(lighthearted music) >> Okay. We're here with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen. Good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome. Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get GreenLake right, for enterprise markets. And you got some news today which we're going to get to, but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim, if you will. The Edge, Cloud, as a service, all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact has been amazing. And, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customers' digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and, you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, a set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know, GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the Cloud to the customer in their data center, in their Colo or at the Edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full Cloud experience all as a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them, so they get that, as I mentioned, true Cloud experience, it's really sort of landing really well with customers. And we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology and we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> You know, it's interesting, you mentioned that, just as a quick aside. The definition of cloud is evolving, and it's because customers ... It's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across Cloud, Edge, you know, multi clouds on prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably see it again for yourself. The cloud is an experience. It's not a destination and digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. The first round of digital transformation focused on a Cloud first strategy, where our customers were looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the Cloud speed, the agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live. According to IDC, by the end of 2021 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps, and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide. Specifically in the small and medium companies, which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, they, the analyst degree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come and speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the focus will be on internal processes and operations the digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem we're helping our customers embrace our as a service vision and stand out wherever they are on their transformation journey. >> Well thanks for those stats. I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business and-- I'm sure there's some exceptions but you got to get on the, on the digital bandwagon. I think pre pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith. Let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have som-- something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, you know the world is hybrid and the world is multi-cloud and so customers are expecting these solutions. And so we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to a general availability of our ML ops, mach-- machine learning operations and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC customer edition which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the Colo. And then today we're introducing our new bare metal capabilities as well as containers on bare metal as a service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a service experience, we talked about before where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud which is virtual machines, containers, storage compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software and our services and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self service capabilities or integrating into our distributors through a core set of APIs to to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over a hundred thousand additional value add resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1 over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake cloud services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand our ex-- extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships. Like our Colos, that co-location centers are really key. So Equinix, Cirrus 1 and others that we're working with. And I'll let George talk more about that. >> Yeah. I wonder if you could pick up on that George I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see that I see opportunity here. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the in the old days moving iron, but I got to move. I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID is actually, you know accelerating a lot of those changes, but, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, Georgia? >> So I completely agree with Keith the-- through and through in with our partners, we we give our customers choice, right? They don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers we're driving special initiatives via Cloud 28, which we run which is the World's largest Cloud aggregator. And also in collaboration with our distributors and their marketplaces. As, as Keith mentioned, in addition customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SIs, our ISBs to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. Because customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient, low latency networks and the modern workload demands, secure compliant highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on co-location, we're partnering with co-location facilities to provide our customers the ability to expand bandwidth, reduced latency and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know making ourselves easier to do business with we've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake central. And can provide their customers end to end support in managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities. So customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts and we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah. So I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer driven to me what the customer wants is they want to come in. They want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on prem in the cloud, across clouds at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me make it simple to do not only the technology to work you know, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide. And that's a, that's a bold vision and then make it easy to do business. Let me buy as a service if that's the way I want to consume. And, and partners are all about, you know, making, you know reducing friction and driving that. So anyway guys, final thoughts. Maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George-- >> Yeah. You summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers apps, data, workloads, and solutions and really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate. You know, our ears are wide open and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Great. George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills in and embrace our confidence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners so we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> So that's great. We're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio partners are key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out an expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> You bet, thank you. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome.