>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by Silicon angle. The cube on cloud continues. We're here with Anna Pinza, who is the chief development officer and Anna Plan. We've been unpacking the future of Cloud. We've heard from a number of CEOs how they're thinking about Cloud in the coming decade. And first of all, Anna, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks for participating. It's great to see you again. >>It's great to see you, Dave. And I'm so excited to be here with you again, so hopefully we'll be doing this soon. >>I hope in 2021 will be able to be face to face everybody. Oh, no. A lot of respect. You think about the CEO role, something that you're intimately familiar with its unique because she or he has a very wide observation space across the company. You know, where is the GM or a business line manager there, You know, most concerned with their respective business, the CEO, they're gonna worry about the whole enchilada. And we've heard a lot in this program about digital transformation. We've heard a lot, of course, in the past couple of years, a lot of it was lip service, but but digital transformation, it's no longer optional. What's changed, in your view, in the way that businesses air going about it? >>You know, Dave, I mean, from my perspective, it's interesting. And this year in particular has been really telling for us, right? So I think before many companies were thinking about Hey, I wanna be online, I wanna grow my revenues, you know, with with digital I wanna have a presence. But what's happened actually this year with covert in particular, is that it's gone from being kind of a good to have, you know, to really ah, fundamental necessity. We must have it. And so when I talked to CEOs today, they're really thinking about different kinds of things than before, not just going digital, but how do I enable um, my people toe work remotely right? I've got to enable that how doe I bring the agility and the flexibility that I need in our business, especially with these new ways of working right? How do I look at business resiliency? You know, not just from a you know, something happens, and then how do I recover from it? But also how do I help our, You know, our company and our people then actually spring forward and grow from where we are. So it's gone from a a topic that was happening at the CEO, maybe at the business level. But now it's really also a fundamental CEO and board conversation. And so now we're seeing the CEO is having to present two boards. You know, what is our digital transformation? Are our digital strategy. So I wonder what >>you've seen in that regard. I'm interested in what role cloud plays and supporting those digital initiatives. But more specifically, you know, cloud migration came, you know, off the charts in terms of interest because of co vid. But you had those that that were, you know, deep into cloud had a lot of experience of those maybe not as much. Are you seeing any kind of schism in the marketplace where there's maybe a great advantage to those who really had years of experience on may be a disadvantage to those who didn't or is there kind of an equilibrium you're seeing in the market place? How do you see that playing out? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, What I'm seeing is that I think there used to be a spectrum of CEOs and effect, you know, the ones that were kind of a little bit, you know, you know, forward, ahead on the cloud, both on cloud infrastructure as well, Assassin. Right. And what are the services that we have? And then there were some that were really, um, you know, trying to think about what's the security, you know, implications of the cloud. And, you know, is it more expensive? And you know, So there was this spectrum of CEOs and I think now what's happened is there's such a business imperative that I think CEO s air saying, Look, I'm either gonna survive, you know, in this new world with the agility and the flexibility that I need And so cloud, you know, I'm seeing a lot of CEO is really saying Okay, Cloud is not just fashionable, but it z in and a necessity, right? And we must on we must do it. And I think frankly, the c e. O. S that don't embrace the cloud and that level of agility are going to struggle, right? It's a it's really a personal imperative. for a CEO in addition to sort of for the company. So >>a lot of times we talk about, you know, the three dimensions of people, process and technology, and I'm interested in your thoughts on how cloud has affected those traditional structures and the value chains. I mean, you've got some people are really good a text. Some people are really good at people. Some people are really good at process. Has the cloud affected that is, it upended? It changed it in any way. >>Yeah. I mean, let's let's, like, unpack that a little bit. You know, Dave, because if you think about process, I mean, one of the interesting things about the cloud is that And if you think about the cloud as going all the way from, like I as their sort of infrastructure all the way up the stack toe, actually providing business processes embedded, you know, in in a fast service, then from a process perspective and for CEOs, it's really upended how they think about business process reengineering in their companies. Um, if I think even, you know, five years ago, where you would have ah whole organization, that's, you know, focused on business process reengineering You do that? It takes a long time. You know, you get a consultant, maybe to help you, and then you work through that process. If you look at a SAS service like Anna plan today, where we our goal is, for example, toe orchestrate business performance. We were assassin business planning platform. We've incorporated into our platform that business process. Right. So the role of the CEO relative to business process and effect changes Right now, it's about how the leverage, ah, cloud infrastructure, and then how do you enable the customization is on top of that. But generally speaking, that's a lot easier than having to think about re engineering the whole company. Um, if you think about the technology stock, obviously the cloud, uh, embeds a lot of technology, you know, in the cloud. Right. So you have a lot of native services that are available to you. Um, that is awesome from a talent perspective, you know, because before, maybe you need to have, you know, needed to have database experts or, you know, kubernetes experts. And not that we don't need those today. But many of those capabilities come native in the cloud today. So, in effect, how it helps the CEO is to provide sort of this ecosystem of talent kind of embedded in what the cloud provider does. Right? So >>I wondered. So stay on that for a minute. So remember, before Amazon announced a W s and whether 2006 it was CEO said to me, >>Yeah, I'm thinking >>about maybe I don't need to run my own email, right? So because you have to have seen the SAS ification of of of businesses, which to your point, you know, makes things, uh, simpler and that I can focus on other areas and not to worry about, you know, managing infrastructure to support APS. At the same time you've had this proliferation of cloud you mentioned, of course, that you're with Anna Plan. You see, you got work day, you got Salesforce. You've got service now Oracle, APS and and people struggle. Okay, how do I get these things Talking to whether there's that worried about that data layer. So there's this new level of complexity. How do you see that playing out in the next decade? >>Yeah. You know, we used to say that, you know, we sort of, um, shift. What we do at a certain level and now is an organization we start to look at kind of higher value outcomes, right. And so I see that happening. And you're absolutely right. The conversations that I have with customers now are Hey, um, you know, there's things that are enabled by the cloud, and then on top of that, you need a set of a P i s or connectors or ways to get data in and out, you know, in and out of a particular system or ways to link. In our case, we're linking with Salesforce toe, Anna plan, toe workday or other tools, right? And so you start to think more about the business outcome that you want. The CEO needs to be focused on that, um, instead of maybe, uh, sort of the fundamentals of the technology. Those come, you know, those come for you, and then it's really more about the partnership with the business side. Right to say Okay, what is it that you're trying to do and can I enable that through my you know, cloud architectures, the work days, you know, the adobes or or the sales forces of the world. So I think the conversation is changing. And from my perspective, what's really cool about that is, um it brings the CEO Thio, you know, really makes the CEO of business and thought leader a strategic leader, right, Because, uh, the I t shop is not just talking tech, you know, the top shop has toe talk a lot more about the outcome that they're trying to deliver. >>So I mean, in the early days of cloud, I just wanna pick up on what you just said. I mean, a lot of people in I t's saw the cloud is a threat to their livelihood. And e think I'm inferring from your statements that were largely through that dynamic. And the CEO is now really trying to make the cloud platform for transformation and monetization or whatever other organizational goal might be saving lives or better government. Is >>that sort >>of how you see it, that the role has changed to that? >>I know. I mean, I talked to so many companies, and it's still we're still going through that transition, so I don't think we're completely over the hump of, you know, cloud all day everywhere but a same time. Um, I think what the CEO so really focused on these days is really around business, agility and business outcomes for their partners. By the way, that's one of the things. The second thing, especially these days, is around people, you know, collaboration, communication. How do we, you know, facilitate interaction of people, whether inside or outside of the company on DSO? You know, that's, um that's a very different conversation for the CEO. It doesn't mean that we're not still having the basic conversation of how safe is the cloud. What security do you have built into the cloud, Right, Andi? But I think, frankly, Dave, that we've across the chasm where before it used to be. Hey, I'm a lot more secure on Prem and, you know, given the tremendous focus of the cloud providers and says companies have put on security, um, I see many more companies, you know, feeling very at ease and in fact, telling their organizations right, we actually need to switch to the cloud, including large. Um, you know, large companies that have compliance issues, you know, or like large financial companies. Many of those are making that switch as well. Well, >>it's interesting talk about security, but I think it's kind of a two edged sword, right? Because I think a lot of frankly, I think a lot of executives early days used security as a way to sort of kick the can >>down the road. But >>the reality was cloud, you know better. Worse you could make that argument is different. And so, you know, different concerns people. But it's still a the end of the day. Bad security practices Trump, >>you >>know, good security. And so that's what we've seen so many times that shared responsibility model on DSO. People are still >>learning there, so >>so security is almost this beast in and of itself. I'm interested in your thoughts on on the priorities. I mean, >>our >>customers are they streamlining their their tech investments? I mean, the major focus, as you pointed out on Cloud, has been it's a driver of agility and shifting. Resource is as we talked about. But there's this constant cost pressure, you know, the procurement. Looking at the Amazon Bill, Uh, do you see ah lot of the same going forward? Or do you think the value equation is shifting such that there'll be Maybe, you know, I t is less cost pressure is always gonna be cost pressure. I know, but But more value producer, >>I think I think you're right. I mean, I see it and I see it. Over the last six months, I've seen it really accelerate where CEOs are thinking about three things and one is business resiliency. When I talk about business resiliency, I talk about the ability to recover from crap that happens. You know, where you know, whether it's pandemics or, you know, global events and shifts that companies have to accommodate. Right? So that's one thing that I see them thinking about. The second one that we talked about a little bit is just agility. You know, I see them really focused on that. And the cloud enables that. And, you know, the third one in conversations is really speed innovation, because, um, you know, when companies air talking to cloud providers and particularly SAS cos what I see them talking about is Look, I've got this particular need and it would take me, you know, two years to do it with a legacy player because of, you know, I've got to do this on Prem. But you have the fundamentals built in. And I think I could do it with you in three months. So I think, you know, business Resiliency both to grow and toe recover from stuff. Um, agility and innovation are really three fundamental levers that I see for movement, uh, movement to the cloud. Right? Andi, any one of those that these days I mean, it's funny, uh, depending on who you talk Thio. Any one of those can propel a CEO to make a choice to make that choice. And when they have all of that together, um, they have a lot more, um, lift in effect As a CEO, they have a lot more leverage, right in terms of what they could do for their companies. Well, >>let's stay on innovation. I mean innovation. I've said many times in tech, >>you >>know, for decades it came, came from Moore's Law, it seems, seems so nineties to even say that it's true. So what's going to drive innovation in the in the coming years? I'm interested in your perspective on how machine intelligence and a I n m l on cloud, of course, play into that innovation agenda. >>Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting, You know, I see it a lot in our business with Anna plan. Um, innovation comes from the ability to bring instead of what you do internally and match it with what's available in the external world. Right? And you mentioned it earlier. Data, You know, data is like the new currency. That's that's, like software, you know, eats the world. Now we talk about data, right? And, um and I think what's really going to drive innovation is being able to have access to the world's