>> Announcer: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's The Cube. Covering Commault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Commvault Go 19! I'm Lisa Martin, with Stu Miniman. And Stew and I are pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time, we have Chris Powers, VP and General Manager at HPE. Chris, welcome! >> Thank you very much, thank you. I was telling Stu earlier, you know, long time watcher. First time participant. >> All right, well, awesome, we love that. So here we are in your native area of Colorado. We were just talking about the weather which is probably a topic if you live or visit Colorado that is always an interesting conversation because it changes >> Chris: Rapidly. >> So rapidly, exactly. You guys had snow last week, we have beautiful weather. Well, at least so far this week. But I only got in last night. >> Well stick around till this weekend cause we'll have some more snow. >> All right, I brought some boots. So Chris, talk to us, you've been a long time HPE guy, let's have just kind of a status of the HPE, Commvault relationship, the partnership. What's going on there? >> Absolutely, so Commvault is key important partner to HP. We actually have an arrangement via a capability we call HPE Complete by which we actually skew up Commvault products, we go through the background working with Commvault making sure we have application integration so that customers have a lot of confidence in them. And then a customer or a partner can buy a complete solution on a single P.O. from both companies. So it really provides that ease of transaction, ease of evaluation. And then confidence in the delivered solution that they purchased from HPE. >> So confidence and simplification are great from doing a transaction. Talk to us about how Commvault and HP are working together to really have customers in this multi-cloud world that a lot of them are living in have confidence that they're able to access secure data in a way that is as simple as it can be. >> Well there's a couple things we have. We have integration with Commvault products with a number of our, across a number of our platforms. Commvault is the backbone for our HPE GreenLake backup as a service product, right? And what that gives is the confidence and the capabilities of having a cloud-like experience for your backup environment. But it's managed and controlled on premises. So it brings the benefits of both with the Commvault and Telesnap technology we've got that integrated in with our HPE Primera 3Par and Nimble platforms and that makes snapshot management much more seamless and much more of core portion of their data protection strategies. So there's a number of connection points that we have and we will continue over time to just continue to broaden and exploit that, you know, where the opportunities exist. >> Yeah, I just had a conversation with Craig Rutledge, last week about GreenLake. Bring us inside your customers and you know, how is it some of their buying patterns are changed? GreenLake's actually been around for about nine years, I hadn't been aware that it had been around that long. But you know, cloud and as a service, Commvault's talking about there's a new SaaS offering that they have. You know storage used to be just something you thought about with a box. Now, you know, software is one of the key delivery mechanisms for how I manage and deal with my data. >> That's correct. Well, you know, a lot of the consumption models changed. You know quite a bit over time. And there are more and more, we're seeing more and more of our customers really being more interested in not purchasing the box. Really, I mean the box delivers something. Really, this is shifting more towards purchasing what is being delivered, right. And so that's why these SaaS service models are really that significant. They're a market changer in a couple of aspects. First of all it changes the economics. You know from a consumption standpoint about what are you purchasing? Second thing it does, is it pushes back under the vendor more of the responsibility of the day-to-day maintenance and the activities. Right, it offloads. And so you could be using these IT, you know, compute storage services. Really focusing on them to bring your business outcome as opposed to spending a lot of your time and energy managing the infrastructure itself. >> Chris, of course we've heard a lot about data this week. One area I'm surprised I haven't heard about it much, maybe I just haven't been in the right conversations, is AI. And I know, I've talked to your peer Patrick Osborne, quite a few times about how AI is impacting your portfolio. Maybe help us understand how it fits into this whole discussion. >> Certainly, you know, it's really in two forms. One is AI to support your infrastructure management itself. Right? So a key component of our strategy is something we call the global intelligence engine. And that brings with it a combination of really monitoring what's happening within the environment. Creating from that a set of, think of fingerprints. Associated with workloads such that we can begin to trace and understand, based upon those fingerprints, if there's something changing in the environment, applying rules based AI to understand what an immediate type of response is. So that's how we're using it to simplify infrastructure management, because it is amazingly complex to what it used to be years ago. The second way though is actually bringing to market capabilities that support AI type workloads. And that's a step that Patrick's really focused on with our Mapar, blue data, integration. And it's really, so it's bringing both of those sets to marketplace. Wanting to help customers better manage their environment and then more on effectively being able to utilize those tools to then manage their businesses. >> And this is part of your, the intelligent data platform strategy that HPE is talking about. Can you kind of walk us through that IDP pitch? >> Absolutely. So, first and foremost it starts with workloads. Right? And it's workload optimized systems. That being either from your primary, from you file based from your object in secondary all the way to managing your cloud capabilities. And it's providing that workload mobility, data mobility across those platforms. We layer on top of that this notion of the global intelligence engine. Right? That I've already spoken to. And then what we have is effectively then able to make sure that we have SaaS type plugins for infrastructure management, right? Plugins and (mumbles), chef puppet and so forth. And then also optimizing from an application standpoint what is necessary from a workload standpoint from a data protection standpoint. In all of this then focused at consumers. Be it the data administrators. Be it the line of business owners being the IT infrastructure ops people. It's really this layered sort of capabilities but it starts and ends with workloads. Right? We don't talk about platforms, it's really how do you optimize the capabilities for a specific set of workloads, recognizing that the data associated with those workloads needs to transition over time. >> Chris, wondering if you have any customer examples that might be able to illustrate the power of HPE plus Commvault. >> Certainly, just reflecting back to the backups as a service, via HPE GreenLake. We have number of large customers that utilize GreenLake for the core of their operational activities. Just recently we took down a number of large deals in Europe utilizing HPE with Commvault to provide that in a backup environment managed by HPE GreenLake. >> And from the value of doing that is that you know obviously there's simplicity. You know, does that have an organizational change to how they think about their data protection once their, they leverage GreenLake. >> Well definitely, upon you know leveraging GreenLake, because no longer do you have this arm of backup administrators, you know sitting with you, within your company, right? You are procuring a service, right? You're no longer having to take care of it and manage that infrastructure, be responsible for it. And we take it upon ourselves then to also make sure that that infrastructure is being continuously updated, refreshed. Basically taking that headache of IT management away and focusing on the business outcome. >> Yeah, I'm wondering too, you could probably give a good kind of longterm view of this. How do you see that as different from the previous trend of outsourcing that we've gone through? >> So, I think that trend of outsourcing a lot of times that turned into, once you played it out over a couple of years, turned into more of a game of asset sweating. Right? And so you know, this notion of continually keeping up from a serviceability standpoint, optimizing the capabilities, I think it was more of a focus from an asset utilization play as opposed to delivering a service. I think the real change now, is delivering a service and what does that involve as opposed to like I said, arbitrating and taking advantage of an asset play. >> So when you were talking, you mention the term business outcomes a second ago and my ears perked up, so whether you're talking about whether it's a large retailer or it's a bank for example, talk to us about some of the business outcomes that you guys together with Commvault are helping customers achieve. You talked about kind of a consumer focus, but in terms of kind of like distilling that down to how an organization is maybe delivering new products and services because not only is the data protected and it's available, it's recoverable they've got the AI to be able to gain insights from it. Favorite story maybe that shows like business transformation by leveraging HPE and Commvault together. >> So I think, you know, that the best stories there are really in regards to given that we've freed up resources from that day to day operational type of activities and coupled together with last year, as you mention, that AI type understanding the insights. What it's really doing is it's allowing companies to really accelerate from a flexibility standpoint it's that notion of flexibility and speed to be able to react quickly. And we're seeing that across a large number of customers and that's really what's differentiating customers in this new, what we call the intelligence era, it's that speed and agility to adopt those new quick, adopt new business models, adopt new opportunities quickly change on a dime to recognize when things are changing and then chase after it and take the opportunity. >> So as we're here at day one of Commvault Go 19 this is their fourth event but a lot has changed for them since Sanjay Mirchandani came onboard just about what nine months or so ago, I'm just curious, you've been a partner a long time. Your perspectives on maybe this new Commvault or this Commvault 2.0 that you're seeing that HPE is partnering with? >> So I think it's refreshing, right? It builds into it a new energy, right? A new sense of focus and it's really I think as all of this within the IT industry are recognizing it's this whole notion about service and customer, really it's customer experience and the service enablement that we provide from infrastructure capabilities. I mean we are providing the tools to allow these companies to accelerate and so I think it's really great. It's really great, you know? Companies need to go through transformation, new leaders come in, breathe some different viewpoints and so forth and I think it's very healthy. >> Cultural change is always challenging to do but in some cases it's like you said, it's refreshing, they've also done a lot even with the launch of metallic yesterday just in terms of how quickly we are seeing them go from ideas to you know, to conceiving technologies and delivering them quite quickly to not just their kind of sweet spot of the enterprise, the large global enterprises, but you know down into the mid-market. So in terms of that speed and agility I think there articulating that and showing that pretty well. As to your point, customers have to have the ability whatever size they are, whatever type of industry they're in to be able to react quickly to take advantage of the next wave or be on the front of that next wave and having an infrastructure that is smart, that is optimized, cost-efficient, is as table-stakes to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. Right, and I think what they've been able to demonstrate this week, you know, as part of their announcement said, is that flexibility, that awareness that there's continuous opportunities to be chased. >> Excellent. Well Chris, we thank you for joining Stu and Me on the The Cube today, telling us what's new with HPE and Commvault. We appreciate your time. >> Appreciate it, thank you very much! >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, from Commvault Go 19! (upbeat music)