. We had to have, you know, hybrid. And, and it's interesting to see that Antonio, you know, took that on and wanted to say, we're gonna do everything as a service right. A few years ago. And, and the whole theme was around hybrid cloud and giving customers that choice. Right? So it's exciting for us to see all of that come together. And I actually worked for HP for like 17 and a half years. So it's really fun for me to be on this side now with red hat and see the messaging come together, the vision come together and just really being able to align and move forward on >>This tremendous amount of transformation in the last few years >>Alone. Oh my gosh, we >>Talk about, you know, customers need choice. They want choice, but you also talked about, we have to meet customers where they are. That seems the last few years to have accelerated, there is no more option for companies. You've gotta meet the customers where they are. >>Exactly. Yeah. And it's all about choice, like you said, and it, everybody's got, you know, their own way to do everything as far as consumption goes and we have to be available and spot on with it, you know, and be able to move quickly with these trends that we're seeing. And so it's great to be aligned. And >>From a partnership standpoint, I mean, you, you mentioned H HP 17 years. I mean, it was, it was a hard to follow company. You had, you had PCs over here, you had services, the kind of the old EDS business. Now there's such a focus absolutely. On this mission, absolutely. Of as a service. And, you know, obviously a key part of that is having optionality and bringing open source tooling into that. I mean, we heard about this in, in spades, at, at red hat summit, which is really interesting this year. It was a smaller VIP event in Boston. And I, and I loved it, you know, cuz it was really manageable. We had all the execs on and customers and partners. It was awesome. What's new since red hat summit. >>Well, I mean, I would say that obviously GreenLake and what we've announced this week is a big new thing for us, but really like we're just continuing on our pattern. We are. Now, if you look at the Q1 report from IBM, you'll see that the growth of the customer base for OpenShift that they reported just continues to go up into the right. You'll see that now, like AMIA is saying that we're like 47.8% of the containers market for the enterprise. You'll see that like we're now in 65% of the fortune 500 with OpenShift, 90% with red hat in general. So we've established our footprint. And when you establish your footprint and customers start taking you out to the edge, we're going into these 5g use cases, we're, we've got an incredible amount happening in the AI space, all these emerging areas of where people are building their cloud, like we're now going to that next level of saying, how do they want to consume it? >>So what's really important to me about that is, is so Omni data around 50% of the market is, is open shift. A people may not realize a lot of people use, you know, do Kubernetes for free, you know, Hey, we're doing Kubernetes, but they don't have that application development framework and all the recovery and all the, the tooling around it. And the reason why I think that's so important, Laurie is ecosystems wanna monetize. So people are paying for things that becomes more interesting and it actually starts to attract people just naturally. >>Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of ecosystem, I mean, that's the beauty of what we're doing with GreenLake too. We're taking on a building block approach. So we're really, it's kind of ISV as a service if you will. And you know, personally, I, this was my baby for the past couple years, trying to make sure that we took into consideration every partner use case, every customer use case. So we created an agreement that would make sense to be able to scale, but also to meet all the demands of our customers. And so the, the what's really exciting about this is now we have a chance to take this building block approach, scale it out to all types of partner types, right throughout the entire ecosystem and build offerings together. That is really exciting for us. And that's where we see the real potential here with GreenLake and with red hat, >>What's actually available inside a GreenLake. >>So we are starting with OpenShift. So OpenShift will be available in Q3 that will follow in Q4 with re and then after that Ansible. So we're, we're moving very quickly to bring our platforms into it and it's really our strategic platforms, but it's all based on customer demand. We know we're seeing amazing transformation of customers moving to Kubernetes. You said, you know, OpenShift is Kubernetes with useful additions to it and an ecosystem around it, right? So that transformation is also happening at the bare metal layer. So we're seeing people move into Kubernetes bare metal, which is an amazing growth market for us. >>Explain those useful additions if you would. So why shouldn't I just go out and, and get the free version of Kubernete? Why should I engage red hat and, and OpenShift? What do I get? >>So you get all the day, two management stuff, you get, we have a whole set of additional stuff you can purchase around it, OpenShift platform. Plus you can get our ACM, our advanced cluster management. So you wanna manage multiple clusters, right? You get the ACS, the security side of it. You can also get ODF. So you get storage built into it as well. And we've done all these integrations. You can manage the whole thing as a cluster or as multiple clusters with the whole enterprise support and the long term support that we provide for these things up to 10 years. So >>When you look at the early days lease of, of Kubernetes, it was really, the focus was on simplicity. You had other platforms that were actually doing more