>> Announcer: theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. >> We're back at the formerly the Sands Convention Center, it's called the Venetian Convention Center now, Dave Vellante and John Furrier here covering day three, HPE Discover 2022, it's hot outside, it's cool in here, and we're going to heat it up with Rashmi Kumar, who's the Senior Vice President and CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, great to see you face to face, it's been a while. >> Same here, last couple of years, we were all virtual. >> Yeah, that's right. So we've talked before about sort of your internal as-a-service transformation, you know, we do call it dog fooding, everybody likes to course correct and say, no, no, it's drinking your own champagne, is it really that pretty? >> It is, and the way I put it is, no pressure to my product teams, it's being customer zero. >> Right, take us through the acceleration on how everything's been going with you guys, obviously, the pandemic was an impact to certainly the CIO role and your team but now you've got GreenLake coming in and Antonio's big statement before the pandemic, by 2022 everything will be as a service and then everything went remote, VPNs and all this new stuff, how's it going? >> Yeah, so from business perspective, that's a great point to start that, right? Antonio promised in 2019 that HPE will be Everything-as-a-Service company and he had no view of what's going to happen with COVID. But guess what? So many businesses became digital and as-a-service during those two years, right? And now we came back this year, it was so exciting to be part of Discover when now we are Everything-as-a-Service. So great from business perspective but, when I look at our own transformation, behind the scene, what IT has been busy with and we haven't caught a breadth because of pandemic, we have taken care of all that change, but at the same time have driven our transformation to make HPE, edge to cloud platform as a service company. >> You know, I saw a survey, I referenced it earlier today, it was a survey, I think it was been by Couchbase, it was a CIO survey, so they asked, who was responsible at your organization for the digital transformation? And overwhelming, like 75% said, CIO, which surprised me 'cause, you know, in line with the business and so forth but in fact I thought, well, maybe, because of the forced march to digital that's what was top of their mind, so who is responsible for, and I know it's not just one person, for the digital transformation? Describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so definitely it's not one person, but you do need that whole accountable, responsible, informed, right, in the context of digital transformation. And you call them CIO, you call them CDIO or CDO and whatnot but, end of the day, technology is becoming an imperative for a business to be successful and COVID alone has accelerated it, I'm repeating this maybe millions time if you Google it but, CIOs are best positioned because they connect the dots across organization. In my organization at HPE, we embarked upon this large transformation where we were consolidating 10 different ERPs, multiple master data system into one and it wasn't about doing digital which is e-commerce website or one technology, it was creating that digital foundation for the company then to transform that entire organization to be a physical product company to a digital product company. And we needed that foundation for us to get that code to cash experience, not only in our traditional business, but in our as-a-service company. >> So maybe that wasn't confirmation bias, I want to ask you about, we've been talking a lot about sustainability and I've made the comment that, if you go back, you know, 10, 12 years and you were CIO IT at that time, CIO really didn't care about the energy bill, that was paid for by facilities, they really didn't talk to each other much and that's completely changed, why has it changed? How should a CIO, how do your your peers think about energy costs today? >> Yeah, so, at some point look, ESG is the biggest agenda for companies, regulators, even kind of the watchers of ISS and Glass Lewis type thing and boards are becoming aware of it. If you look at 2-4% of greenhouse emission comes from infrastructure, specifically technology infrastructure, as part of this transformation within HPE, I also did what I call private cloud transformation. Remember, it's not data center transformation, it's private cloud transformation. And if you can take your traditional workload and cloudify it which runs on a GreenLake type platform, it's currently 30% more efficient than traditional way of handling the workload and the infrastructure but, we recently published our green living progress report and we talk about efficiency, by 2020 if you have achieved three times, the plan is to get to 30 times by 2050 where, infrastructure will not contribute to energy bill in turn the greenhouse emission as well. I think CIOs are responsible multifold on the sustainability piece. One is how they run their data center, make it efficient with GreenLake type implementations, demand from your hyperscaler to provide that, what Fidelma just launched, sustainability scorecard of the infrastructure, second piece is, we are the data gods in the company, right? We have