data once the company builds this digital DNA, You know, this digital foundation and puts, you know and is able to have access to that data, Then you start to make decisions. You know, you start Thio offer services. Um, you start thio, bring intelligence. Um, that wasn't available before, right? And, um, that's a really powerful thing for any company, whether you're doing, you know, forecasting. And you need to sort of bring the world's data. Whether you're a agricultural company, we talking. And in these days, um, innovation comes in the form of speed, you know, being able to just deliver something new to an audience faster. So to me, the cloud enables, You know, all of that the ability Thio bring in data. And then on top of that, I mean, think about all the A i m l innovation that's happening around the world. We we just launched an offer, actually, um, to be able to dio forecasting intelligent forecasting on top of the cloud we partner with with a W s forecast for that, Um, if we didn't have a cloud platform, you know, to do that and instead of a p i s you know, being digital that way really enables us, uh, the opportunity Thio toe match. You know, one plus one equals one, you know, 100. Really? And bringing the power of that to get to companies together to be ableto enable that type of innovation. >>Well, that that that's interesting. It reminds me of my friends. Ed Walsh is the CEO of a startup called Chaos Search. And you use the statement. He said, where we're standing on the shoulders of the giants, you know what you know, trying not trying to recreate it. And I think you know, you got what you just said is the same thing. You're sort of relying on others to build out cloud infrastructure. So there's a totally left field question. When you hear all the talks about breaking up big tech I >>want Is that a >>relevant to you? Because you figured okay, the clouds gonna be there. It's maybe more about search or it's about, you know, Facebook or, you know, Amazon's dominance. Interestingly, Microsoft's really not in those discussions anymore. They were the center of it >>back. No, no. >>But as a head of development for a company, does that even factor into the equation? And you're kind of not worry about that? >>No. I mean, I'll be honest for me personally. What I do is I compartmentalize my world, right. In a sense, I view I view the partnerships and we have partnerships with Google and AWS and Microsoft and others, Right? So, um, I view those as part of a non opportunity to really provide on ecosystem set of solutions right to customers and those air very powerful. I think those partnerships enable companies like ours, like Sasse companies, to innovate faster, right? And so I compartmentalize and I say those things are are wonderful. I don't know why you would want to break up those companies at the same time. Um, you know, part of what you're referring Thio, you know, has to do with, um more the social and the consumer elements of what's going on. But as a business leader, um, I really I really focused on what the power is, particularly in the enterprise. What is it that we can do for global enterprise companies? And at least in my mind, those two things tend to be separate. >>Couple of things, you said they're triggered my mind. One was ecosystems. We've been talking about data. One of our guests on this program, Alan Nance, has been talking about ecosystems and the power of ecosystems. And I definitely see Cloud is a platform to allow data sharing across those those clouds and then to form ecosystems and share data in ways that we really couldn't have, you know, half a decade or even you no longer ago. And that seems to be where ah lot of the innovation is going to occur. Some of the people talk about the flywheel effect, but it's the power of many versus the resource is of, you know, a few. >>And I'm such a big believer in the ecosystem play. And part of that is because, um, frankly, even over the last 20 years, that the skills that are required and the knowledge that required that is required is so specialized. Dave, you know, if you think about, you know, a I m l and all the algorithms that we need to know when the innovation that's happening there. And so I really don't think that there's any one company that can serve a customer alone, right? And if you think about it from a customer perspective, you know they're made up of their business is made up of needs from a lot of different parties that they're putting together, you know, to accommodate their business outcome. And so the only way to play right now in tech is is in a collaborative way in an ecosystem way. I think the mawr that companies like ours worked with other companies on these partnerships. And frankly, by the way, I think in the past, many companies that have made bold announcements and they would say, Oh, you know, I'm partnering with so and so and I've got this great partner, you know, partnership. And then nothing would happen. You know, like it was just a lot of, you know, talk. But I think what's actually happening now and it's enabled by the cloud, is, um, we have much more of a show me culture, right? We can we can actually say. Okay, well, let's say, uh, Anna plan is partnering with Google. Show me. You know, show me what you're actually doing. And I see our customers, um, asking for references of how these ecosystem partnerships air playing. Um, and, uh, because these stories air out there mawr, I think partnerships are actually much more feasible and and really and pragmatic. Yeah. >>Anna, we call those Barney deals, you know, I love you. You love me, would do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. >>That's right. That's right. And I think that Z that's not gonna work. Going forward day, right? People are asking for a lot more transparency. And so when we think about ecosystems, they really want the meat on the bone, right? They don't want just, uh, announcements that don't really help their business move forward. Yeah, >>And you know the other thing to the come back to data. It's always comes back to data, right? Every conversation. But the data that's created out of that ecosystem is gonna throw off, you know, new capabilities and new data products, data services. And that, to me, is a really exciting, you know, new chapter, I think of cloud. >>Yeah, and it's interesting. You know, the conversations I'm having now are are about data and believe it or not, also about metadata, right? Because people are trying to analyze what's happening with the cloud. You know, among cloud providers what our customers doing with the data, right? How are they using data? How often are they accessing data? Um, security. You know, from that perspective, looking at who's accessing? Accessing what? So, um, the data conversation in the metadata conversation are truly enabled by the cloud and their their key. And they weren't that easy to do in a prior, you know, legacy sort of environment. There's >>a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, because legacy, environment, all the all that metadata that data about the data is locked inside of these systems. And if you're gonna go across clouds and you're gonna have it secure and govern. You've gotta have that metadata visibility and a point of control that actually can see that and and can manage it. So thank you for that at that point. And thank you for coming on the on the Cuban participating. The Cuban cloud has been great having you. >>Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. >>Alright, Keep it right there. Everybody mawr from the Cuban cloud right after this short break.

>> The Cube on cloud continues. We're here with Ana Pinczuk, who's the chief development officer at Anaplan, and we've been unpacking the future of cloud. We've heard from a number of CIOs how they're thinking about cloud in the coming decade. And first of all, Ana, welcome back to the Cube. Thanks for participating. It's great to see you again >> It's great to see you, Dave, and I'm so excited to be here with you again. So hopefully, we'll be doing this soon. >> I hope in 2021, we'll be able to be face-to-face >> Face-to-face, I know. >> and everybody out there, we miss you all. >> I know, I know. >> Now, Ana, in a lot of respects, you think about the CIO role, something that you're intimately familiar with, and it's unique, because she or he has a very wide observation space across the company. Whereas a GM or a business line manager, they're most concerned with their respective business, the CIO, they got to worry about the whole enchilada. And we've heard a lot in this program about digital transformation. We've heard a lot, of course, in the past couple of years. A lot of it was lip service, but digital transformation is no longer optional. What's changed, in your view, in the way that businesses are going about it? >> You know, Dave, from my perspective, it's interesting, and this year, in particular, has been really telling for us. So I think, before, many companies were thinking about, hey, I want to be online, I want to grow my revenues with digital, I want to have a presence. But what's happened, actually, this year, with COVID in particular, is that it's gone from being a good to have to really a fundamental necessity, we must have it. And so when I talk to CIOs today, they're really thinking about different kinds of things than before, not just going digital, but how do I enable my people to work remotely? I've got to enable that. How do I bring the agility and the flexibility that I need in our business, especially with these new ways of working? How do I look at business resiliency, not just from something happens and then how do I recover from it, but also how do I help our company and our people then actually spring forward and grow from where we are? So it's gone from a topic that was happening at the CIO, maybe at the business level, but now it's really also a fundamental CEO and board conversation, and so now we're seeing the CIOs having to present to boards what is our digital transformation, our digital strategy. >> So I wonder what you've seen in that regard. I'm interested in what role cloud plays in supporting those digital initiatives, but more specifically, cloud migration came off the charts in terms of interest 'cause of COVID, but you had those that were deep into cloud, had a lot of experience, and those maybe not as much. Are you seeing any kind of schism in the marketplace, where there's maybe a great advantage to those who really had years of experience, and maybe disadvantages to those who didn't, or is there an equilibrium you're seeing in the marketplace? How do you see that playing out? >> Yeah, what I'm seeing is that, I think there used to be a spectrum of CIOs, in effect, the ones that were a little bit forward, ahead on the cloud, both on cloud infrastructure as well as SaaS, and what are the services that we have, and then there were some that were really trying to think about what's the security implications of the cloud, and is it more expensive? So there was this spectrum of CIOs. And I think now what's happened is there's such a business imperative that I think CIOs are saying, "Look, I'm either going to survive in this new world with the agility and the flexibility that I need." And so cloud, I'm seeing a lot of CIOs really saying okay, cloud is not just fashionable, but it's in, and a necessity, and we must do it. And I think, frankly, the CIOs that don't embrace the cloud and that level of agility are going to struggle. It's really a personal imperative for a CIO, in addition to for the company. >> So a lot of times, we talk about the the three dimensions of people, process, and technology, and I'm interested in your thoughts on how cloud has affected those traditional structures and the value chains. You've got some people are really good at tech, some people are really good at people, some people are really good at process. Has the cloud affected that? Has it upended it, changed it in any way? >> Yeah, let's unpack that a little bit, Dave, 'cause if you think about process, one of the interesting things about the cloud is that- and if you think about the cloud as going all the way from IaaS, or infrastructure, all the way up this stack to actually providing business processes embedded in a SaaS service, then from a process perspective, and for CIOs, it's really upended how they think about business process re-engineering in their companies. If I think, even five years ago, where you would have a whole organization that's focused on business process re-engineering, you do that, it takes a long time, you get a consultant, maybe, to help you, and then you work through that process. If you look at a SaaS service like Anaplan today, where we- Our goal is, for example, to orchestrate business performance. We are a SaaS business planning platform. We've incorporated into our platform that business process, so the role of the CIO relative to business process, in effect, changes. Now it's about how to leverage a cloud infrastructure, and then how do you enable the customizations on top of that? But generally speaking, that's a lot easier than having to think about re-engineering the whole company. If you think about the technology stack, obviously, the cloud embeds a lot of technology in the cloud, so you have a lot of native services that are available to you. That is awesome from a talent perspective, because before, maybe you needed to have database experts or Kubernetes experts. And not that we don't need those today, but many of those capabilities come native in the cloud today. So, in effect, how it helps the CIO is to provide this ecosystem of talent embedded in what the cloud provider does. >> So I wonder, so let's stay on that for a minute. So I remember, before Amazon announced AWS in, was it 2006, a CIO said to me, "Yeah, I'm thinking about maybe I don't need to run my own email," (chuckles). And so- >> That's right, that was those days. >> And then, of course, it happens that we see the SaaSification of businesses, which, to your point, makes things simpler, in that I can focus on other areas, and not to worry about managing infrastructure to support apps. At the same time, you've had this proliferation of cloud. You mentioned, of course, that you're with Anaplan, you see, you got Workday, you got Salesforce, you got ServiceNow, Oracle apps, and people struggle. How do I get these things talking to others, they're worried about that data layer, so there's this new level of complexity. How do you see that playing out in the next decade? >> Yeah, and we used to say that