sophisticated cluster management. And the, the committers that in Kubernetes said, you know, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna keep it simple. And so that leave some holes and gaps and you know, they're starting to fill those, but what if, if correct me if I'm wrong, but what red hat has done is said, okay, we're gonna accelerate, you know, the, the, the closing of those gaps and stay ahead and actually offer incremental value. And that's why you're winning in the marketplace. >>Well, we're an open company, so we're still doing everything upstream and open source as we do, of course, sticking with, you know, the APIs and APIs to make this all work, both, you know, in terms of what the community's trying to drive, what we're trying to drive for our customers on their behalf. And then just where things are going from a technology basis, make it a lot of investment, >>But you have to, you have to make a red hat, has to make a choice as to where it puts its commitments. You can't spread yourself too thin, so you gotta pick your spots. And you've, you've proven that you're pretty adept at doing that. >>That just comes back to customer centricity, right. And just knowing where our customers need to take the platform. That's, >>That's easy to say, but it's, it's an art form. And a little bit of science. >>Remember these customers have experts that are deep in this space. So it's like, you know, those experts trust us with where they needed to go. And they trust us to help shepherd that and deliver that as a platform to them. So it's not like anybody tell us what you want, right? Like it's really about like, knowing what's the best way to do it. And working with the people that can help you understand how to apply that to their use case >>And within the customer environment, who are you working with? Who is that key constituent or constituents that are guiding red hat in this direction? >>Well, it's certainly infrastructure folks. So it's your, it's your standard folks that are looking at the, how do we lay down our infrastructure? How do we manage it? How do we grow it? It goes out to the application developers. They're trying to deliver this in a cloud native way. And we have new personas, you know, coming in with the AI practitioners, right? So we've announced at before summit at Invidia's event, their new offering called Invidia AI enterprise. And so that's them bringing in enterprise support for GPU, for Kuda and for a software stack above that to start offering some more support there. So they're certifying OpenShift, we're both certifying the servers that run underneath it, and then they're offering support for their stuff on top of it. And that's a whole new use case for us. >>And, you know, I should also mention that even though this paper use with the GreenLake is new for us, and we just had this big announcement, we have done GreenLake deals though. We've done numerous GreenLake deals with our annual subs, right? So I, so even though this is new to us, as far as, you know, monthly utilization and being able to do this cloud consumption this isn't new to us as two companies coming together, we've been doing GreenLake deals for the past couple years. It's just, now we have this cloud consumption availability, which is really gonna make this thing launch. So, >>So what have been some of the customer benefits so far, you've been doing it for a couple years. The announcement was yesterday, but there's obviously feed on the street going on. What are some of the, the big outcomes that you're seeing customers actually bring to reality? >>I think speed and agility, right? That's the biggest thing with, with our products, being able to have it everything predictable and being able to have it consumed one way, instead of having this fragmented customer experience, which is, you know, what we've seen in the past. So I think that's the biggest thing is speed agility and just, you know, a really good customer experience at this point. >>Go get it, please. >>I would say the customer experience is critical. Yes. That's one of the things that we know that in terms of, of patients wearing thin the last couple of years, people expect to have a really strong consumer experience regardless of what you're doing, regardless of what industry and so attention and mind on that is a differentiator in my opinion. >>Absolutely. Yeah. And we've gotta constantly keep our eye on that. I mean, that's, that's our north star, if you will. Right. So, and Lori, >>I know you've saying you're, you've done GreenLake deals in the past, but what feels different to me now in that it's actually coalescing some of the things that Alma Russo announced this morning, the platform on which, you know, ISV is a service. I think you, you called it. Yeah. You, it, it now seems like, you know, look a couple years ago, HP said, okay, this is the direction that we're going. Yeah. They weren't there at that time. And they're still not there. There's a lot of work to be, to be done. But now it's starting to form. You're seeing, you know, the pieces come together, the puzzle pieces that sort of substrate being laid out. And now you're hoping that we see the steep part of the S-curve and that's what customers I think are expecting. >>Right. And it's bringing that operating model to move to a monthly model so they can do pay as you go. Right. And that pairs up nicely with like the cloud native capabilities we're bringing to OpenShift and hybrid cloud in general. So it's, it just shows like we're already getting demand from customers. It's saying like, this is part of our model. Like we know a certain amount of infrastructure we wanna own, and we just wanna own it outright, but there's a lot that they want to have flexibility on. And so being able to add that portion to it is just, you know, gonna help us both. >>And you think