access to all kinds of data, provide that to the product teams and have them, if we cannot measure, we cannot improve. So if you work with your product team, work with your BU leader, provide them data around greenhouse gas and how they're impacting a mission through their products and how can they make it better going forward, and that can be done through technology, right? All the measurements come from technology. So what technology we need to provide to our manufacturing lines so that they can monitor and improve on the sustainability front as well. >> You mentioned data, I wanted to bring that up 'cause I was going to bring that up in another top track here, data as an asset now is at play, so I get the data on the sustainability, feed that in, but as companies go to the cloud operating model, they go, hey, I got the hyperscalers, you call microscale, Amazon for instance, and you got on-premises data center, which is a large edge and you got the edge, the data control plane, and then the control plane and the data plane are always seem to be like the battle ground, I want to control the data plane, will customers own the data plane or will the infrastructure providers control that data plane? And how do you see that? Because we want to power the machine learning, so data plane control plane, it seems to be like the new middleware, what's your view on that? How do you look at that holistically? >> Yeah, so I'll start based on the hyperscaler conversation, right? And I had this conversation with one of the very big ones recently, or even our partner, SAP, when they talk about RISE, data center and how I host my application infrastructure, that's the lowest common denominator of our job. When I talk about CIOs being responsible for digital transformation, that means how do I make my business process more innovative? How do I make my data more accessible, right? So, if you look at data as an asset for the company, it's again, they're responsible, accountable. As CIO, I'm responsible to have it managed, have it on a technology platform, which makes it accessible by it and our business leader accountable to define the right metrics, right kind of KPIs, drive outcome from that data. IT organization, we are also too busy driving a lot of activities and today's world is going to bad business outcome. So with the data that I'm collecting, how do I enable my business leader to be able to drive business outcome through the use of the data? That's extremely important, and at HPE, we have achieved it, there are two ways, right? Now I have one single ERP, so all the data that I need for what I call operational reporting, get hindsight and insight is available at one place and they can drive their day to day business with that, but longer term, what's going to happen based on what happened, which I call insight to foresight comes from a integrated data platform, which I have control of, and you know, we are fragmenting it because companies now have Databox, Snowflake, AWS data analytics tool, Azure data analytics tool, I call it data torture. CIOs should get control of common set of data and enable their businesses to define better measurements and KPIs to be able to drive the data. >> So data's a crown jewel then, it's crown jewel not-- >> Can we double-click on that because, okay, so you take your ERP system, the consumers of data in the ERP system, they have the context that we've kind of operationalized those systems. We haven't operationalized our analytics systems in the same way, which is kind of a weird dynamic, and so you, right, I think correctly noted Rashmi that, we are creating all these stove pipes. Now, think I heard from you, you're gaining control of those stove pipes, but then how do you put data back in the hands of those line of business users without having to go through a hyper specialized analytics team? And that's a real challenge I think for data. >> It is challenge and I'll tell you, it's messy even in my world but, I have dealt with data long enough, the value lies in how do I take control of all stove pipes, bring it all together, but don't make it a data lake which is built out of multiple puddles, that data lake promise hasn't delivered, right? So the value lies in the conformed layer which then it's easier for businesses to access and run their analytics from, because they need a playground because all the answers they don't have, on the operation side, as you mentioned, we got it, right? It'll happen, but on the fore site side and deeper insight side based on driving the key metrics, two challenges; understanding what's the key metrics in KPI, but the second is, how to drive visibility and understanding of it. So we need to get technology out of the conversation, bring in understanding of the data into the conversation and we need to drive towards that path. >> As a business, you know, line of business person putting that hat on, I would love to have this conversation with my CIO because I would say, I just want self-service infrastructure and I want to have access to the data that I need, I know what metrics I need to run my business so now I want the technology to be just a technical detail, you take care of that and then somebody in the organization, probably not the line of business person wants to make sure that that data is governed and secure. So there's