we shift what we do at a certain level, and now, as an organization, we start to look at higher value outcomes. And so I see that happening, and you're absolutely right. The conversations that I have with customers now are, hey, there's things that are enabled by the cloud, and then on top of that, you need a set of APIs, or connectors, or ways to get data in and out of a particular system, or ways to link. In our case, we're linking with Salesforce, to Anaplan, to Workday, or other tools, and so you start to think more about the business outcome that you want. The CIO needs to be focused on that, instead of maybe the fundamentals of the technology. Those come for you. And then it's really more about the partnership with the business side, to say, okay, what is it that you're trying to do, and can I enable that through my cloud architecture, the Workdays, the Adobes, or the Salesforces of the world? So I think the conversation is changing. And from my perspective, what's really cool about that is it brings the CIO to, really makes the CIO, a business and thought leader, a strategic leader, because the IT shop is not just talking tech, the IT shop has to talk a lot more about the outcome that they're trying to deliver. >> So in the early days of cloud, I just want to pick up on what you just said, a lot of people in IT saw the cloud as a threat to their livelihoods, and I think I'm inferring from your statements that we're largely through that dynamic, and the CIOs are now really trying to make the cloud a platform for transformation, and monetization, or whatever other organizational goal, might be saving lives, or better government. Is that how you see it, that the role >> Look, I talk- >> Has changed to that? >> I know, I talk to so many companies, and we're still going through that transition, so I don't think we're completely over the hump of cloud all day, everywhere, but at the same time, I think what the CIO's really focused on these days is really around business agility and business outcomes for their partners. By the way, that's one of the things. The second thing, specially these days, is around people, collaboration, communication. How do we facilitate interaction of people, whether inside or outside of the company? And so that's a very different conversation for the CIO. It doesn't mean that we're not still having the basic conversation of how safe is the cloud, what security do you have built into the cloud? But I think, frankly, Dave, that we've crossed the chasm, where before it used to be, hey, I'm a lot more secure on prem, and given the tremendous focus that the cloud providers and SaaS companies have put on security, I see many more companies feeling very at ease, and in fact, telling their organizations we actually need to switch to the cloud, including large companies that have compliance issues, or large financial companies. Many of those are making that switch as well. >> Well, it's interesting, we could talk about security, but I think it's a two-edged sword, because I think a lot of, frankly, I think a lot of executives, early days, used security as a way to kick the can down the road. But the reality was the cloud, better or worse, you could make that argument, but it's different, and so different concerns people, but it's still, at the end of the day, bad security practices trump good security, and so that's what we've seen so many times, the shared responsibility model. And so people are still learning there. So security is almost this beast in and of itself. I'm interested in your thoughts on the priorities. Are customers, are they streamlining their tech investments? The major focus, as you pointed out, on cloud has been it's a driver of agility and shifting resources, as we talked about, but there's this constant cost pressure, the procurement, looking at the Amazon bill. Do you see a lot of the same going forward, or do you think the value equation is shifting such that there'll be, maybe, IT is less cost pressure? There's always going to be cost pressure, I know, but more value producer. >> I think you're right. I see it, and over the last six months I've seen it really accelerate, where CIOs are thinking about three things, and one is business resiliency, and when I talk about business resiliency, I talk about the ability to recover from crap that happens, whether it's pandemics or global events and shifts, that companies have to accommodate. So that's one thing that I see them thinking about. The second one that we talked about a little bit is just agility. I see them really focused on that, and the cloud enables that. And the third one in conversations is really speed to innovation, because when companies are talking to the cloud providers, and particularly SaaS companies, what I see them talking about is, look, I've got this particular need, and it would take me two years to do it with a legacy player because I've got to do this on prem, but you have the fundamentals built in, and I think I can do it with you in three months. So I think business resiliency, both to grow and to recover from stuff, agility, and innovation, are really three fundamental levers that I see for movement to the cloud. And any one of those that these days, it's funny, depending on who you talk to, any one of those can propel a CIO to make that choice, and when they have all of that together, they have a lot more lift, in effect, as a CIO. They have a lot more leverage in terms of what they can do for their companies. >> Well, let's stay on innovation. Innovation, I've said many times, in tech, for decades it came from Moore's Law. It seems so '90s to even say that, >> I know, I know. >> but it's true. So what's going to drive innovation in the coming years. I'm interested in your perspective on how machine intelligence, and AI, and ML, and cloud, of course, play into that innovation agenda? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I see it a lot in our business with Anaplan, innovation comes from the ability to bring in what you do internally and match it with what's available in the external world. And you mentioned it earlier, data. Data is like the new currency, that's like software eats the world, now we talk about data. And I think what's really going to drive innovation is being able to have access to the world's data. Once a company builds this digital DNA, this digital foundation, and is able to have access to that data, then you start to make decisions, you start to offer services, you start to bring intelligence that wasn't available before, and that's a really powerful thing for any company, whether you're doing forecasting and you need to bring the world's data, whether you are a agricultural company. And in these days, innovation comes in the form of speed, being able to just deliver something new to an audience faster. So to me, the cloud enables all of that, the ability to bring in data. And then on top of that, think about all the AIML innovation that's happening around the world. We just launched an offer, actually, to be able to do forecasting, intelligent forecasting, on top of the cloud. We partner with AWS Forecast for that. If we didn't have a cloud platform to do that, and a set of APIs, being digital that way really enables us the opportunity to match, one plus one equals 100, really, and bring in the power of that to get two companies together to be able to enable that type of innovation. >> Well, that's interesting. It reminds me of, one of my friends, Ed Walsh, is the CEO of a new startup called ChaosSearch, and he used this statement, he said, "We're standing on the shoulders of the giants. We're not trying to recreate it." And I think what you just said is the same thing. You're relying on others to build out cloud infrastructure. >> Totally. >> So here's a totally left-field question. When you hear all the talks about breaking up big tech, I wonder, is that irrelevant to you because you figured, okay, the cloud's going to be there, it's maybe more about search, or it's about Facebook, or Amazon's dominance. Interestingly, Microsoft's really not in those discussions anymore. They were the center of it back in the '90's. >> I know, I know. >> But as the head of development for a company, does that even factor into the equation, or do you just not worry about that? >> I'll be honest, for me personally, what I do is I compartmentalize my world. In a sense, I view the partnerships, and we have partnerships with Google, and AWS, and Microsoft, and others, so I view those as part of an opportunity to really provide an ecosystem set of solutions to customers, and those are very powerful. I think those partnerships enable companies like ours, like SaaS companies, to innovate faster. And so I compartmentalize, and I say those things are wonderful, I don't know why you would want to break up those companies. At the same time, part of what you're referring to has to do with more the social and the consumer elements of what's going on. But as a business leader, I really focus on what the power is, and particularly in the enterprise, what is it that we can do for global enterprise companies? And at least in my mind, those two things tend to be separate. >> A couple of things you said there that triggered my mind. One was ecosystems. We've been talking about data. One of our guests in this program, Allen Nance, has been talking about ecosystems and the power of ecosystems, and I definitely see cloud as a platform to allow data-sharing across those clouds and then to form ecosystems and share data in ways that we really couldn't have half a decade, or even longer ago. And that seems to be where a lot of the innovation is going to occur. Some of the people talk about the flywheel effect, but it's the power of many versus the resources of a few. >> And I'm such a big believer in the ecosystem play, and part of that is because, frankly, even over the last 20 years, the skills that are required and the knowledge that is required is so specialized, Dave, if you think about AIML and all the algorithms that we need to know and the innovation that's happening there, and so I really don't think that there's any one company that can serve a customer alone. And if you think about it from a customer perspective, their business is made up of needs from a lot of different parties that they're putting together to accommodate their business outcome, and so the only way to play, right now, in tech, is in a collaborative way, in an ecosystem way. I think the more that companies like ours work with other companies on these partnerships, and frankly, by the way, I think in the past, many companies that have made bold announcements and they would say, oh, I'm partnering with so-and-so, and I've got this great partnership, and then nothing would happen (laughs). It was just a lot of talk. But I think what's actually happening now, and it's enabled by the cloud, is we have much more of a show me culture. We can actually say, okay, well, let's say, Anaplan is partnering with Google, show me, show me what you're actually doing. And I see our customers asking for references of how these ecosystem partnerships are playing. And because these stories are out there more, I think partnerships are actually much more feasible, and real, and pragmatic. >> Yeah, Ana, we call those barney deals, I love you, you love me, we do a press release, and then nothing ever happens. >> That's right, that's right. And I think that's not going to work going forward, Dave. People are asking for a lot more transparency, and so when we think about ecosystems, they really want the meat on the bone. They don't want just announcements that don't really help their business move forward. >> Yeah, and the other thing too, we come back to data, it's always coming back to data, every conversation, but the data that's created out of that ecosystem is going to throw off new capabilities, and new data products, data services, and that, to me, is a really exciting new chapter, I think, of cloud. >> Yeah, and it's interesting, the conversations I'm having now are about data, and believe it or not, also about metadata, because people are trying to analyze what's happening among cloud providers, what are customers doing with the data, how are they using data, how often are they accessing data. Security, from that perspective, looking at who's accessing what. So the data conversation and the metadata conversation are truly enabled by the cloud, and they're key. And they weren't that easy to do in a prior legacy environment. >> It's a great point, I'm glad you brought that up, because in a legacy environment, all that metadata, that data about the data, is locked inside of these systems, and if you're going to go across clouds, and you're going to have it secure and governed, you've got to have that metadata visibility and a point of control that actually you can see that and can manage it, so thank you for that point. And thank you, Ana, for coming on the Cube and participating in the Cube on Cloud. It's been great having you. >> Thank you so much for having me, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. More from the Cube on Cloud right after this short break. (bouncy music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everyone. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, this is Day Two of of HPE Discover 2017. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week Peter Burris. Ana Pinczuk is here, she's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Group. >> That's right, that's right. >> Welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Many time Cube alum. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pre-HPE and second time since, when did you start, in February? >> Yes, I know it's been nine months, I'm a veteran. >> You're a vet, right. (laughs) How's the gig going, you hitting your groove swing? >> Yes. >> Dave: Looked great up on stage yesterday. >> Thank you so much, yeah I appreciate it. Yeah I think we are, I came on board in February and it's been a run ever since. We launched a brand in February, so that's when I think when we sort of talked last. And then since then, we've just launched another brand which is HPE GreenLake for flexible consumption model stuff. And we've been doing a lot of great things, we've been doing partnerships with folks, I've been going out to each one of the regions talking to different customers, it's been going really well. >> Well so Pointnext has become a linchpin of HPE strategy. After the spin-merges, things became more clear when you talk about making hybrid IT simple, getting to the intelligent edge, services is now front and center. Meg talks about it, Antonio talks about it. >> That's right. >> Why is services so important and how do you see that scaling in the organization? >> So first of all, I definitely believe the world is turning to be a services-led world and I tell folks that it's really two things, it's services-led and then advisory-led, really advisory. And particularly because our customers want to really undergo these new digital journeys. I was just on stage talking to one of our customers, the Tottenham Hotspurs, and they're redoing their whole stadium and they're trying to increase the interaction and the engagement that they have with fans. So that's where services come in, and so we're really services-led that way and the second thing that's a phenomenon is really the cloud has really helped us learn to want everything instantaneously and to want things when we need them and when we think we need them. And so a lot of services is really about enabling those experiences in a consumption model. So that's the transformation I think that HPE is going through right now, just being a product company, but really moving to being services-led to deliver these digital experiences. >> Well one of the things that we've observed over the years, as folks who work with customers in thinking about their technology, is that there's a co-mingling, a bringing together of the idea of invention. And one of the things that's most attractive to me about a services-led, or acknowledging the role of services, is it really, innovation, is a two-part process. There's an invention, which is the engineering element, and enters the innovation, which is the social, the change. And one of the beauties of taking a services as opposed to a product approach, is that you end up focusing on the social change. >> That's right. >> You end up focusing on what does it mean to use this, apply it, make it happen, and it accelerates the innovation process. I'm wondering if by having a more services-approach, HP's able to look at this significant new range of problems you're going to try to address, but address them as a social innovation challenge as opposed to just getting product into market. >> Yeah, no and that's absolutely right. I'll give you another cool example, we have a customer Yoox Net-A-Porter, and they're a digital sort of online experience provider. They support brands like all of the expensive luxury brands that we know and love. And they're trying to help stores innovate, so let's say you're Prada or Marni or Louis Vuitton, they're helping provide a social experience to their luxury brand consumer. And being able to do that, not just mirroring what you would get in a store, but really innovating in how do you engage with that kind of a consumer online. And so for example, they allow you to shop online but then they'll bring the product to you, it'll be all wrapped really nice, they wait for you to try it on to make sure it's okay. So that's an example of social innovation, not just thinking about how to provide product to enable a website, but how do you actually then help a customer innovate in that whole engagement model? >> It's innovation that is made possible by a whole lot of technology combined with simple ways of introduce change, not just to consumers, but also the people who are ultimately responsible for providing that service. >> Ana: That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. >> Peter: Is that one of the basis then for thinking about Pointnext? >> It is, yeah, it is because people ask me, you know we've always done services and a lot of our services were product-attached services, you do support services, operational services, data center care, those sorts of things. And then we decided to sort of launch Pointnext, and the idea is that this is more than just what we've traditionally done as product-attached. This is really coming at it from a completely different angle, which is recognizing that there is an element of social and management of change that comes through digital. And that's why we talk about advisory-led. Part of that advisory-led is really helping companies figure out what is that new phenomenon, how do I actually shift the experience that I want to enable and how do I bring social innovation with a set of partners, too, because experiences really require us to work not just with our own products, but with software providers, with inside and others. >> Peter: And your customer's partners too. >> And our customer's partners as well, I mean who the customer is is shifting as we put this together. I'll give you an example, when we work with automotive companies, we've gotta think not just about, let's say, the car company and their connected car, but we also have to think about how the consumer of the car is going to interact with the IT environment in the car. >> How the dealers are going to sell it, >> Ana: And how the dealers are gonna sell it. >> how they're gonna make money, the whole thing. >> How they're gonna do predictive maintenance on it >> Exactly. >> So you start to think not just about one experience, but all the elements that come from that single experience. >> Well we just had Deloitte on talking about retail experiences and transforming brick and mortar stores, so that's a key part of it. So partnerships is also something critical, 'cause you can't do everything. >> Ana: That's right. >> So I want to come back to some of the invention piece. When you were up on stage talking about flexible consumption models, you know, cloud, when we went into the downturn it was kinda a tap on the shoulder. Coming out of the downturn it became a kick in the butt to a lot of tradtional IT players. So you've had to respond to that. And you have, flexible consumption models, pay-as-you-go models. So I started to make a list because we've been talking all week about two ends of the spectrum. We've got here at HPE Discover, AWS re:Invent's going on this week, completely different philosophies about what customers want and how to serve those customers. And so you've got to a great degree mimic the cloud experience. And you can't do it 100%. At the same time, the cloud can't mimic what you guys can do. So I kinda wanted to go through a list and think about where have you closed those gaps, where do you still have advantages for customers. So things like pay-as-you-go, flexible capacity, you've done a lot of work there. Can you give us the update on that and how big is that gap when you talk to customers? >> So first of all, it's interesting because when some of our competitors talk about pay-as-you-go, they start by talking about just a leasing arrangement. They say "Okay, it's a lease." And this is far beyond a lease. I think I can eliminate quite a few of our competitors, (laughs) not cloud competitors, just by saying we've gone beyond that, right. And we provide a full service. So it's the hardware, the software, the data center care, the operational management. And then we turn that service into a pay-as-you-go model. So that's the first sort of innovation and differentiation. And we do that on-prem or in a hosted environment, that's the first thing. The second thing is that part of what we do is we help to manage that environment for the customer. So in a flexible capacity model, we over-provision in a sense and we have a buffer and we understand where the customer's going, how much their utilization is, and then we automatically sort of manage that whole thing for them, up or down depending on what happens. I think the third thing, which is part of the innovation, which is a little different, is we also do the integration of other technologies into the offer. So yesterday I was talking about private backup as a service. There we've got the hardware, the software, it could be Commvault let's say backup software, all the management associated with that, including the support that you need for that, offered in an outcome-based service. So what we're doing there is we're also innovating in the metering, what we're saying is we're going to really provide you an outcome, and that outcome is a successful backup. So you don't actually have to worry about the equipment, you don't have to worry about is it infrastructure-as-a-service? You know, AWS, whatever, we're actually providing a full solution in an outcome-based. And I think that's a little bit of what differentiates us from maybe some of the solutions that are out there, from others. That said, I view this as providing the right mix to our customers, so although, yes, you can say that we're competing with the public cloud, because customers have choice, at the same time part of what we're trying to do also is bring those two together, which I think is unique for us. >> Makes more same philosophy, different approaches. >> Different approaches, and by the way, if you're customer-centric, then what you wanna do is provide customer choice and do the right thing for the customer, and to say where does it make sense to be on the public cloud, or in a private environment, and optimize for the customer benefits that you're going after. >> Well I think it's fair to say that the world has learned a lot from what AWS has done, and said "Hey, we can take that "and we can apply it to our customers' businesses "on-prem or in a hybrid environment." >> And by the way, AWS, especially with our CTP acquisition, they've been a long-term AWS partner and we're having conversations with AWS that say okay, if we're going to really focus on customers, and we're really customer-centric, then how do we work together? Not just AWS, but Microsoft and Google and others, how do we work together and look at where we can optimize our solutions to be able to do the right thing for the customer. >> So our clients are sick and tired of hearing me say this, or us say this, but we believe that where we're going is the cloud experience for your data demands. >> That's right. >> So the way we think about it and I'm wondering if you would agree, is that the first conversation we have with a customer is what's the outcome, what data is required to serve that outcome, how're you gonna package it up as a workload, and where do you naturally need to run that based on latency, other types of issues. Is that kind of how Pointnext is working with customers as well? >> Yeah absolutely right, so we wanna come in, customer in, so you wanna be able to say "What is it that you're trying to do from an outcome?" I described a backup outcome, another outcome might be I'm trying to accelerate my ability to roll out new agile solutions, or microservices-based applications. So we have that conversation with a customer, we then say okay, for that kind of workload, what are you requirements? What are you trying to do? We might also come in and actually, 'cause sometimes what people think they do and what they actually do in their environment is different. So we can come in and say okay, let me actually measure what you're doing and see what you're doing and then bring that information back to them. And then have a conversation about what to do with your workload and what makes sense. So I think it's a very close engagement with the customer, it's based on real data about what the customer's trying to do. And frankly that was one of the reasons that we made the CTP acquisition, as well, because it started to complement our portfolio. A lot of the capabilities that we had were very robust, in particular around private cloud, but just having the public cloud angle there and sort of strengthening that piece was super important to be able to have that conversation and truly enable the right mix. >> Well now that brings up the topic of multi-cloud, which kinda, to use a sports analogy, it's jump ball. It's kind of a free-for-all, everybody wants that business. I guess with the exception of some of the big cloud guys aren't interested. But certainly, Hewlett-Packard >> Peter: Well don't believe it, want to avoid it. >> Yeah well, but that's the reality is there's gonna be multiple clouds, we know this. Particularly with SaaS. So a company like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously has to play in that space. So I wonder if you could talk about the strategy there, why you feel confident that HPE is in a good position. >> Yeah well a couple things, first of all I think it's really good to be, we're somewhat independent, we're not totally independent because we've got a whole set of products, but we're somewhat independent in the sense that if we wanna be truly hybrid and enable other public and private solutions, we wanna be able to give customers choice in terms of the public domains that they can work with. And so we're sort of in a great position as a large provider and with the relations that we have in the enterprise in particular, with our customer base, to be a little bit of Switzerland and be able to say, okay, let's have that conversation about the right mix and enable these multi-cloud solutions, that's the first thing. The second thing is we have relationships and great partnerships with many of these providers. So take Microsoft, we've got an Azure relationship, an Azure stack opportunity, so we've got the ability and by the way, we do many of their applications as well. So we've got the ability to help have that conversation with our customers to say okay, do you wanna be on-prem or do you wanna be in the cloud? Even with one provider, and to do that, and so we have the opportunity to provide robust solutions even with one private and public provider. And on top of that, we've got a consultancy with our professional services. We wanna be responsive to our customers, we've got now HPE OneSphere. And with HPE OneSphere we can be data-driven and actually provide our customers a view of their environment and help to be a little bit of that Switzerland to say look, here's what would be best for you and help to have workload mobility together with OneSphere. So I think we're well-positioned, I tend to call it my stairway to Heaven. In a sense we start out at the bottom talking about infrastructure and support, and we've got great relationships there with our customers. If I launch the flexible capacity offers, we're starting to deliver outcome-based solutions. When I bring in CTP, we'd go up the stack and we now provide advisory and the consumption solutions. And with OneSphere now you go up the stacks just a little bit more and say not only are we gonna advise you and provide you those executables with consumption models, but we now have capabilities that allow you to sort of optimally