about the critical aspects of, of the cloud operating model. It's obviously pay as you go it's, you know, massive scale it's ecosystem enablement, and also automation. I mean, that is, that is a key, what's your point of view on that? You guys with Ansible, you, you, you know, you go back to a couple years ago and it was, you know, there was this, there were a lot of other tooling, but now, I mean, Ansible is really taken off. Yeah. >>It's just, you know, Cinderella story, right? Like it really an amazing community driven thing where we just knew, we all know this, right. You have, when you get to the very last mile of doing infrastructure management, there's a variety of devices, there's variety, a variety of vendors. And then you have like the variety of skills of the people that have to figure out how to do automate all of this. And what Ansible did is it provided a common language across all of that. And so what we do with automation, our, an ible automation platform is we make it. So now teams can manage all of this together and they can share their playbooks and they can host that privately for all their enterprise stuff that they need to do. So it's just, you know, it fits our DNA so well to have something so community driven now with a really nice enterprise message wrapped around it. And it's playing out very well for where, you know, hybrid cloud. Right. Cause there's some more additional variety. You need to be able to manage, you know, across all of your different footprints, because really it's like, it's not just about flexibility and scale up scale down it's where do you need it to run at what time? Right. And that, that last leg Ansible plays a key role in that. >>And we actually, Ansible will be coming further down the, you know, the patch. I know we're gonna talk a little bit about what's available today versus what's available down the road, but yeah, we have that on the radar. So right outta the gate, we're working on OpenShift, obviously bare metal. And we see that happening in Q3 and then behind that as well in Q4 and then Ansible is gonna be right behind that. So that's kind of the order that, and there's other pieces, right? So our whole portfolio is basically available to HP right now. It's just making sure that we can operationalize everything and have the best experience >>All inside of GreenLake, >>All inside a GreenLake. Yeah. Pretty neat. Lori >>Question for you. You've been, you were with HP for a very long time. This is obviously the first discover in three years in person. Exactly. You know, three years ago, Antonio near stood on stage and said, we are going to buy 20, 22. And here we are deliver everything as a service, as a partner and as a former HP, what are you seeing at this discover 22? >>It's it's so interesting. I it's such a sea change if you will. Right. And having come from HPE, I actually led the software as a service organization for a while on the software side of things. And we thought that was like state of the art and cutting edge that was 10, 11, 12 years ago. Right. So to actually see this come to life, because we were all thinking really, everything is a service. How are you gonna do that? Like your entire portfolio is gonna be available. Like that is lofty. Right. And having worked at HP, I thought, wow, I don't, you know, I know things take time. And, but actually just even being around the showcase here and watching everything come to life is amazing. Cause I, I, you know, I, I was very positive about it, but at the same time, it's like that, that was a big goal three years. Right. And it's, I'm seeing it happen >>A big goal in two of those years during a pandemic. Right. So right. Talk about lofty. Oh my gosh. Quite a bit of accomplishments guys. Thank you so much for joining David me on the program talking about actually guys, this is great. What red hat and HPE are doing your power partnership, power ship. Is that a word? It is now your power. >>I like >>That with GreenLake. We appreciate that. We'll look forward to having you guys back on. >>Thank you so much, guys. >>All right. For our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave ante. We are at HPE discover 22 live from the show floor in Las Vegas. This is just day one of our cupboards stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome to Las Vegas. It's the cube live on the show floor at HPE discover 2022, the first in person discover in three years, there are about 8,000 people here. The keynote was standing room only Lisa Martin here. I got a powerhouse group joining me for this keynote analysis. Dave ante joins us, Keith Townsend, John farrier, guys. Lot of news. It's all about HPE GreenLake. What were some of the things Dave, that stuck out to you? >>Well, I'll tell you right now, I gotta just quote, Antonio OIR said, Neri said four years ago, I declared that the enterprise of the future would be edge centric, cloud enabled and data driven. As a result, we launched HPE GreenLake. It kind of declared victory. Now I would say that what they're talking about and what they announced, I would consider table stakes. You know, I wish it started in 2014. I wish Antonio took over in 2015 instead of 2018, but I have to give credit, he's brought a focus and uh, and a, he think he's amped it up, John. I mean, if he's really prioritizing, uh, the, as a service they're going on in all in they're burning the boats, uh, and it's good. They got a lot of work to do. They >>Got a lot of work to do three years ago, John Antonio stood on this very stage saying we, and by 2022, we're gonna be delivering our entire portfolio as a service here we are with GreenLake. What I wanna get your thoughts on Keith's as well. >>Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that the crowded house was, uh, and a sign of people wanna come back together. So it's, to me, that was the first good news I saw, which was the HP community, their customer base. They're all here. They're glad to be back and forth. So it shows that they, their customer base it's resonating their value proposition of annual recurring revenue as a service plus the contract values with GreenLake are up. So this resonance with the customers, Dave, on the new operating model, that's a great check the box there. Um, I would say that I don't think HP's, as far along as Antonio had hopes, he'd be the pandemic was a setback. Um, but GreenLake is a real shining star. It's, uh, it's producing some green if you will money for them in terms of contracts, but they still got a lot more work to do because they're in a really interesting zone, Dave, because edge the cloud, although relevant and accurate where the, the shift is going, are they really there with, with the goods? And to me, I'm looking forward to seeing this discover if they have it or not. Certainly the messaging's good, but we're gonna UN UN unpeel that onion back and look at it. But >>Keith they're on the curve, right? At least they're on the cloud curve. >>They're absolutely on the curve. They have APIs, they have consistent developer experience. They announced the developer portal. They're developer centric. You can now consume your three par storage array services via a Terraform, uh, provider. They speak the language of cloud practitioners. You might struggle a little bit if I'm a small startup, you know, why would I look towards HPE? They kind of answered that a little bit. They had evil genius as a customer on stage, not a huge organization. A lot of the pushback they've been given is that if I may startup, I can simply go to a AWS portal, launch, a free trial service and run it. HPE kind of buried the lead. They now have, at least they announced preannounced the capability to, to trial GreenLake. So they're moving in the right direction. But you know, it's, it's it's table states. Well, >>Here's the thing. Here's the dynamic day that's going on. This is something that we've got got we're first of we've been covering HPE HP for now 11 years with the cube and look at Amazon's success and look at where Amazon's struggling. If you can say that they're having crossed overs to the enterprise, uh, cuz the enterprises are now just getting up to speed. You're seeing the rise of lack of talent. It certainly changing, uh, cyber security. You can't find talent. Kubernetes, good luck with that. Try to find someone. So you're seeing the enterprise aren't really geared up or staffed up for doing what I call, you know, high end cloud. So the rise of managed services is, is what we're seeing out there right now. You want Kubernetes clusters is a great set of managed services. You want other services? So that's the tell sign that the enterprises H HP's customers are now walking before they can run. They're crawling, they're now they're walking. So it's they have time to get in the Amazon lane in my opinion. Well, you >>Think about the hallmarks of cloud, obviously there's as a service, there's consumption based pricing. There's a developer, you know, friendliness, uh, there's ecosystem, which is really, really important. I think today, a lot of the ecosystem is partners, resellers and managed service providers. And to your point, Keith table stakes are things like single sign on being able to have, you know, a console being able to do it from a, from a URL to your point about startups is really interesting because that's one of the other hallmarks of cloud is you attract startups. And Lisa, we were at the snowflake summit and I asked the same question, can snowflake attract startups with their own super cloud. And what you saw was ecosystem partners developing in the snowflake cloud and monetizing. And that's something that we're waiting to see here. And I, I think they know >>You're suggesting way you suggesting that HP's gonna attract startups. >>Well, >>I, I think that's a sign if they can do that. That's a sign. And, and right now, I mean, you heard the example that Keith Keith gave. Uh, but, but not, not many. >>Yeah. I'm hoping that H I don't think HP is gonna ever attract startups, but I think the opportunity GreenLake affords the ecosystem is build clouds or purpose driven clouds around GreenLake. Mm-hmm <affirmative> whether it's the agreement with Equinix or all the cos and semi clouds, I think GreenLake gets most small CSPs, a leg up or 80% of the way there, where they can add that 20% of the IP and build services around GreenLake. And then that can attract the, the startup >>Or entrepreneurs. So the, the big question is, okay, where are these developers gonna come from? They could come from incumbents inside of companies. You know, the, the, the DevOps crowd from the enterprise, the really ops dev crowd. Right? I mean, yeah, don't you see that as a sort of a form of innovation startup, even though it's not a true startup. >>Yeah. Even though it's not, >>So Todd's making faces over there, we <laugh> >>Look, it, look it, they have >>Listen, if they don't, if they can't >>Do that, no, this is their focus is not startups. I agree with Keith on this one, they have to take care of business, home Depot. They have big customers and they have a lot of SMBs as well. They've got a great channel. H HP's got amazing infrastructure and, and client action going on. They gotta get the operating model, right job one as a service ARR, and then contract value and, and nail that with GreenLake. >>Who's their ideal customer profile. >>Their ideal is their install base. Look what Microsoft did with 365, they were going down. Their stock price was 26. At one point go to the, they went to the cloud 365, moved everything to the cloud and look at the success they're having. HP has the same kind of installed base. They gotta bring them along. They gotta get the operating model, right. And the developers that they're targeting are the ones inside the company and, or manage services that they're gonna go to the ecosystem for. That's where the cloud native comes in. That's where thing kind of comes together. So to me, I'm bullish on the operating model, but I'm skeptical that HP can get that cloud native developer. I haven't seen it yet. I'm looking for it. We're gonna look for it here. >>A key to that is going to be consistently. I, the, one of the things I'm looking for on the tech side, I, I hate to compare what HPE is doing to what VMware did with vCloud error years ago, but vCloud error on the outside looked >>Wonderful. Yes, >>It did. Once you tried to use it, it was just flaky underneath. And that's the part I'm looking to see customers pounding on it and saying, you know what API call after API I call, can I, uh, provision 10,000 pods a day? Does it scale down? Does it scale? And is it consistent? Is it >>Fragile Al roo she's co seasoned veteran? Uh, she was at V VMware cloud. She saw that movie. She gets a Mulligan, Dave. So I think her leadership is impressive. And I think she could bring a lot to the table to your point about don't make that same mistake and they gotta get this architecture, right. If they get the operating model right with GreenLake, they can double down on that and enable the developers that are driving the digital transformation. That to me is the, the key positions that they have to nail. And they do that. The rest is just fringe work. In my opinion, >>The reason why Alma was brought in, sorry, Lisa, it was, and then you gotta chime in here was to really build out that platform so that internal people at HPE can actually build value on top of it and the ecosystem that's her priority. >>We're gonna hear a lot from the ecosystem in the next couple of days, but I wanna get your perspective on, you've been following HPE a long time, all three of you. What are some of the things that you're hearing right now that are differentiators? We were just at Dell technologies. We talking about apex. We saw the big announcement they had with snowflake. We were at snowflake two weeks ago. I wanna get all three of your opinions on what are you seeing? Where is HP leading? >>I mean, HPE and Dell will, both with Dell, with apex are go, they're both gonna differentiate with their strengths. And, you know, for Dell, that's their breadth and their, their portfolio. And for, for HPE, that's their sort of open posture. I mean, John, you, you know this well, uh, that's their, their ecosystem, which I know has to evolve. And to me, their focus, you know, Antonio laid out some of the key differentiators. I, I, I think some of them were kind of, you know, pushing the envelope a little bit. Uh, but, but I think they're focus on as a service burning the, the, the boats telling wall street, this is our business. I think that's their differentiator. Is that they're, they're all in. >>Yeah. I, I think they, they try to highlight it by re announcing their private cloud service. I don't even know why they needed to announce that they have a private cloud. GreenLake is a cloud it's is a private cloud >>With block storage, hit disaster recovery. It's like good >>With like everything you get. But I think the, the key is, is that all of that is available today and you can get it in all kinds of frame of, of formats and, and frames specifically, if I'm a customer and I wanna get outta the data center and you, you know, Dave, we go back and forth about this all the time, and I wanna repatriate some workloads to Kubernetes on prem. I don't need to spend up another data center. I can go to Equinix, get GreenLake min IO, object storage on the back end, HPE lighthouse, all those services that I need for Kubernetes and repatriate my workloads without buying a new data center. And I get it as a service. I can get that Dave from HPE GreenLake, Dell apex is on the way. The >>Other thing they're differentiating with Aruba, that's something that Dell doesn't have. Yeah. And, and that is their edge play, I think is stronger than >>Of the others. Mean the, to me, the differentiator for HP is their, their history. Their channel's amazing. They got great Salesforce and they have serious customers and they have serious customers that have serious problems, uh, cyber security, uh, infrastructure, the security paradigm's changed. Uh, the deployment is changed how they deploy applications in their customer base. So they gotta step up to that challenge. And I think their differentiator is gonna be their size, their field and their ability to bring that operating model. And the hybrid model is a steady state. That's clear multi-cloud is just hybrids stitched together, but hybrid cloud, which is basically on premises and cloud to edge operating model is the number one thing that they need to nail. And if they nail that right, they will have a poll position that they could accelerate on. And again, I'm really gonna be watching how well they could enable cloud native developers, okay. To build modern agile applications while solving those serious problems with those serious customers. So again, I think hybrids spun in their direction. I'm not gonna say they got lucky, cuz they've always been on the hybrid bandwagon since we've been covering them. But I thought they'd be for a long day, but they're lucky to have hybrid. That's good for them. And I think do what Microsoft did convert their customers over and they do that, right? >>I think the key to that is gonna be ecosystem. Again, the developers need to see, especially the data piece, they talk about the cloud operating model. I think they're really moving that direction. The data piece to me is the weakest. Like they'll, they'll make claims that we can do anything that the cloud can do. You can't run snowflake, can't run data