somebody else and that maybe is your responsibility, so how do you handle that real problem? So I think you're well on the track with GreenLake for self-serve infrastructure, right, how do you handle the sort of automated governance piece of it, make that computational? Yeah, so one thing is technology is important because that's bringing all the data together at one place with single version of truth. And then, that's why I say my sons are data scientist, by the way, I tell them that the magic happens at the intersection of technology knowledge, data knowledge, and business knowledge, and that's where the talent, which is very hard to find who can connect dots across these three kind of circles and focus on that middle where the value lies and pushing businesses to, because, you know, business is messy, I've worked on pharma companies, utilities, now technology, order does not mean revenue, right? There's a lot more that happen and pricing or chargeback, rebates, all that things, if somebody can kind of make sense out of it through incremental innovation, it's not like a big bang I know it all, but finding those areas and applying what you said, I call it the G word, governance, to make sure your source is right and then creating that conform layer then makes into the dashboard the right information about those types of metrics is extreme. >> And then bringing that to the ecosystem, now I just made it 10 times more complicated. >> Yeah, this is a great conversation, we on theCUBE interview one time we're talking about the old software days where shrink-wrap software be on the shelf, you wouldn't know if was successful until you looked at the sales data, well after the fact, now everything's instrumented, SaaS companies, you know exactly what the adoption is, either people like it or they don't, the data doesn't lie. So now companies are realizing, okay, I got data, I can instrument everything, your customers are now saying, I can get to the value fast now. So knowing what that value is is what everyone's talking about. How do you see that changing the data equation? >> Yeah, that's so true even for our business, right? If you talk to Fidelma today, who is our CTO, she's bringing together the platform and multiple platforms that we had so far to go to as-a-service business, right? Infosite, Aruba Central, GLCP, or now we call it it's all HPE GreenLake, but now this gives us the opportunity to really be a alongside customer. It's no more, I sold a box, I'll come back to you three years later for a refresh, now we are in touch with our customer real time through Telemetry data that's coming from our products and really understanding how our customers are reacting with that, right? And that's where we instantiated what we call is a federated data lake where, marketing, product, sales, all teams can come together and look at what's going on. Customer360, right? Data is locked in Salesforce from opportunity, leads, codes perspective, and then real time orders are locked in S4. The challenge is, how do we bring both together so that our sales people have on their fingertip whats the install base look like, how much business that we did and the traditional side and the GreenLake side and what are the opportunities here to support our customers? >> Real quick, I know we don't have a lot of time left, but I want to touch on machine learning, which basically feeds AI, machine learning, AI go together, it's only as good as the data you can provide to it. So to your point about exposing the data while having the stove pipes for compliance and governance, how do you architect that properly? You mentioned federated data lake and earlier you said the data lake promise hasn't come back, is it data meshes? What is the architecture to have as much available data to be addressed by applications while preserving the protection? >> Yeah, so, machine learning and AI, I will also add chatbots and conversational AI, right? Because that becomes the front end of it. And that's kind of the automation process promise in the data space, right? So, the point is that, if we talk about federated data lake around one capability which I'm talking about GreenLake consumption, right? So one piece is around, how do I get data cleanly? How do I relate it across various products? How do I create metrics out of it? But how do I make it more accessible for our users? And that's where the conversational AI and chatbot comes in. And then the opportunity comes in is around not only real time, but analytics, I believe Salesforce had a pitch called customer insight few years ago, where they said, we have so many of you on our platform, now I can combine all the data that I can access and want to give you a view of how every company is interacting with their customer and how you can improve it, that's where we want to go. And I completely agree, it ends up being clean data, governed data, secure data, but having that understanding of what we want to project out and how do I make it accessible for our users very seamlessly. >> Last question, what's your number one challenge right now in this post isolation world? >> Talent, we haven't talked about that, right? >> Got to get that out there. >> All these promises, right, the entire end to end foundational transformation, as-a-service transformation, talking about the promise of data