choose what's the right thing for you. So I think we're well-positioned, by the way, with CTP we've got sort of a managed, sort of cloud sort of capability as well. We manage compliance and other elements. So we're able to have in our portfolio sort of value-added services above and beyond that help with multi-cloud and making sure that customers can be compliant, secure, and have the right experience on a multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah I think a lot of people that don't know CTP don't understand how deep their expertise is. They're only a few hundred people, if that. But they're rockstars. >> They're over 200 people. >> Serious thought leaders with real deep connections. I've gotta change subjects to the last topic area. As you know, The Cube from day one has always been a fan of having women on, and promoting women in tech. We first met you at the Anita Borg Institute of the Grace Hopper Conference. Meg Whitman is obviously a woman leader in tech and she's leaving HP. We've got Meg and we've got Ginni. And Ginni's coming to the end, I don't know, she's getting to the age where typically IBM retires its CEOs. You've got two prominent women in tech now leaving. Now maybe IMB will replace Ginni with a woman. HPE has chosen Antonio, great choice. But your thoughts on a leader like Meg, obviously has done some great work. But we're losing one. >> I know, and so >> How do you feel about that? >> I mean, you know, I'm very conflicted if I've gotta be honest. One one hand, as I joined HPE I had never worked for a female CEO so I've really enjoyed watching. You know it's always great to have mentors and to have people that are advocating for women, so I really enjoyed being part of Meg's organization, I'm really sorry to see her go. And she's an icon as well, so she does a lot, in fact this afternoon we're gonna be doing a session for women just here at the conference. So very sad to see her go, at the same time I think we as women, and men by the way, have a responsibility to build the next generation of leaders. And I think that's where I focus my energy and I know that I'm gonna be sort of a high profile female in the HPE environment so I feel that sense of responsibility, not just within HPE, but within the industry, to help to cultivate an environment that takes advantage of half of the population and enables innovation through them as well. So I think we've gotta get more women up there. I think part of it is really bringing up the next generation and frankly this next generation, they don't have tolerance for waiting for things, whatever, and they feel like they're super entitled to have the right and the choice >> Peter: They are. >> And they are, right. But that seems like an easy thing to say, but in some sense we come from a generation, many women as well, which have had challenges especially in the tech world, in terms of really breaking that glass ceiling. And I think we've got some amazing women and some amazing leaders as well. I'm part of the Anita Borg Board of Trustees as well, and we were at Grace Hopper and we had Debbie Sterling, some really great women that are coming up the ranks that are CEOs, that are CTOs, that are really leading the way and so I'm very hopeful that the conversation, by the way, about women in tech is really prominent right now. And that I think it'll open up opportunities for women to shine going forward and I think that should happen for HPE as well. In fact right now its me and then Archie Deskus is the CIO for HPE. So we're trying to do our part to sort of make sure that there's other women in leadership as well. >> Well you're a great example of a current and future leader. >> Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate you coming onto The Cube, Ana. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, great to see you, thank you so much. >> Alright keep it right there everyone. This is The Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid, we'll be right back. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (techno music) >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for theCube's exclusive three days of coverage of HPE Discover 2017. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, and my cohost, Dave Vellante. Partner in crime here. Our next guest is Ana Pinczuk, Senior Vice President, General Manager, HPE Pointnext, the new organization >> Ana: That's correct. Yeah. >> John: Anyways, welcome to theCube. Good to see you again. >> Thank you. Really nice to see you as well. Yeah, excited to be here with you guys. >> Cube alumni also. Part of the Grace Hopper Community as well with women in tech. Great work there. Just want to give you props. >> Ana: Thank you, yeah. >> Shout out there. Okay, so you're in the new job here. You're a seasoned veteran. >> Ana: Yes. >> You know the industry. Your thoughts? I mean, you're coming in fresh. >> Ana: Yeah, I'm coming in fresh. So, first of all, three whole months here, you know. So, it's been kind of a whirlwind since we came onboard. We announced the new brand. So HP Pointnext is the new brand for really our future-facing services organization, right. And we've got this great opportunity, you know? We've got customers that are really undergoing tremendous digital transformation, right, and they need help, and we're the arm of HP that can really help them through that journey. All the way from sort of advice and transform services, professional services, like design and implementation services, and then when we go to operational support services as well, so. >> John: One of the things that Meg Whitman was talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction to, is, she said it's a cleaner positioning with HPE now. Because the partner relationships have always been center. We had the Chief Channel Officer on earlier, Denzel. 70 percent of the revenues comes from partners. >> Ana: That's right. >> And so, having Pointnext the way it's structured makes it cleanier. What is she-- Cleaner, for everyone to understand what's happening. What does she mean by that? And give us your perspective. >> Ana: Yeah. Well, I'll give you, you know. Look, before, we had a huge outsourcing business, right. And with the DXC business moving off, we've got the opportunity to really partner with the Accentures, the DeLoyds, the WhitPros, the Tatas of the world, right? We provide mostly technology services, so, to the extent that they go and they help customers with applications and really figuring out their business processes, then we come together with them and then figure out how to translate that business architecture to the technology architecture and then how to do that technology road map for them, right. So, um, it's really positioned us much closer to different kinds of SI's, both sort of the traditional SI's as well as other ecosystem partners. And today, I mean, if you think about mostly every vertical is transforming, right, so. Whether you're in retail or transportation, et cetera. And frankly with DXC, you know, really going off focusing on outsourcing, we're still a huge partner of theirs, you know. They're a customer of ours. But at the same time, it opens up huge opportunities to go after other verticals and other solutions as well. >> Dave: Yeah, it's kind of a strange TAM expansion for the core of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Ana: Yeah, it is. >> You sort of concede the outsourcing business. Okay, we're out of that business. >> Ana: That's right. >> But now you've got so many other partners that really could boost your core business. >> Ana: Yeah. And, you know, um, I mean. Nobody owns advise and transform, right? I mean, nobody owns the whole digital transformation journey. The opportunity there greatly, sort of, outweighs the constraints that we have in that space, right. And so, you know, it's really important for us to go with the Accentures or the Deloyds, other partners, and be able to come with them and provide those solutions to customers. >> John: Ana, I'd like to get your thoughts on the trend and the particular question if it's going to be around the cloud transformation, which is the driver. You got big data, you've got IOTs, you have, obviously you have your hybrid IT solutions here, but, you know, cloud computing in general and big data point to a new set of applications. Dave and I always comment on theCube as we go to all these different events that we're old enough to remember the 80's and 90's. >> Ana: You're not that old. >> The 80's and 90's, the ERP generation. The mini computer was a massive opportunity for service providers. >> Ana: That's right. >> You know you had the big six accounting firms back in the day. Now you have thousands of partners. That was a big movement. That was a big wave. >> Ana: It is. >> This wave is almost bigger than that, but different. >> Ana: It is. >> What's different now as the new apps come out? >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: And we've seen this movie before in a way. >> Ana: Yes. >> John: With the ERPs of the world and CRMs. >> Ana: Yeah. >> John: What's different now with cloud that makes this bigger, and what's your thoughts on this opportunity? >> Ana: Well, I think, two things for me. One is-- In fact, over the last couple of days, we've been talking to a lot of customers about not what I would consider traditional, but even S, you know, SAP HANA, right? And those migrations. Those are like, a little bit like, still the old wave, you know. With new, sort of a new flavor to it as people go more into big data and analytics as well. But the biggest thing is that, you know, think about the world of the future. Everything's going to communicate with everything else. Everything is going to compute, right? And so, you know, the patterns of communications are really shifting, you know, as well. It used to be very data center, centric, and those traditional models, or the old IBM models of the 80's, right. >> John: Big iron, all the-- >> Ana: Big iron, everything in the servers and the data center. But think about, you know, your toaster talking to you, you know. Think about smart meters out there. Think about your car being really a roaming, you know, office and entertainment center, right. >> John: Yeah. >> So I think that's what's really shifting. It's just the magnitude of data that's going to be, you know, computable, in a sense, at the edge, and that's really helping us think about whole new different applications that we didn't have, you know, back then. >> Dave: So cloud is obviously this huge megatrend, and everybody, I think Hewlett-Packard Enterprises included, is trying to substantially mimic the cloud experience on-prim, create hybrid. And it seems like you're having a great deal of success there, at least early, some early wins. The other component of that is the business model side of things. >> Ana: Yes. >> The whole as a service piece of it. >> Ana: Yes. >> And as you transition into that, you know, cloud-like world, what happens on the business model side? I mean, we've heard a lot about flex capacity and things of that nature, but it feels like the services business can transform dramatically into that model. I wonder if you can comment on that. >> No, it's true. I mean, just think about it. In the more traditional world, we've been mostly a product company with sort of services attached. You know, you sell a hardware box and you attach support to it and some installation services. We're completely shifting the model, right? So we're really services led and hardware attached, right, of the model going forward. And, so that's one thing that's shifting. And then the business models are really outcome based. You know, so, I'll give you an example. You know, I was talking to a customer, in fact, earlier this morning, about providing retail store as a service. That's a very different model, right. That means that we're looking at the whole architecture for them. We're looking at what value constitutes in a retail store. You know, how do they make money. What that outcome should be, right. Then how do you deliver that as a solution on a per, you know, something basis. Per outcome basis. So completely shifts the way that we think about delivering services. >> Dave: And so has it become services as a service? I mean do you go to-- >> Ana: I call it-- Yeah, I mean, I've been calling it, you know, experience as a service, and it is service as a service or outcome as a service. I mean, in a sense what the customer cares about is the value that they get out of that thing that you delivered to them, right. And so-- >> John: It's important to them. >> It's important to them. >> John: It's their business. >> I think, that's their business. That's what they care about. You know, I'll give you an example. Data is so important. Backing up your data is really important. But what the customer cares about is not whether they have back up, but it's whether the back up actually worked, you know. >> Dave: And can I recover. >> Ana: And can I recover from it, restore it, right. And so, when you think about that, you know, experience as a service. The experience is, gees, you know, that I get my data backed up and can I restore or recover from it. And then that becomes the outcome that they want. >> John: Which is the digital transformation. I mean, digital transformation has been around for awhile. It's been that buzzword. Certainly center stage here. But you're talking about business transformation. You're talking about really changing how companies are doing business. >> Ana: That's correct. >> John: Chop line revenue driven by digital services or digital apps or-- >> That's right, that's right. >> John: Interfaces, experiences. Whether it's feeling good or actually delivering something. >> Ana: That's right. And, you know, what's happening. I mean, think about the retail store of the future, right. I mean, you know, you have, you have a teenage daughter or a teenage son as I have. You know, you want to make it really interesting for them to go into a store and have a different kind of experience, right? And so, you know, location based services, all these, all these things that you can enable in terms of, you know, helping them buy new things or getting, you know, I don't know, some sort of discount when they go into the store. Or really seeing what it looks like when it's on. You know, those are the experiences of the future that are going to make that retailer relevant, you know, especially moving on. >> John: Well, we're going to have my daughter-- She's down in the front desk. She's interning for us. She's a Berkeley student. Say hi to her. She's going to come in and tell us about what she thinks of HPE as a youngster. >> Ana: Oh, good. >> John: But more importantly, this is a big trend. I mean, we're seeing-- I want to talk about the women in tech piece of what you're involved in because, you know, we were having a conversation at dinner two nights ago that, you know, people consume technology, whether they're the end user, and that word to even exist. End user, or consumer. >> Ana: That's right. >> End user isn't even a word anymore. >> Ana: Isn't that, yeah-- Who is that? >> John: Who do we call end user? >> Ana: I know. Or end thing. >> John: But people who are-- >> Ana: In the future. >> We're all connected, right? >> Ana: That's right. >> So, so this makes up this-- 50 percent of the population's women. >> Ana: That's right. >> And they're not making the products as much, so the percentage of women in tech is a big issue. I know you're, you're involved with Grace Hopper. >> Ana: Yes. >> Your thoughts on women in tech, because we need more women building products or being involved in the design or something. >> Ana: Yeah, yeah. It's a great, as you know, a great passion area for me. And we've got about-- You know, if you think about computing, we've got about 17 percent or 18 percent of the graduates come out in computer science, right. But if you think about technology in general, you know, because everything is going to be digital, because everything is going to compute, you now have, for example, women that are going into tech that have, sort of, a real different variety of backgrounds, right? I mean, they could be designers, because your fabrics are going to be, sort of, lit up with, you know, with sensor technologies. Your knees will be, you know, will have capabilities that are computational. You know, so. What we're seeing is the opportunity to open up the space for women because some of the things that are out there that are going to be technology are going to be much more interesting generally to, to women. >> John: So if I get this right, you're saying is that it's, "Okay, we want more people, more women in software." Except that's not the restriction. It should be computer science, now, is broader. >> Ana: That's right. >> John: And in analytics, I mean, we see a lot of women who are crushing it and being great data scientists. >> Ana: That's right. >> Bring some creativity to it or expertise. >> Dave: In that stat, you said 17 percent with a degree and a small, a much smaller percentage actually enter the technology field, correct? >> Yeah, you know, yeah. What happens, I mean, especially, we get about 17 to 22 percent or so that enter the technology field, but then many of them don't stay. You know, especially those, you know-- There's attrition as you go up the, up the chain as well. >> Okay, so maybe this new dynamic >> Ana: Yeah. >> Changes that. >> Ana: Yeah, well, I mean, I think the kinds of degrees that people are getting. You know, every degree will have a technology aspect to it, right? You're in textiles or you're in, you know, design. >> John: Healthcare. Science, everywhere. >> Or you're in healthcare. And, you're in-- Yeah, you know, you're a doctor, you're a lawyer. Every degree will have an aspect of tech, that means, frankly, that we as a tech industry have to open up the kinds of people that we attract, right? We've got to look for, not just computer science people, but people that understand business processes. You know, people that understand industry verticals, because digital's going to all these different, sort of, you know, places. >> John: And you're an inspiration. Thanks for all that work. And we agree. Science is everywhere now. >> Ana: Yeah, that's right. >> And whether it's block chain or some sort of medical breakthrough, >> Ana: That's right. >> You don't have to be a hardcore programmer. >> Ana: That's right, that's right. >> Ana, thanks so much for coming on theCube. Really appreciate you sharing your insight. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> John: Congratulations on the new opportunity. >> Yeah, appreciate it. >> John: And Pointnext is, points to what's next. >> The place to be. That's right. As I try to tell people. (laughter) >> John: It's like dabbing and pointing at the same time. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Ana: Thank you so much. >> John: I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, live coverage of HPE Discover 2017. Our 7th year covering HP Discover, now HPE Discover in it's 2nd year. Be right back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

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

>> Narrator: Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlitt Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris, otherwise known as Mr. Universe. This is HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Flynn Maloy is here as the Vice President of Marketing the HP Point Next. >> Hi guys. >> And John Treadway is here as the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Portfolio at Cloud Technology Partners, an HPE company. Gentlemen, great to see you again. Welcome to theCube. >> Great to see you. >> It's been a good week. We were just talking about the clarity that's coming to light with HPE, the portfolio, some of the cool acquisitions. You and I, Flynn, were at this event last year in London. You had the Cheshire Cat smile on your face. You said something big is coming. I can't really tell you about it partly because I can't tell you about it. The other part is we're still shaping it. Then Point Next came out of it. How are you feeling? Give us the update. >> It's been a really exciting year for services. This time last year we knew as Antonio announced, we're going to be bringing our services together after we announced that we're spinning out our outsourcing business. We're bringing technology services at the time forward. We had a new brand coming. We purchased Cloud Cruiser in February so we're investing in the business. We also invested in services back in the engine room all year long to really build up to our announcement this week with Green Lake which takes our consumption services to the next level. Then of course in September we continue to invest and acquire Cloud Technology Partners and by the way brought on our new leadership team with Ana Pinczuk and Parvesh Sethi. For us here at HP it's really been a banner year for services. It's really been transformative for the company and we're excited to lead it going into FY '18. >> John, Cloud Technology Partners specializing, deep technology expertise. You've got an affinity for AWS, you've got a bunch of guys that reinvent this week in close partnership with them. Interesting acquisition from your perspective coming into HPE. What's it been like? What has HP brought you and what have you brought HP? >> That's a fantastic question. We have really found that everything about this experience has exceeded our expectations across the board. When you go into these things you're kind of hoping for the best outcome, which is we're here because we want to be able to grow our business and scale it and HP gives us that scale. We also think that we have a lot of value to add to the credibility around public cloud and the capabilities we bring. You hope that those things turn out to be true. The level of engagement that we're getting across the business with the sellers, with the customers, with the partners is way beyond expectations. I like to say that we're about six months ahead of where we thought we'd be in terms of integration, in terms of capability and expertise. Really bringing that public cloud expertise, not just to AWS, we do a lot of Azure work, we do a lot of Google work as well, really does allow the HPE teams to be able to go into their clients and have a new conversation that they couldn't have a year ago. >> What is that new conversation? >> The new conversation is really about, and we like to use the term "the right mix." I.T. is not just one mode. You're gonna have internal I.T., you're gonna have private clouds. Public cloud is a reality. AWS is the fastest growing company in tech history ever. If you think about that it's a reality for our clients, HPE clients, that public cloud is there. That new capability that we could bring, that credibility is that we have done this for the last seven years with large enterprises across all sorts of industries and domains: Toko, healthcare, financial services in particular. We bring that to the table, combine that with the scale and operational capability of HPE and now we have something that's actually pretty special. >> Just to add, it is about the customers at the end of the day. It's about where do those workloads want to land? Public cloud, private cloud, traditional, those are all tools in your toolbox. What customers want to know is what is the right mix? There are workloads that are ideal for going to the public cloud. There are workloads that are ideal for staying on prem. Finding that right mix, especially by bringing in the capabilities of what needs to go to public cloud that really rounds out our portfolio for hybrid I.T. >> I'm starting to buy the story. The upstarts, the fastest growing company in the world would say old guard trying to hang onto the past. I like the way you framed it as look, we know our customers want to go to the cloud. They want certain workloads to be on prem. We want them to succeed. We're open, we're giving them choice. Maybe two years ago it sounded like bromide. But you're actually putting it into action acquiring a company like CTP. It's interesting what you were saying, John, about well no not just AWS, it's Google, it's Azure. You've got independent perspective on what should go where or on prem. >> We always have so even as a company that derived most of our revenue from public cloud over the last few years, we've never, ever been the company that said everything should go to public cloud. Toss it all, go to Amazon, toss it all, go to Azure. Never been our perspective. We've had methodology for looking through the application portfolio and helping determine where things should go. Very often a large percentage of the portfolio we say it's good where it is, don't move it. Don't move it right away. >> But in the past that's where it ended. You said okay, hey, go figure out, go talk to HPE. >> That's actually a funny thing because we've had this conversation. Literally when we would say okay we'll take care of this part for the public cloud, but you're on your own for the private cloud stuff, in the past HP would do the reverse. We'll help you with the private cloud stuff, and we think this could go to public cloud. But you're kind of on your own with that. Not that there wasn't any capability, but it wasn't really well developed. Now we can say this should go to private cloud, this should go to public cloud and guess what? We can do both. >> Dave: So now you've got a lean-in strategy. >> Absolutely right, as John said the funnels and the response from our customers have been outstanding. As you can imagine, Mike, all of our top customers are saying fantastic, come talk to us, come talk to us. They're having to prioritize where they go over the last few months. We are well ahead of where we were. >> We strongly believe over the years that the goal is not to bring your business to the cloud. It's to bring the cloud to your business. That ultimately means that public cloud will be a subset of the total although Amazon's done a wonderful job of putting forward the new mental model for the future of computing. Can you guys reliably through things like Green Lake and other, can you present yourselves as a cloud company that just doesn't have a public cloud component? >> Let me approach the response to that question in a slightly different way. When you look at our strategy around making hybrid I.T. simple it's not necessarily which cloud is the right cloud? It's not really about that. It's about where should the workloads land? We do believe that the pragmatic answer is you need to be a little bit above all of those choices. They're all in the toolbox. If you look at, for example, our announcement with One Sphere this week that's a perfect example of what customers are asking the industry to do which is to look across all of it. The reality is it's hybrid, it's multi-cloud and speaking at that length. >> But you're saying it's a super set of tools that each are chosen based on the characteristics of workloads, data, whatever it might be, that's right. So John look, as human beings we all get good at stuff. We say I know that person I can stereotype him. I can stereotype that. What's the euristic that your team is using to very quickly look at a workload? Give our audience, our clients a clue here so that they can walk away a little bit and say well that workload naturally probably is going to go here. And that workload's naturally going to go there. What's it like 30 second where you're able to generally get it right 80% of the time? >> It really comes down to a set of factors, right? One factor is just technical fit. Will it work at all? We can knock out a lot of workloads because they're on old Unix or just kind of generally the technical fit isn't there, right? Second thing is from a business case. Does it make sense? Is there gonna be any operational saving against the cost of doing the migration? Because migrating something isn't free right? It's never free. Third is what is the security and governance constraint within which I'm living? If I have a data residency requirement in a country and there's no hyper-scale public cloud presence in that country then that workload needs to stay in that country, right? It's those types of high-level factors we can very quickly go from the list of here's your entire list down to already these are candidates for further evaluation. Then we start to get into sort of deeper analysis. But the top level screen can happen very, very quickly. >> You do that across the, you take an application view, obviously. A workload view. Then how do avoid sort of boiling the ocean? Or do you boil the ocean? You have tools to help do that. >> We do, I mean we've invested a lot in IP, both service IP and software IP in both Point Next also comes with some strong IP in this as well that we've been able to merge in with. Our application assessment methodology is backed by a tool called Aura. Aura is a tool for taking that data, collecting it, and help providing individualization in reporting and decisioning at the high level on these items. Then every application that looks like a great candidate for something that I'm gonna invest in migration, we need to do a deeper analysis. Because it isn't lifting and shifting. It doesn't work for 90% of the applications, or 80%, or 70. It's certainly not anywhere near 50% of the applications. They require a little bit of work, sometimes a lot of work, to be able to have operational scale in a public cloud environment because they're expecting a certain performance and operational characteristic of their internal infrastructure and it's not there. It's a different model in the public cloud. >> A lot of organizations like yours would have a challenge presenting that to a customer because they can't get the attention of the senior leaders. How is it that you guys are able to do that? You were talking I think, off-camera, talking about 20-plus years of experience on average for each of your professionals. Is that one of the secrets to how you've succeeded? >> This is a big thing and why this integration's working so well is that the people, the early team all the way through today of CTP are all seasoned I.T. professionals. We're not kids straight out of school that have only known how to do I.T. in an Amazon way. We have CIOs of banks that are in our executive team, or in our architecture team that have that empathy and understanding of what it means to be in the shoes. Not having this arrogant approach of everything must be a certain way because that's what we believe. That doesn't work. The clients are all different. Every application is a snowflake and needs to be treated as such, needs to be treated like an individual, like a human. You want to be treated like an individual, not like -- >> Stalker! (laughing) >> Gezunheit. (laughing) >> Okay, so now the challenge is how you scale that. How you replicate that globally and scale it and get the word out. Talk about that challenge. >> That's right and one of the big things we're really excited to see is the merger of the IP that comes from CTP along with everything that we have inside of Point Next and then rolling that out to the 5,000 plus consultants that we've got inside of HP and our partners. That's really where we're expecting a lot of the magic to come from is once we really expose the integrated set of what those capabilities are we think, and Ana has said it on stage. We had heard from a couple of analysts that we believe that together we have the largest cloud advisory in the industry today. >> It was interesting we actually had, we've had challenges in the past where we've gone into clients and were starting to get into some pretty serious level of work. We were a younger company, didn't have the scale, and scope, and capability of HPE. Now we're being brought in to these opportunities and the clients are saying HP, you're right here. We can do that. We have the scale to now start doing the larger transformation programs and projects with these clients that we didn't have before. Now we're being invited back in, right? In addition to that being invited in because now we have the cloud competency that we can bring to the table. >> You know what, I kind of want to go back to the point you made earlier about how it's all cloud. That resonates with me. I think it is all cloud depending on where you want to land the various pieces. If that's what you want to call that umbrella I think it makes a ton of sense. You know, a lot of what we've announced this week with Green Lake is about trying to bridge the benefits gap with public cloud as the benchmark for the experience today for what needs to stay on prem. When you sit down and for all those reasons you outlined, whether it's ready, whether it isn't ready, where the data has to sit, or whether or not. There's gonna be x-workloads that need to stay on prem. We've been working hard in the engine room to really build out an experience that can feel to the customer a lot like what you get from the public cloud. That's gonna continue to be an investment area for us. >> If the goal is success for the business then you don't measure success by whether you got to Amazon. >> That's correct. >> The goal of success is the business. You measure success by whether or not the business successfully adopts the technology where the data requires. What's interesting about the change we're experiencing is in many respects for the first time the way of thinking about problems in this industry is going through a radical transformation. Let's credit AWS for catalyzing a lot of that change. >> Absolutely, setting that benchmark. I mean it really is a catalyst. >> But you look at this show, HP has adopted the thought process, it's adopted it. It's no longer in our position to say fine, you want to think this way, we'll help. >> Imagine this, as One Sphere comes up and as we really can manage multi-clouds and as we'll eventually be able to move workloads between the various clouds, manage the whole estate, view the whole estate and everything under it whether it's off-prem or on-prem is all consumption. I mean, how does that change central I.T.? Central I.T. radically changes. If everything's consumed, wherever it is and you've got a visibility to the whole estate and you can move stuff depending on what the right mix is, that's a fundamental change and we're not there yet as an industry. But that's a fundamental change to the role of Central I.T. >> But your CIOs are thinking along those lines. We can verify they are thinking along those lines. >> Again the strategy's coming into focus for me personally. I think us generally. We talked to Ana about services-led, outcome-led. And if it's big chewy outcome like kind of IBM talks well you've got partners to help you do that. Deloitte, we had PWC on. They're big, world-class organizations with deep expertise in retail and manufacturing and oil and gas. You're happy to work with those guys. If it is service-led or outcome-led you can make money whether you're going to Amazon, whether you're staying on prem, whether you're doing some kind of hybrid in between and you're happy to do that as an agnostic, independent player. Now yeah, of course you'd like to sell HP hardware and software, why not? >> I think that's really an important point. When it comes to the infrastructure itself we do believe we have the best infrastructure in the industry, but we play well with others and we always said HPE plays well with others. When it comes to the app layer we are app agnostic. A lot of our biggest competitors are not. When you go out and talk to CIOs today that's really, this is my app, this is my baby. This is the one that I want. They're not really looking for alternatives for that in many cases. When you're thinking agnostic that's really where we think partner, being agnostic, working with all the ad vendors, working with all the SIs, we think that's where the future-- >> And it's a key thing. You guys are younger, but you remember Unix is snake oil. I mean-- >> Designing is a Russian Trump. >> Unix is snake oil and then two years later it's like here our Unix. >> Flynn: It's the best thing ever. >> So you now are in a position to say great, wherever you wanna go we'll take you there. That's powerful because it can be genuine and it can be lucrative. >> What's unlocking here is the ability to actually execute a digital transformation program within the enterprise. One of the big things the public cloud providers brought to us and that HPE's now bringing in through the internal infrastructure is that agility and speed of innovation of the users. Their ability to actually get things done very quickly and reduce the cycle time of innovation. That frankly has always been the core benefit of the public cloud model, that pay-as-you-go, start with what you need, use the platform services as they grow. That model has been there since the beginning and it's over 11 years of AWS at this point. Now with enterprise technology adopting similar models of pay for it when you consume it, we'll provision it in advance, we'll get things going for you, we're giving that model. It's about unlocking the ability for the enterprise to do innovation at scale. >> I wanna end if I can on met Jonathan Buma last night, J.P., J.B., sorry. You're J.T. >> It's confusing. >> But one of the things I learned, a small organization, 200-250 people roughly when you got acquired, but you've got this thing called Doppler, right? Is that what it's called, Doppler? Explain that, explain the thought leadership angles that you guys have. >> Actually from the very beginning. >> The marketing team loves this, it's fantastic. >> So follow up with how. >> From day one there's a few things that we said were core principles, the way that we were going to grow and run the business. I'll talk about one other thing first which was that we were gonna be technology-enabled, technology-enabled services company. That we were gonna invest in IP both at the service level but as the technology level to accelerate the delivery of what we do. The second thing as a core principle is that we were going to lead through thought leadership. So we have been the most prolific producers of independent cloud content as a services firm bar none. Yeah, there's newspapers, magazines, analyst firms like yourself producing a lot of content. The stuff that we're producing is based on direct experience of implementing these solutions in the cloud with our clients so we can bring best practices. We're not talking about our services. We're talking about what is the best practice for any enterprise that wants to get to the cloud. How do you do security? How do you do organizational change? That has a very large following of Doppler both online where we have an email newsletter. But we also do printed publication of our quarterly Dopplers that goes out to a lot of our clients, the CIOs and key partners. That kind of thought leadership has really set us apart from all of the rest of the, even the born in cloud consultancies who never put that investment in. >> Flynn, you're a content guy. >> Absolutely. >> So you've got to really appreciate this. >> That's a dream, it's an absolute dream. One of the things, another proof point as a way to end, services first strategy is what we're doing in the market community at HP more money, energy, content, time is going into how we're talking, thought leadership and services than anything else in the company. We've got not just branding for Point Next and Green Lake, but bringing Doppler forward, bringing those great case studies forward. Putting that kind of content at the tip of the HPE sphere. It's not something you've seen from our company in the past. I think keep your eyes out over the next year. We'll have this conversation in six months and you'll see a lot more from us on that topic. >> Great stuff, congratulations on the process, the exit, the future. Good luck, exciting. >> Thanks guys. >> Really appreciate it. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back right after this short break. Dave Vallente for Peter Burris from HPE Discover Madrid. This is theCube. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> (Narrator) Live from Madrid, Spain it's theCUBE. Covering HP Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Espana. theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage is here covering HPE Discover Madrid, day one. I'm Dave Villante with my cohost, Peter Burris. Well, it's all coming into focus, Peter. >> It is, it actually is. >> It is, I mean, it better be after five or six years. It's taking longer than I had hoped. But, the story is consistent now. The last four Discovers, despite some of the distractions of spin merges and so forth the story of hybrid IT, the Intelligent Edge, bringing automation is somewhat new to the data center. Services lead starts to actually make sense. >> Peter: Through private cloud. >> Yep, and you know, we talked about at the top of the show today, the spectrum. We're running AWS re:Invent, we got a big presence there. Obviously its affected the entire industry, and then you've got HPE, the likes of HPE, Dell EMC, to a certain extent IMB basically not given up, say wait a minute, these are our customers, they want Cloud on prem, we're gonna deliver to them. They want Cloud in the Cloud, we'll help them get there. >> Peter: Oracle. >> Oracle as well. Oracle, different strategy. We should talk about that a little bit. But, summarize, you know synthesize your take on the day, and where we're at with HPE. >> So I would say that the... What we talked about this morning was, when Meg first took over the reins, she stopped a whole bunch of stuff, and HP stopped spending and behaving like a company that believed that it had to get scale as fast as possible because that was the only way to win. And she ended up going back to, look, lets focus on the customers and what the customers are trying to do, and not how we're trying to leverage our assets. And it kind of took a pause, and for a while you could kind of see them start putting things back together, and you kind of had a sense of where it was all gonna go. But this has been kind of the coming out party for what the last five years have been about. As you said, I think we've seen the three core messages that certainly line up, you know, with a little bit of cavat here. Their story is very much aligned with what we think the industry needs to see right now. At least, our research suggests. Gonna need true private Cloud, the ability to put the Cloud service where your data requires, and not force your business to move it's data to some Clouds location. You're gonna need increased automation within your IT organization, because you're not going to be able to support these more complex workloads if you don't find ways to increase the productivity of your people, and even more importantly, dramatically reduce even the possibility of a failure, and that's what AI inside IT's all about. And very importantly, the idea that you gotta put more intelligence at the Edge, that that interface between the real world and the digital world is really what's gonna drive the dynamic in the computing industry over the next few years. And HP has shown up and they're not just talking about it, they're showing it. And it's nice to be there. >> Well it's interesting, Meg Whitman came by and was talking to us, and we were talking about the Aruba acquisition. She said, look, we bought this because it was a nice business, it could show some growth. And it was, you know, a way to compete with Cisco and differentiate, because, hey were trying to compete head to head with