bricks, can't run Mongo Atlas. So they gotta figure out that data layer and that's optionality of, of data stores. And they don't have that today. >>Yeah. They, they, they have an announcement coming and I can't pre-announce it, but they're, they've, I've deemed them against it. They have the vision, Emeral data services, their data fabric multi-protocol access is a great start. They need the data network behind it. They need the ability to build a super cloud, a across multiple cloud providers, bringing some Google infos love inside of, uh, right next to your data. They have the hardware, they have the infrastructure, but they don't have the services. >>That's a key thing. I think one, you just brought up great point, Keith, and that is, is that at the end of the day, Dave, we're in a market now where agility and speed can be accomplished by startups or any company and HP's customers. Okay. Can move fast too. Okay. And so whoever can extend that value. If HPE can enable value creation for their customers, that's gonna be truly their, their task at hand, they got the channel, they got some leverage, but at the end of the day, the customers have alternatives now and they can move faster to get the value that they need to solve their serious problems. Uh, like cyber, like scalable infrastructure, like infrastructures code, like data ops, like AI ops, it's all here. And it's all coming really fast. Can GreenLake carry the day. And >>By the way, everything we just said about GreenLake in terms of table stakes and everything else, it applies for Dell. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>No question. It does guys. We have, and jam packed three days. We're gonna be talking with the ecosystem. We're gonna be talking with HPE leaders with customers. You're gonna hear all of these, uh, all this information unpacked over the next three days. We will be right back with our first guest for Dave ante, Keith Townson and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. Our first guest joins us momentarily.

>> Live, from Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE, covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (futuristic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live in Washington, D.C. for Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. This is their big show for the public sector. It's like a mini reinvent for specifically the public sector. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman, my co-host this segment, and Stewart Mclaurin, president of the White House Historic Association, is our guest. I heard him speak last night at a private dinner with Teresa Carlson and their top customers. Great story here, Amazon success story, but I think something more we can all relate to. Stewart, thank you for joining us and taking the time, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, it's just great to be with you. >> Okay, so let's jump into it; what's your story? You work for the White House Historical Association, which means you preserve stuff? Or, you provide access? Tell the story. >> Well, we have a great and largely untold story, and a part of our partnership with Amazon Web Services is to blow that open so more people know who we are and what we do, and have access to the White House, because it's the people's house. It doesn't belong to any one particular president; it's your house. We were founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who realized that the White House needed a nonprofit, nonpartisan partner. We have no government funding whatsoever, completely private. So we fund the acquisition of art, furnishings, decorative arts for the White House, if a new rug is needed, or new draperies are needed on the State Floor, or a frame needs to be regilded. We also acquire the china, the presidential and first lady portraits that are done; we fund those. But more importantly, in my view, is our education mission that Mrs. Kennedy also started, to teach and tell the stories of White House history going back to 1792, when George Washington selected that plot of land and the architect to build that house that we know today. So we unpack those stories through publications, programs, lectures, symposia, and now this new multifaceted partnership with AWS. >> Let's talk about, first of all, a great mission. This is the people's house; I love that. But it's always the secret cloak and dagger, kind of what's going on in there? The tours are not always, they're probably packed when people go through there, but the average person on the street doesn't have access. >> Sure, well, your cable news channels handle the politics and the policy of the place. We handle the building and the history, and all that's taken place there, including innovation and technology. If you think of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and others that evolved their early technologies through the White House, about 500,000 people get a chance to go through the White House every year. And when you think about in that small space, the president and his family lives, the president and his staff work, it's the ceremonial stage upon which our most important visitors are received, and then about 500,000 people schlep through, so you imagine 500,000 people that are going through your house, and all of that takes place. But it's very important to us for people to be able to see up close and personal, and walk through these spaces where Lincoln walked, and Roosevelt worked. >> Is that what the book you have, and share the book 'cause it's really historic, and the app that you have with Amazon, I think this is a great-- >> Sure, this is a real prize from our office. Mrs. Kennedy wanted us to teach and tell the stories of White House history, and so the first thing she wanted was a guide book, because the White House never had one. So in 1962, she