analytics, we talked about governance and security, all that is possible because of the talent we have or we will have, and our ability to attract and retain them. So as CIO, I personally spend a lot of time, CEO, John Schultz, Antonio, very, very focused on creating that employee experience and what we call everything is edge for us, so edge to office initiative where we are giving them hybrid work capabilities, people are very passionate about purpose, so sustainability, quality, all these are big deal for them, making sure that senior leadership is focused on the right thing, so, hybrid working capability, hiring the right set of people with the right skill set and keeping them excited about the work we are doing, having a purpose, and being honest about it means I haven't seen a more authentic leader than Antonio, who opens up his keynote for this type of convention, with the purpose that he's very passionate about in current environment. >> Awesome, Rashmi, always great to have you on, wonderful to have you face to face, such a clear thinker in bringing your experience to our audience, really appreciate it. >> Thank you, I'm a big consumer of CUBE and look forward to having-- >> All right, and keep it right there, John and I will be back to wrap up with Norm Follett, from HPE discover 2022, you're watching theCUBE. 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>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Venetian convention center. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022. The first discover live discover in three years, 2019 was the last one. The cube we were just talking about. This has been at H HP discover. Now HPE since 2011, my co-host John furrier. We're pleased to welcome Phil Maru. Who's the executive vice president and general manager of HPE Aruba. And he's joined by David Hughes, the chief product and technology officer at HPE Aruba gentleman. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank >>You. >>Okay, so you guys talk a lot, Phil, about the intelligent edge. Yep. Okay. What do you, what do you mean by that? >>Yeah, so we, well, we're kind of focused on, is providing technology to customers that sits out at the edge and typically the edge would be, uh, any location out of the data center or out of the cloud. So for the most part, our customers would deploy our technology either in their office premises or maybe retail premises shops, uh, maybe deploying out of the home where their employees are on a factory floor. And we're really talking about technology to connect both people and devices back to, um, systems and technology throughout an organization. So, but >>I, I, you know, sometimes I call it the near edge and the far edge yeah. Near, near edge. Maybe as we saw home Depot up on the stage yesterday far, Edge's like space. Right. You're including all of that. Right. That's >>Edge. >>Yeah. And actually we, we, we, you know, we've got a broad range of technology that actually works within the data center as well. So, you know, what we are focused on is providing, uh, network technology, software and services. And, you know, for the most part, our heritage is at the edge, but it's more pervasive than that. So >>If you have the edge, you got connectivity and power, that's an edge. How much, um, is the physical world being connected now you're seeing robotics automation. Yeah. Ex and with machine learning specifically in compute, really driving a new acceleration at the edge. What you, how do you guys view that? What's your reaction? Yeah. >>I think, look, it, I think as connectivity is improving and that's both in terms of wifi connectivity, so, you know, wifi technology continues to, uh, advance and also you've got this new kind of private 5g area, just generally connectivity is becoming more pervasive and that's helping some industries that haven't previously embraced it. And I think industrial is, is one of the big ones. So, you know, historically it was difficult for kind of car manufacturers to really enable a factory floor. But now the connectivity is connectivity is better. That gives them the opportunity to be able to really change how they do things. So >>David, if you do take an outside in view, mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and, and, and when you talk to customers, what are they telling you and how is that informing your product strategy? >>Yeah, well, you >>Know, I think there's, there's several themes we hear. One is, you know, it's really important, better work from anywhere they wanna enable their employees, um, to get the same experience, whether they're at home or on the road or in their branch office or at headquarters. Um, you know, people are also concerned that as they deploy, deploy all of this IOT and pursuit of digital transformation, they don't want those devices to be a weak point where someone breaks into one device and moves naturally, um, across the network. So they want to have this great experience for their customers and their users, but they wanna make sure that they're not compromising security, um, in any way. And so it's about getting that balance between ease of use and, and security. That's one of the primary things we hear, >>You know, Dave, one of the things we talked about many, many years ago was when hybrid and was starting to come out multi-cloud was on the, on the table