>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas with theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle. My co-host David Vellante. David with Silicon Angle and Wikibon. Our next is Xavier Poisson, VP in Indirect Digital Services at HPE and Craig McClellan, founder of ThinkOn. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, welcome back. I know Dave interviewed you in London. I wasn't there, but welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So Xavier I got to congratulate you on the prestigious cloud leadership award in 2017. >> Xavier: Oh my. >> So congratulations- >> Xavier: Thank you. >> On the Data Cloud Europe prestigious award. >> Yeah, it was announced yesterday in Monte Carlo and I believe it is a good recognition from the industry about what we have been doing. But not only me, you know, but as a collective work with our partners, with the HP people. And really to bring the best of the value of cloud to our customers. >> So Monte Carlo, Vegas, okay. Tough choices. >> I'd like to go to Monte Carlo. It's not a bad place to visit, hang out. Cloud 28 is really expanding, really kind of lightning in a bottle with what you've been doing so this speaks to the general industry trend, the way that you're riding with cloud and enterprise. Talk about why Cloud 28's doing so well and what's the dynamic, what's the driver? >> Well, you know, I take back of the prize, we believe that the customer deserves to know more and they need to have their choice. And also that our partners are paying a significant role to make it happen because we cannot believe that one single company will do everything. So the digital transformation of our customers is involving that more and more capabilities are put in place in order that we answer the right needs at the right moment in the right geography. And this was, you know, the foundation of Cloud 28 was to make it happen like that. We call it, you know, how you can make a global ecosystem in the sense of the sharing economy, putting the resources together and at the ready that one single partner can find with another one the way to achieve his goal instead of thinking, "I will do it myself" and I will lose my customer at the end of the day. And they may not know it, but the customers recognize that so this is the reason why I believe it's growing and it's growing fast. >> And the open source community is really expanding as well and if you look at the technology providers from the global system integrators down to the front lines of channel partners, cloud is changing the game. Customers expect co-existence. Craig, you're in the middle of all this. What is some of the front line dynamics with customers because they're going to be getting a lot of services from a variety of different vendors and suppliers, no one size fits all anymore. >> That's so true, more than ever. I think it falls into three categories. One is all the customers expect partners and their service providers to focus on integration with others, treat each other as peers, whether you call it collaboration or coop-itition it's still an issue that the customer, more than ever, is expecting their providers to facilitate. Secondly, they're very impatient. Everything is about now or five minutes ago and there is very low tolerance for the traditional engagement model. And the third item is technology's changing so fast that the customers, in many cases, have stopped trying to stay on top of it and they're now looking for service providers to be, effectively, their proxy with the underlying developers. >> The patient thing is a good point. I want to drill into that because what we're seeing as a move to cloud highlights the anti-waterfall concept, which was really great for project management back in the days of ERPs and those 18 month to 24 months POCs. Now, you know, people are under a lot of pressure to drive top line revenue and cost consolidations so cloud can give you that. So how has that changed the nature of the customer? Obviously they're impatient, but how has that changed structurally how they engage with partners? >> So what I experience in our day to day is the customers are eager to fail fast. Failure is acceptable outcome as long as it doesn't take them 12 months to 18 months. They're also expecting service providers to embrace a similar dev ops mentality where they're looking for service providers to be innovating all the time. So there is some forgiveness, I think, that occurs from the customer base if we're all in this together, but they really, back to what I said earlier, they just do not tolerate we'll meet next Thursday and talk about it. They really want to move today. >> David: Action, they want the action. >> So Craig, talk a little bit more about ThinkOn, sort of, why you founded the company. What's your journey been like? I'm really interested in the transformation that has been affected as a result of Cloud 28. >> So we believe very strongly in ecosystems, participating ecosystems. We're a wholesale provider so we enable the traditional vars to go to market faster and we look to the Cloud 28 marketplace as just another example of ecosystem where traction inside the ecosystem is growing faster than if we were to do everything ourselves. So not only do we embrace the notion of partnerships, we also leverage the channel to help them develop faster go to market strategies in their chosen niches. >> So how did it work? How did you guys engage? Xavier do you find partners like this? Do they come to you? They're already part of the ecosystem. >> So really it's both sides. Sometimes, yes, we discuss. I believe HP has a responsibility to discuss with our partners to explain that the world is changing and there is an opportunity. So we do our job and creating a relationship with Craig has been done by the HP team in the country. And diversity matters. We need to respect also what is happening into the country. The ecosystem and the way business is done into the country so in this case it was HP. Some other cases, and I have a very good example it was in New York, the eComm manager of var was called by the var to say, "I want to join, how I can get in touch "with carton tier plus because I see the opportunity "to partner with some other vendors, "meaning ISVs or SIs and I want to be there." So it is both sides. We have a lot of calls from ISVs because a software vendor is developing applications and, as you said Craig, it's going very, very fast with cloud native development. So you have more and more startups coming and developing new products and they want to reach market very, very quickly. And with the exposure that we have because we are world wide and we started in Europe and Eastern Africa, but we are developing Cloud 28+ now from December onwards in The United States of America, in Canada, Latin America, in Asia Pacific. You would be amazed what is happening in India, for instance, where cloud is just popping up and where all the good ideas are coming. So it is both sides, either from HP engaging with our partner saying, "okay there is an opportunity, "do you want to join?" Or sometimes, as I said, it is the partners reaching on us saying, "we want to be there, we want to accelerate with you." >> Now give us some metrics on the program. >> So, as of today, so remember we opened the platform, it was in December '15 and worked together in London if you remember. >> John: Yeah, absolutely. >> As of today's 18 months after 500 members. It's amazing, 500 members. We cover more than 300 data centers of our partners, like the ones of Craig. 300. And we have published nearly 18,000 cloud services on the platform out of 2,000 unique and we have nearly now 40,000 hits per month on the website. It's really amazing. I can tell you it's a snowball effect and it's not only the end user customers, but we have a lot of traffic inside the platform between members while building new offering. So, for instance, we have been speaking here at Discover of the Automoción Ferias that has been announced running on Discover. This is coming out of Cloud 28+, typically, and we see that there. There is another offering that HP pont next is proposing now as a service, which is a legal identity by Lay-kwah, which is a software company in the Nordics, coming out of Cloud 28+. So expanding dramatically. >> So this really highlights the pay as you go cloud business model. >> Xavier: Yeah. >> And it gives ISVs and vars and vabs the portfolio approach. So they're kind of organically putting this together versus the old channel model of predefined programs and products being shipped out to partners. You can pop services in here and then your customers can roll their own solutions. >> Craig: That's right. >> David: Am I getting that right? >> Absolutely, I also think that one of the things that's a real value add is- a lot of organizations are concerned about vendor lock-in. And when you build a consortium, like what HPE has done, it forces the service providers to participate in a way that avoids lock-in. Every service provider wants to build a lock-in strategy, but there are subtle ways that you can do it that aren't offensive and then there are offensive ways and I think the Cloud 28 consortium is really doing a good job on giving customers the comfort that they can adopt services, but they're not locked in. >> George: Let's call it sticky. >> There you go. >> What's the best way for somebody in the channel to create stickiness and loyalty with their customers? >> In my experience, they have an existing ecosystem that they've been working with for a long time, whether it's HPE or a Veeam or another software vendor and that's an ecosystem that their sales organization understands. That's an ecosystem that their own support organization understands. I think you should always start a nice simple step within an ecosystem you already know and then take the next step, turn it into a recurring revenue stream without trying to start from scratch. Blank slate is always exciting to the people that are paid to do it, but unfortunately the outcome is usually not on time and on budget, but there's lots of little steps you can take with existing ecosystem partners. >> Kind of familiarity, you know, ease of doing business. >> Yep. >> You know, track record, all those kinds of things. >> Craig: Customer trust. >> So, I mean, we use the term lock-in but that's sort of, that's what we're really trying to achieve is trust and loyalty. >> The new lock-in is scale, openness, and trust. Question on some of the technical things. I mean, channels are always been a beautiful thing and direct to sales is a great cost per order dollar, the numbers are great, but you got to get it going, right? You got the flywheel going with Cloud 28. How do you nurture this? I mean obviously it's organic, there's some community involved, training, and getting out there, I mean, how is it running? I'm just trying to understand. This is a really good formula. Is there a magical formula? Is there certain training? Is it done in the community peer to peer? >> So it is amazing because it is driven by listening to the people and, I would say, educating everybody in the value chain and the sales people at HP, the pre-sales at HP, and the people within our partners and the end user customer that they need to think business outcome. And once you shift from transactional selling to thinking business outcome, all the things are getting together because you think what your customer and your customer's customer wants to do and how you will help you customer to achieve his business goals. And you spoke about agility, time to market. These are things you can create with assembling all what is into Cloud 28+. I have a big example. We used our Cloud 28+ to answer a multi-million dollar RFPs. Why? Because multi-cloud is a reality so large governments, enterprises wants to deploy clouds in many areas, not always putting everything in the same data center. They want it so you have a good mix of technologies, a good mix of usage, and then you end with RFPs which are giant. And especially when everything is coming to IoT, to the storing of data. You need to have data analytics, hyper for most companies, it is becoming a nightmare. So we had a very good example with a big RFP in Europe. It was all about connecting all the open data that are produced by satellites in the sky and to put all this data available for all the sam-vees in Europe. I can tell you, it was very complicated to do. You would not believe me. In less than three weeks, we were able to discuss with the right partners inside Cloud 28+ to be the consortium onto beat. Three weeks. It was unbelievable. >> Well the thing about cloud too, as you get into these horizontally scalable data opportunities, you also need specialism, you need to have expertise. And that, to me, really is an application-specific, not peddling product. You actually, to your outcome perspective, you're solution-providing, right? It's back to listening. So, okay final thoughts guy, HP Discover 2017. What's the takeaway, Craig? So this year what's the big story? Obviously we heard Meg Whitman, you know, compute is kind of being redefined and scaling. What's the big story here from your perspective? >> For me I was excited to hear about the customer having a more open mind about where to put workload. I would say two years ago there was this mad rush to the cloud without really understanding the cloud and now there's a more seasoned reality is that workload has a multitude of locations where it can be. And I've been saying this for a long time, but as a small organization in Canada not everyone's listening. >> David: Well you're nibbling on the front line. >> That's right. So it's nice to hear that it's being seen around the world in the enterprise space. That's my big takeaway. >> John: Xavier, thoughts? >> I believe that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is interest and confidence about the journey we have designed with Meg Whitman. We have to cross different phases of transformation, it is not finished. But more than every, we put the customer in front of the discussion. You know, when you have been, perhaps, listening about this new start that was pre-announced there, I was thrilled with the process. This product has been built just because it was by essence connected. When they were designing the product, to Cloud 28+ that would be a resource provider for the new start. This is the way we invent product now. So we put the customer and the channel partners and the ecosystems in the center of the design of the products that we are doing. So it's no longer a product I'm selling, it is a product that is ready to be sold because it is fitting customer or channel partner outcomes. This is a big transformation of today's. >> And I would just say, one of my observation is, again, education on the cloud is key and then, you know, this ability of tailoring solutions not a one size fits all. You know, here's hyper converged or here's composability. >> Exactly. >> Having the customer mix and match whatever they need. Guys, great conversation here inside theCUBE. HPE Discover 2017, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with David Vellante we'll be back with more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (upbeat music)