(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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