early on. Uh, we were, we were saying, Hey, the data center is just a big edge, right? I mean, if you have cloud operations and you see what's going on with GreenLake here now, the momentum hybrid cloud is cloud operations, right? An edge off data centers to a big edge on premises. And you got the edge as you have cloud operations, like say GreenLake, plugging in partners and diverse environments. You're connecting, not just branch offices that are per perimeter based. You have no perimeter and you have now other companies connecting mm-hmm <affirmative> so you got data and you got network. How do you guys see that transition as GreenLake has a very big ecosystem part of it, partners and whatnot. >>Yeah. So, you know, I think for us, um, the ecosystem of partners that we have is critical in terms of delivering what our customers need. And, you know, I think one of the really important areas is around verticals. So, um, you know, when you think about different verticals, they have similar problems, but you need to tailor the solutions. Um, to each of those, you know, we are talking a bit about devices and people. When you look at say a healthcare environment, there can be 30 devices there for each patient. And, um, so there's connecting all those devices securely, but we have partners that will help pull all of that together that may be focused on, um, you know, medical environment that may focused on stadiums. They may be focused on industrial. Um, so having partners that understand those verticals and working closely with them to deliver solutions is important in our go to market. >>So another kind of product question and related to what you just said, David, I got connectivity, speed, reliability, cost security, or maybe a missing something. But you, you said earlier, you gonna gotta balance those. How do you do that? And do you do that for the specific use cases? Like for instance, you just mentioned stadiums and 81 and how do you balance those and, and do you tailor those for the use cases? >>Yeah, well, I think it depends on the customer and different people have different views about where they need to be. So some people are, are so afraid about security. They wanna be air gapped and completely separate than the internet. That would be one extreme mm-hmm <affirmative> other people, you know, look at it and see what's happening with COVID with everyone working from home with people being able to work from Starbucks or the airport. And they're beginning to think, well, why is the branch that much different? And so what I think we are seeing is, you know, a reevaluation of how people connect to, um, the apps they're using and, uh, you know, you, you, you've probably for sure heard people talking about zero trust, talking about micro segmentation. You know, I think what we we see is that people wanna be able to build a network in a way where rather than any device being able to talk to any device or any person, which is where the internet started, we wanna build to build networks where people or devices can only talk to the destinations that are necessary for them to do their job. >>And so a lot of the technology that we are building into the network is really about making security intrinsic by limiting what can talk to what that's >>Actually micro, micro segmentations, zero trust, um, these all point to a modern, the modern network, as you say, Antonio Neri was just on the cube, talking about programmability, substrate, the words like that come to mind, what is the modern network look like? I mean, you have to be agile. You have to be programmable. You have to have security. Can you describe in your words, what does the modern network these days need to look like? How should customers think about architecting them? What are some of the table stakes and what are some of the differentiators that customers need to do to have a modern network? >>Yeah, well, you covered off a coup a few quarter, one there with clarity and so on. So let me pick one that you didn't mention. And, and I, you know, I think we are seeing, you know, a lot of interest around network as a service. And, you know, when we think about network as a service, we think about it broadly, um, you know, for consumers, we're getting more and more used to buying things as a service versus buying a thing. When you, when you get Alexa, you care about how well she answers your questions, you don't care about what CPU is or how much Ram Alexa has. And likewise with networking, people are caring about the outcomes of keeping their employees connected, keeping their, their devices and systems running. And so what for us, what NASA is all about is that shift of thinking about a network as being a collection of devices that get managed to being a framework for connectivity and running it from the point of view of those outcomes. >>And so whether, you know, it's about CapEx versus OPEX or about do it yourself, managing the network yourself versus outsourcing that, um, or it's about the, you know, Greenfield versus brownfield, each of our customers has got a different starting point, but they're all getting heading towards this destination of being able to treat their network as a service. And so that is, you know, a key area of innovation for us and whether it's big customers like home Depot that you heard about yesterday, um, where