published this guide book with us, and this is her actual copy. Her hands held this book. This was her copy of the book. Now, we continue to update this. It's now in its 24th edition, and each new edition has the latest renovations and updates that the latest president has added. But it's now 2018. So books are great, but we want to be able to impart this information and experience to people not only around Washington, who are going through the White House, but across the country and around the world. So this app that we've developed, you get through WHExperience at the App Store, you have three different tours. If you're walking through the White House, tours are self-guided, so unless you know what you're looking at, you don't know what you're looking at. So you can hold up an image, you can see, it brings to life for you everything that you're looking at in every room. Two other types of tours; if you're outside the White House in President's Park, it will unpack and open the doors of these rooms for you virtually, so you can see the Oval Office, and the Cabinet Room, and the Blue Room, and the Green Room. If you're around the world, there's a third tour experience, but the best part of it is, empowered by Amazon recognition technology, and it allows people to take a selfie, and it analyzes that selfie against all presidential portraits and first lady portraits, and the spatial features of your face, and it will tell you you're 47% Ronald Reagan, or 27% Jackie Kennedy, and people have a lot of fun with that part of the app. >> (laughs) That's awesome. >> Stewart, fascinating stuff. You know, when I go to a museum a lot of times, it's like, oh, the book was something you get on the way home, because maybe you couldn't take photos, or the book has beautiful photos. Can you speak a little bit about how the technology's making the tours a little bit more interactive? >> Sure, well we love books, and we'll publish six hardbound books this year on the history of the White House, and those are all available at our website, whitehousehistory.org. But the three facets of technology that we're adapting with Amazon, it's the app that I've spoken about, and that has the fun gamification element of portrait analysis, but it also takes you in a deeper depth in each room, even more so than the book does. And we can update it for seasons, like we'll update it for the Fall Garden Tour, we'll update it for the Christmas decorations, we'll update it for the Easter Egg Roll. But another part of the partnership is our digital library. We have tens of thousands of images of the White House that have literally been in a domestic freezer, frozen for decades, and with AWS, we're unpacking those and digitizing them, and it's like bringing history to life for the first time. We're seeing photographs of Kennedy, Johnson, other presidents, that haven't been seen by anybody in decades, and those are becoming available through our digital library. And then third, we're launching here a chatbot, so that through a Lex and Polly technology, AWS technology, you'll be able to go to Alexa and ask questions about White House history and the spaces in the White House, or keyboard to our website and ask those questions as well. >> It's going to open up a lot of windows to the young folks in education too. >> It is. >> It's like you're one command away; Hey, Alexa! >> It takes a one-dimensional picture off of a page, or off of a website, and it gives the user an experience of touring the White House. >> Talk about your vision around modernization. We just had a conversation with the CEO of Tellus, when we're talking about government has a modernization approach, and I think Obama really put the stake in the ground on that; former President Obama. And that means something to a lot of people, for you guys it's extending it forward. But your digital strategy is about bringing the experience digitally online from historical documents, and then going forward. So is there plans in the future, for virtual reality and augmented reality, where I can pop in and-- >> That's right. We're looking to evolve the app, and to do other things that are AR and VR focused, and keep it cool and fun, but we're here in a space that's all about the future. I was talking at this wonderful talk last night, about hundreds of thousands of people living and working on Mars, and that's really great. But we all need to remember our history and our roots. History applies to no matter what field you're in, medicine, law, technology; knowing your history, knowing the history of this house, and what it means to our country. There are billions of people around the world that know what this symbol means, this White House. And those are billions of people who will never come to our country, and certainly never visit the White House. Most of them won't even meet an American, but through this app, they'll be able to go into the doors of the White House and understand it more fully. >> Build a community around it too; is there any online social component? You guys looking around that at all? >> All of this is just launched, and so we do want to build some interactive, because it's important for us to know who these people are. One simple thing we're doing with that now, is we're asking people to socially post and tag us on these comparative pictures they take with presidents and first ladies. So there's been some fun from that. >> So Stewart, one of the things I've found interesting is your association, about 50 people, and what you were telling me off-camera, there's not a single really IT person inside there, so walk us through a little bit about how this partnership began, who helps you through all of these technical decisions, and how you do some pretty fun tech on your space. >> Unfortunately, a lot of historical organizations are a little dusty, or at least