Cisco and it was going okay, but not great. Aruba gave them a clear differentiator. And then all of the sudden, the Edge became this tailwind. And it kinda got them there early. >> Well, lets remember what Mark Hurd talked about. He said, well, why are you going after the network world. I like their 67% gross margins. Okay, so... >> Dave: Talking about 3Com. >> He's talking about 3Com, he's talking about all the things that HP did as it tried to get into the networking business. >> Dave: Cisco, right, yeah. >> It was purely driven by gross margin. They didn't quite have the customer story down. Aruba has always been a great customer story. They've always say, look, this is your business challenge. You know, are you sick and tired of dropping your connection as you go from one conference room to another. This is your security issues. On, and on, and on. They had three or four concrete value propositions that just worked for customers. That acquisition at that time it happened, it happened about the same time that HP was starting to rededicate itself back to thinking about it's customer base. So, it's not surprising to me that that integration, or that merger has been one of the more successful that HP's undertaken. >> So again, the spectrum. You know, you got Andy Jassy on one end who started this whole thing, and you got the likes of HPE on the other end. And you're right, it does align with a lot of things that we've been saying around true private cloud and so forth. Jassy doesn't buy it. He flat out says, this is old guard thinking trying to hang on to the past. But, our analysis suggests it's not just old guard thinking. It's customer thinking because they can't just move their business into the Cloud. Thoughts. >> Totally agree. So I'd say there are a couple of things about it. It's customer thinking based on the realities of the data assets that they're trying to leverage as they transform into a digital business. Data is real, and it has, it's gonna weigh in on how your infrastructure looks. And the Edge is gonna have characteristics that mean you're gonna have to do automation right there, right where the action is. You're not gonna be able to send it up to the Cloud all the time. There's gonna be a lot of business events that take place in that core, in that second tier. So, it's not that it's... It's not that it's old versus new guard. And here's why I say that, Dave. It's because in many respects, we're giving some props to HP right now, which is great. But, in many respects, the story that HP is telling today is a story that is still being largely, has largely been told, largely fashioned by what AWS has done over the last 10 years. And that is, here's what the Cloud experience is. And now HP's adding, "And you want that Cloud experience whatever your data demands." The difference, therefore, between the old guard and and the new guard, or the old way and the new way, on premise, is that it used to be, it was pretty clear to me, and I think it was pretty clear to us, that the old, that the talk about private Cloud was simply a way of thinking about how to put new marketing spin on the enhancement, upgrade, replacement cycle for servers and storage. And that did not work. It just flat out didn't work. >> Well it worked in the sense that it froze the market a little bit. >> Eh, it froze the market a little bit. But, overall, for the past five or six years our growth has been slowing down pretty dramatically. So, I would say, that the data is pretty unassailable. You're not gonna move everything to a central location. But, you're gonna want that Cloud experience. And so, the question is, are we gonna see great Cloud experience where the physics, the legality, and inertia property governance demands that you put your data. >> Well, I thought Jesse St Laurent was gonna talk about the next wave. He mentioned Multi-Cloud. >> Peter: He's CTO of... >> Of SimpliVity, now HPE Hyperconverged. >> Peter: Right. >> I thought he was talking about, he said the next wave is Hyper-V. Okay, check. I mean, like, that's like to me a feature of the product. And then he sort of talked about Multi-Cloud. And that really where I thought he was gonna go, because when you look at what AWS is doing, and I've always contended, they're years ahead, we can debate how many. Five, seven, three. Probably closer to five than three. But where they're headed is serverless, you know, functional programming. Stateless, new programming models. It's all about the developer to those guys. And that's the parlance that they speak in. The Hyperconverge guys all talk in VM terms. And that's not how Amazon talks or thinks. So, you know, the question is, is that a next wave, and can the Enterprise guys >> Peter: Talk developer? >> Yeah, can they catch that wave? >> So, I think... Look, lets be honest. AWS is a great company. There's no question about it. They've done things that a lot of old style infrastructure jocks thought couldn't be done. And they did it. And they continue to, they continue to demonstrate that they are really engaging their customers and turning that insight and knowledge into great services. So, this is not, this is not a knock on AWS. But what ultimately has to, and I think AWS is recognizing this as well, because they're starting to talk a lot about IoT and their approach to IoT, recognizing that not all the data is gonna be sourced up in the Cloud. The data is gonna be generated in a lot of other places and they have to participate there as well. So, from our perspective ultimately, we would say that Multi-Cloud, the ability to, the ability to naturally place your data where the data needs to be placed, which is increasingly is gonna be closer to the event that needs to be automated, that needs to have that high quality experience, is gonna be the way, is gonna be the dominant factor in determining the characteristics of the application infrastructure that you put in place. And, we'll see what happens. Serverless, yeah, serverless is great. You can do a lot with it. But, you can also still build junky applications with serverless. Microservices are great, yeah. But you can still build junky applications with Microservices. >> A lot of those services aren't so micro as Neil Raden would say. >> That's exactly right. So you can still do bad stuff in the Cloud. So, at the end of the day, the whole point is to get a new compact between business who have the vision of the digital services and digital capabilities they want, IT professionals and developers who are gonna generate, create that value, and then infrastructure people who are not who are allowing the data and the workload to fall where is naturally should fall, and then making it possible for the industry to work together, because that's what users want. >> Okay, so let me ask the question differently. You agree that the Cloud guys generally, Amazon specifically, is ahead of the Enterprise guys when it comes to infrastructures and servers. >> Peter: Yeah, there's no question there. >> Okay, is the lead extending, or is it dwindling. Amazon's lead in your view. >> Well, so look, you have Amazon's lead, first of you have to think about Amazon's lead relative to Microsoft, Oracle, and others. And, they're not as far ahead as, they're not that far ahead of Microsoft. >> Dave: Right. >> So there's a real battle raging there. Google has at least as good a relationship with a lot of developers as Amazon does. When you think about what a lot of developers are building in the Cloud experience, they're using Kubernetes, they're using TensorFlow, they're increasingly going to use Istio. I mean, so, it's not, There's gonna be increased energy being put forward to try to talk about how that Cloud innovation's gonna happen. >> So those are the three Hypercloud guys. >> Those are three Hypercloud guys. And, as we talked about, they are increasingly defining what the Cloud experience is. I think what we're seeing now, is the Enterprise guys stepping back and saying, you know what, we have to define our roll in the Cloud experience, and not presume that we're gonna tell everybody what the Cloud experience is. Which is what they were doing for many years, and they failed at it. >> And you could make an argument that HPE as a smaller company with less assets to encumber them, can actually deliver that through partnerships, maybe not as profitably, most definitely not as profitably, but actually can deliver that outcome for customers as a more agile customer. >> We'll see, we'll see, because... >> Dave: You could make that argument is all I'm saying. >> Well, you could make that argument, but remember, we're moving from, and even HP announced some stuff today with Greenlake, moving from a product orientation increasingly to a service orientation. And there's demonstration that you can do things with your business model that may allow you to do things in different levels of profitability at somewhere, you know, when you take more of a services approach to things. So, I think the most important message that we can leave from today is that, our observation on that notion of a spectrum, from, you know, public put it on public, to a true private orientation which is hybrid where an on premise play is gonna be essential. That spectrum seems to be real, number one. Number two, however, it doesn't mean that AWS in particular is not going to be successful at driving the definition of the Cloud experience, and number three, we're now seeing at least one company, but we're also starting to see indications of others, acknowledge that their roll in all of this will be to take whatever the leaders in Cloud are talking about and make it possible, that experience possible where the data requires and that will include on premise. >> So, and I agree with you, AWS is defining that Cloud experience. So, as Ana Pinczuk was speaking, I just wrote down, I jotted down, AWS Cloud experience, which they've defined, and HPE Cloud experience. So I've got pay as you go, you know this kind of flex capacity, kind of. I mean it's as close as you can probably get. >> Peter: Greenlake. >> Yeah, Greenlake Kind of. >> Something we all need to learn more about. But, it's getting there, it's getting there. >> But it will never get there entirely, right? Because, they're gonna require to be, you know, buy a years worth of capacity, thresholds, you're gonna have thresholds above and threshold below. >> Except, we also heard, again I think there's more, I don't wanna, I think you're right. >> It's nuanced, it's not 100% of the way there. >> You start throwing the balance sheet and finances in there and how you're gonna do it. >> We'll come back to that. So, elastic? Again, kind of. You know, to a point. Integrated services? Like tons of them, like thousands a year? Some of those, but as I was saying before, HP's ecosystem play, allows them to pick and choose. >> Yeah, but remember Dave, okay keep going, keep going. >> Security, sort of, let's call it the Amazon way. Here's our security, it's good. But take it or leave it. And then, the HP approach is your way. HPE, you have security your way. If that's the edict of the organization, we can map to that. One Cloud versus Multi-Cloud. Obviously, HPE has a Multi-Cloud strategy, Amazon doesn't. They don't care about managing Multi-Clouds. They care about managing their Cloud. And then services as a service. HPE can deliver that and, Amazon I got a question mark, it's their ecosystem that's delivering those services. So I guess the point is, that I'm making is, maybe it's not the exact replica of the Amazon experience, but there are attributes of it, which appeal to Enterprise IT. >> Peter: That's right. >> Which Amazon is really not interested in delivering. >> Peter: Right. >> Ergo, the assumption is, my assumption is that, that business, that on prem business will be here for a long, long time. >> Peter: Absolutely. >> Indefinitely. >> And we would agree with that. In fact we think, ultimately, that there's gonna be enough uniqueness about how businesses use their data and treat their data that we expect to see this notion of true private Cloud actually be a bigger overall piece of the marketplace than the one size fits all, with a degree of customization possible, that Amazon's providing. But, again, this is, we have to be careful here. Because as analysts, we're sort of naturally falling into this trap of setting up AWS and HPE or any of these folks in opposition. There are companies that have very, very different opposed visions of how this is gonna play out. Specifically, we can talk about Amazon saying it's all gonna be IaaS, we're gonna out paths in there. And then, increasingly obviously, Microsoft and Oracle saying, oh no, we're gonna have application Clouds. You're gonna buy and application Cloud, and you're gonna do a whole bunch of stuff in that. What we see today is not in opposition, >> Dave: Right. >> to the AWS vision, it's not. It is a, okay, great. But for this type of work, this type of data, this type of workload, this type of reality, chances are, you're gonna need to put this type of stuff here, and have it fit into the overall motion of Cloud experience, and it doesn't have to be a complete substitute. It just has to work for that class of workload. >> Well, but, bringing it back to HP, and we gotta wrap, is HPE does not have an application Cloud, right? >> Peter: They don't. >> And as a result, it's going to be in a knife fight. With Amazon, with Dell EMC, and with China. >> It's gonna be in a knife fight with companies that are like it. China, you know, Huawei, Dell EMC, Cisco. >> You're right, you're right. Amazon's setting the pricing tone and the business model tone. >> Look, right now it's Amazon and Microsoft, are helping to set the stage of what this is all gonna look like. >> So, again, bottom line is, it's not a 60% gross margin company, Mark Hurds vision of going to compete with Cisco. It's a 25 to 32% gross margin business. >> Peter: That's really focused on customer problems. >> Focus on customer problems throws off a couple billion dollars of cash, it can eke out a little bit of growth. You know, that's what it is. >> Not a bad business. >> No, it's a great business, actually. Alright, Pete, thanks the wrap on day one. We'll be back tomorrow 8:30 am local time, right? >> Man: Sure. >> Roughly. >> Man: 8:45. >> 8:45 local time. Check out theCUBE.net, where you'll see this show, you'll see the other shows that we're doing including re:Invent John Furrier and the crew are over there today. That's a wrap for day one, this is theCUBE. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)