we kind of manage everything for them on a, as on a store basis, um, for connectivity, um, or, you know, the recent, um, skew based nest that we launched, which is a really scalable foundation for our partners to build nest offerings around. Um, we see this as a key part of network modernization. Yeah. >>And one of the things, again, that's great stuff. Uh, infrastructure is code, which was really kind of pioneer the DevOps movement in cloud kind of as platform level. And you got data ops now and AI at the top of the stack, we were always wondering when network as code was gonna come, uh, and where you actually have it, where it's programmable. I mean, we all know what policies do do. They're good. That's all great network as code. >>Yeah. >>And that's the concept that's like DevOps, it's like, make it work just seamlessly, just be always on. And >>Yeah. And smart, you know, people are always looking for the, for the easy button. Um, and so they want, they want things to operate easily. They want it to be easy to manage. And, you know, I actually think there's a little bit of a, um, a conflict between networkers code and the easy button, right? So it depends on the class of customers. Some customers like financials, for instance, have a huge software development organizations that are extremely capable that could, that can go with program ability that want things as code. But the majority of the, of, of the verticals that we deal with, um, don't have those big captive software organizations. And so they're really looking for automation and simplicity and they wanna outsource that problem. So in Aruba central, we have invested a lot to make it really easy for our customers to, um, get what they need, you know, is that movement of zero code. It's more like zero code. They want, they want something packaged now >>The headless networks. Yeah. Low code, no code >>Kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, obviously for people that have the sophistication that want to, um, do the most advanced things, we have APIs. And so we support that kind of programmable way of doing things. But I'd say that that's that's, those are more specialized customers. So >>Phil, yeah. Uh, is that the strategy? I mean, David listed off a number of, of factors here is that Aruba's strategy to modernize networks to actually create the easy button through network as a service is as simple as dial tone. Is that how we >>Should think? I mean, the way I think about the strategy is I think about it as a triangle, really, along the bottom, we've got the products and services that we offer and we continue to add more products and services. We either buy companies such as silver peak a couple of years ago, or we build, uh, additional products and by, and by the way, that's in response to customers who are frustrated with some other suppliers and wanna move on mass over to, uh, companies like ourselves. So at the bottom layer of the product and services, and then the other side of the triangle one would be NAS, which we talked about, which is kind of move to buying network and as a service. And then the other side of the triangle is the platform, which for us is river central, which is part of HP GreenLake. And that's really all about, you know, kind of making it easy for customers to manage networks and Aruba central right now has got about 120,000 live customers on it. It connects to about 2 million devices and it's collecting a lot of data as well. So we anonymously collect data from all of our customers. We've got one and a half billion data points in the platform. And what we do is we let that data kind of look for anomalies and spot problems on the network before they happen for customers. >>So Aruba central predated, uh, uh, GreenLake GreenLake. Yeah. And, and so did you write to GreenLake through GreenLake APIs? How, what was the engineering work to accomplish that? >>Yeah, so really, um, Aruba central is kind of the Genesis of the GreenLake platform. So we took Aruba central and made it more generic okay. To build the GreenLake cloud platform. And you know, what we've done very recently is bring, bring Aruba into that unified infrastructure, along with storage and compute. So the same sign-on applies across all of HP's, um, products, the same way of managing licenses, managing devices. And so it provides us, uh, great foundation going forwards to, um, solve more comprehensively. Our customers automation requires. >>So, so just a quick follow. So Aruba actually was the main spring of GreenLake from the standpoint of okay. Sing, like you said, single sign on a platform that could evolve and become more, more generic. Yes. So, okay. So that was a nice little, um, bonus of the acquisition, you know, it's now the whole company >><laugh> Aruba taking over. >>Yeah. There's been a lot of work to, to, uh, you know, make it generic and, and widely applicable. Right. Yeah. Um, so, but >>You were purpose >>Built for yeah. Well it's foundational. Yes. So foundational for GreenLake, they built on top of it. Yeah. So you mentioned the data points, billions of data points. So I gotta ask you, cuz we're seeing this, um, copy more and more with machine learning, driving a lot of acceleration, cuz you can do simulations with machine learning and compute. We had Neil McDonal done earlier. He's a compute guy, you got