perceived to be that way. And so we want to be a first mover in this space, and an influencer of our peer institutions. Later this summer, we're convening 200 presidential sites from around the country, libraries, birthplaces, childhood homes, and we're going to share with them the experience that we've had with AWS. We'll partner or collaborate with them like we're already doing with some, like the Lincoln Library in Illinois, where we have a digitization partnership with them. So with us, it's about collaboration and partnership. We are content rich, but we are reach-challenged, and a way to extend our reach and influence is through wonderful partnerships like AWS, and so that's what we're doing. Now another thing we get with AWS is we're not just hiring an IT vendor of some type. They know our mission, they appreciate our mission, and they support our mission. Teresa Carlson was at the White House with us last Friday, and she had the app, and she was going through and looking at things, and it came to life for her in a new real and fresh way, and she'd been to the White House many times on business. >> That's great; great story. And the thing is, it's very inspirational on getting these other historic sites online. It's interesting. It's a digital library, it's a digital version. So, super good. Content rich, reach-challenged; I love that line. What else is going on? Who funds you guys? How do you make it all work? Who pays the bills? Do you guys do donations, is it philanthropy, is it-- >> We do traditional philanthropy, and we'd love for anybody to engage us in that. During the Reagan Administration in 1981, someone had the brilliant idea, now if I'd been in the room when this happened, I probably would have said, "Okay, fine, do that." But thank goodness we did, because it has funded our organization all these years. And that's the creation of the annual, official White House Christmas ornament, and we feature a different president each year sequentially so we don't have to make a political decision. This year, it's Harry Truman, and that ornament comes with a booklet, and it has elements of that ornament that talk about those years in the White House. So with Truman, it depicts the south balcony, the Truman Balcony on the south portico. The Truman seal that eventually evolved into being the Presidential Seal. On the reverse is the Truman Blue Room of the White House. So these are teaching tools, and we sell a lot of those ornaments. People collect them; once you start, you can't stop. A very traditional thing, but it's an important thing, and that's been a lifeblood. Actually, Teresa Carlson chairs our National Council on White House History. John Wood, that you just had on before me, is on our National Council on White House History. These are some of our strong financial supporters who believe in our mission, and who are collaborating it with us on innovative ways, and it's great to have them involved with us because it brings life in new ways, rather than just paper books. >> Stewart, I had a non-technical question for you. According to your mission, you also obtained pieces. I'm curious; what's the mission these days? What sort of things are you pulling in? >> Well, there's a curator in the White House. It's a government employee that actually manages the White House collection. Before President and Mrs. Kennedy came into the White House, a new president could come in and get rid of anything they wanted to, and they did. That's how they funded the new, by selling the old. That's not the case anymore. With the Kennedys, there's a White House collection, like a museum, and so we'll work with the White House and take their requests. For example, a recent acquisition was an Alma Thomas painting. Alma Thomas is the first African American female artist to have a work in the White House collection; a very important addition. And to have a work in the White House collection, the artist should be deceased and the work over 25 years old, so we're getting more of the 21st century. The great artists of the American 20th century are becoming eligible to have their works in the collection. >> Stewart, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. It's good to see you speak, and thanks for the ornament we got last night. >> Sure. Well, you've teased this ornament. Everybody's going to want and need one now, so go to whitehousehistory.org. >> John, come on, you have to tell the audience who you got face matched recognition with on the app. >> So who did you get face matched with? >> I think I'm 20% James Buchanan, but you got the Gipper. >> I'm Ronald Reagan. Supply-side economics, trickle-down, what do they call it? Voodoo economics, was his famous thing? >> That's right. >> He had good hair, John. >> Well, you know, our job is to be story tellers, and thank you for letting us share a little bit of our story here today. We love to make good friends through our social channels, and I hope everyone will download this app and enjoy visiting the White House. >> We will help with the reach side and promote your mission. Love the mission, love history, love the digital convergence while preserving and maintaining the great history of the United States. And a great, good tool. It's going to open up-- >> Amazon gave us these stickers for everybody who had downloaded the app, so I'm officially giving you your downloaded app sticker to wear. Stu, this is yours. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks guys, really appreciate it. >> Thank so much, great mission. Check out the White House-- >> Historical Association. >> Historicalassociation.org, and get the White House app, which is WHExperience on the App Store. >> That's right. >> Okay, thanks so much. Be back with more, stay with us. Live coverage here at AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back. (futuristic music)