networking. So with all this, um, these services and devices being put on and off the network humans, can't actually figure this out. You can discover what's on the network. How are you guys viewing the discovery and monitoring because there's no perimeter okay. On the network anymore. So I want to know what's out there. Um, how do you get through it? How does machine learning and AI play into this? >>Yeah. I mean, what we are trying to do is obviously flag trends for customers and say, Hey look, you know, we can either see something happening with your network. So there's a particular issue over here and we need to, I dunno, free up more capacity to solve that. Or we're looking at how their network is running and then comparing that with anonymized data from all of our other customers as well. So we're just helping find those problems. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it is becoming more of an issue for organizations, you know, how do you manage the network, >>But you see machine learning and AI playing a big part. >>Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, AI massively and, and other technology advances as well that we make. So recently we, uh, also announced the availability of location awareness within our access points. And that might sound like a simple thing. But when network, when companies build out their networks, they often lose or they potentially could lose the records as to, well, where were the access points that we laid out and actually where are they not within, you know, 20 feet, but where actually are they? So we introduced kind of location, finding technology as well into our, uh, access points to make it easy for >>Customers. So Aruba one of the best, if not the best acquisition. I think that HP E has made, um, it's made by three par was, you know, good. It saved the storage business. Okay. That was more of a defensive play. Uh, but to see Aruba, it's a growth business. You guys report on it every quarter. Yeah. It's obviously a key ingredient to enable uh, uh, GreenLake and, and a that's another example, nimble was similar. We're much smaller sort of more narrow, but taking the AI ops piece and bringing it over. So it's, it was great to see HPE executing on some of its M and a as opposed to just leaving them alone and not really leveraging 'em. So guys, yeah. Congratulations really appreciate you guys coming on and explaining that. Congratulations on all the, all the great work and thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks for having us. >>All right, John, and I'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage from HPE Las Vegas, 2022. We'll be right back.

(intro music) >> We're back on theCUBE unpacking HPE's GreenLake announcements. I'm here with Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Keith, always awesome to see you, man. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> So, let's talk about these announcements. Let's break it down. Where do you want to start? >> So-- >> Cloud services? >> Cloud services, one of the things that we've gone back and forth with HPE over the past few years is that I don't understand GreenLake. Like, is it a financial scheme? Is it a cloud services? And I think data services, the data services announcement around Zirdle and Marketplace really elevates GreenLake to a cloud service. Kind of on par with some of the hyperscalers on how they think about architectures around data centers and, and fabrics and services to enterprise customers. >> When you say on, par in what regard? >> So, one of the things I didn't get, separate to the GreenLake announcement, we've heard a lot about HPE's containers services, Ezmeral, and they have a data fabric and it does things that the storage solutions does. Okay. That seems like a marketplace upon itself. And then the data services with the Zirdle acquisition, completely different marketplace? No, HPE is bringing all of that together, logically. So a cloud architect, similar to how they could go to AWS's console, select some services, deploy those services in their AWS VPC. Now, I can conceptually do that with HPE. I can go to HPE's GreenLake console, choose the services I need to build my app, and deploy it. That is something new within all these traditional OEM providers. >> Because of the cloud nativeness on-prem, bringing that capability. >> So, bringing the Aruba Central concepts, you know, Aruba Central, I think I read a stat, a hundred thousand customers on Aruba Central with a million interactions an hour. So this scale is hyperscale scale. This base to have a centralized marketplace and have those on those cloud-like services, but on-premises or in Niccolo, I think puts HPE near the top, if not the top for building private cloud services on-premises. >> Lets say you're a CTO at an organization that's an HPE customer or an architect. You're all in, on HPE, been working with the company for a long, long time. Wouldn't you want a view of your estate, your applications and workloads, where you could manage on-prem, Cloud, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, take advantage of the cloud native, go across cloud, abstract all that complexity away, maybe eventually go out to the edge. Is that what you want? >> That's what I want, it's aspirational. No one between Microsoft to HPE, no one is able to give me that today. So as a CTO, I'm looking at platforms and seeing is the building blocks there. We talked to the HP storage team of how they're building the abstractions, that they can take anything from their ProLiant line, build the necessary storage underlay, and then abstract that away with a GreenLake. You can do that with AWS EBC, Azure storage. It really doesn't matter because they're building that abstractions. So, aspirationally they're there, they have the right vision. It's about excecution. >> Okay, so that is the right direction in your view, you, I mean, I think that that is clearly where customers want to go. >> A lot of work >> Keith: A lot of work. to get there, and it's a race, right? I mean, that's, you know, I feel as though, as a service is good starting point, but there's, there's a long way to go. And, so how do you feel about HPE's chances there, how they're positioning relative to not only the, there other sort of on-prem competitors, but public cloud players. >> So they're asking the right questions. They're asking the right questions of the right players. It's about relationships. Dave, you know this more than anyone that if you don't have the right relationships inside of the customers, you're not going to get there. And I think that's HPE's number one struggle. The, no slant to the VP of operations, but the VP of operations doesn't want to change his operations. He doesn't want disruption. What COO was coming to you and saying, "I want to be disruptive." Same thing in VP of operations, IT operations, they don't want disruption, but this has been HPE's traditional customer. HPE needs to get into the chief data officers, the chief marketing officers' office, and have these very difficult conversations in sales so that they can eventually show that they can't execute. I think that's the one of their primary challenges. >> So, okay that's good. I'm glad you brought that up because I think Ezmeral starts to go in that direction, it feels as though the first phase is let's pick off analytics. Let's make analytics on-prem as attractive and simple as it is in the cloud. And then, beyond that, let's support this notion of decentralized data and federated governance. And that is aspirational today. But no, as to your point, nobody really has that. AWS really, you know, they're not going after that, across clouds at this point in time, Microsoft is with arc, I guess, and Google kind of has Anthos and they're kind of doing it, but, but yeah, I'm not sure you're going to trust your cloud provider to be that player. So it's kind of like jump ball here, isn't it? >> You know, AWS make a strategic partnership with one of HP's primary competitors, because there was a gap. We know Andy Jassy, former president and CEO of AWS, doesn't typically partner with traditional OEMs, unless there's a real gap in his portfolio that he needed to do and he did it with VMware and he did it with HPE's primary competitor in storage and one of their primary competitors in storage. HPE sees the opportunity. The question is, do they have the workforce? Do they have the field teams, the field CTOs, the solution architects that can go and talk the talk to these customers and this new audience that they need to convince that HPE is just as, as respected a snowflake in these, in this data area. >> Can partners fill that gap? >> Partners definitely can fill that gap, but HPE still has the same challenge for partners: transforming partners from speaking boxes to solutions. I've spent a short stint at VMware. I was surprised at how rigid the channel is and these large organizations and making that transition. >> The other thing, when you think about it as a service that at least that I look for when, if you could comment is the pace, you know, we all would go to, we go to these events, go to re-invent and it's just this fire hose of announcements. We're seeing HPE on a cadence. You know, it's not like a once a year dealio with GreenLake. We're seeing, you know, some stuff with HPC. We're seeing the acquisition of Zerto of the, the DR services, the data protection as a service, Ezmeral. Do you feel like that pace is accelerating? And is it fast enough? >> You know what, I famously said on theCUBE that VMware moves at the pace of the CIO. HPE needs to move a little bit faster than the CIO because the CIO isn't their only customer. They have the opportunity to get customers outside of the CIO and I think they're moving fast enough. This is really hard stuff. Especially when you start to deal with data and the most valuable asset of an organization. Can you move too fast? You absolutely can. One of the other analysts said that you don't want to become the, the forgotten about data services company of the other, of the two thousands. You don't want to make that mistake in the twenties. So I, right now, I think I feel as if HPE is making the right cadence, bringing along their old customers, new customers. Challenge of all of the big OEMs is how do you not erode your base customer base and, but still move fast enough to satisfy the move fast break stuff crowd. >> Keep close to your customers. Keith, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> I'd love to have you back. >> As always, Dave, great time. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from HPE GreenLake announcements. You're watching theCUBE.