>> Announcer: Live from Madrid Spain, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back. This is theCUBE that you're watching, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at HPE Discover 2017 in Madrid. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host for the week, Peter Burris. Peter, it's been great working with you this week. >> Indeed, it's been great. >> We're winding down, and we're really excited to have Ric Lewis, >> Great ideas. >> Senior Vice President and General Manger of the Software Defined and Cloud Group. Many time CUBE guest with HPE, and Jeff Wike of Dreamworks. CTO, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Great to see you. You're welcome. Been a good week? >> It's been a fantastic week. >> Things are coming into focus? >> They are. >> You killed it on the keynote, how are you feeling? >> Feeling really good, feeling really good. I mean, the momentum in the software defined and cloud arena is just fantastic. You know, there were times when I used to visit with you guys and we were only talking about what's coming in the future. Now we're talking a lot about what we have, what customers are buying, where we have momentum. And still introducing new things, so it's just a whole lot of fun. >> Jeff, Senior Vice President, CTO, can we talk a little bit about your role? What the scope is? >> Sure. Sure, so Dreamworks Animation, you may have heard of it. >> Yeah. We do we make animated films. >> Good friend Kate Swanberg's been on a number of times. >> Kate's, love her. We make animated films, we do a lot more than that. We're a digital content creation company. So we, we're the largest TV animation studio in the world. We're doing theme park ride work, cause we've got, we're now under NBC Universal. So we're doing a lot of projects, it's a very busy time for us. >> So, Synergy, we talked about Synergy a lot, there's nothing >> Yeah. >> like Synergy we've heard. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yeah, it just gets better. >> Wait and see and so, what can you tell us? How's the momentum? >> Yeah let's talk a little bit about that. So the momentum on Synergy is fantastic. We started shipping in volume at this conference last year, basically December of last year. And the response has been fantastic. We've looked at Momentum for new infrastructure plays. You know if you look back at our history, whether it was the C7000 or whether it was UCS from Cisco or whether it was VCEs built on UCS, Nutanix. If you kind of look at the first year of a new infrastructure play, Synergy looks like it's the fastest growing thing ever. It's just fantastic, really growing for us. We have over 1100 customers on Synergy now. You know, and that's in 11 months of shipping. And the business, it just continues to grow quarter by quarter. Just really thrilled with the progress there, so happy. >> And you guys are customers? >> We're big customers, if we're not the biggest customer, we're certainly the biggest fan. >> One of the biggest, one of the biggest customers, maybe the biggest fan. >> Certainly the biggest fan. >> Okay so Jeff, tell us, take us back to sort of pre-Synergy, you know, what was it like before and after and what has it done for your business in particular? >> Well one of the things that that we face going forward is we developed, in our infrastructure, and inner data center, we do a lot of rendering to make a movie. That's our largest high performance compute. You know, 80 million render hours, CPU hours to make one of these films. And we're making a lot of them at the same time. We really defined that work flow, and how we optimize the data center hardware to be able to go through that work flow and be able to be as efficient as possible. The issue came with we have a lot of other projects that are coming in, and since we are now under NBC Universal, there's a lot of other work that's happening there. And also, different types of media that's coming, you know, around the corner. And we want to be able to prepare for that. What we would have done traditionally would be to buy to peak, you know because it is rather cyclical, and that's what we would do that on prem, peak. But if we had a special project, we might buy or segment a portion of that and say, you know, this is for this purpose. This is for that purpose, but that's very inefficient. So with Synergy, the beauty of it is we can purchase you know that hardware, but then if we want to be able to use it for another project, we can do that. And we can do that very very quickly. >> You said you repurpose that across your application portfolio. Or your project portfolio. >> Yeah. Yeah, it gives us, I like to say it future proofs us. Because now no matter what the parent company or our own creative ambitions are, we can handle that. We can't say no, well we never say no. We usually say not right now, or wait a couple of weeks or a couple of months to be able to provision that. And now it's, it's instantaneous. >> And I know what Ric's answer would be to this, but I want to hear from the customers. Is this really different than other products that you've experienced. >> It's totally unique. We haven't experienced it before. And I'll give you, I'll give you a little example. We just got our order. We got about 200 servers of Synergy that arrived a couple of months ago. And within seven working days, we were using it in production. And I just want to say, we took, I don't know if I told you this story, but we were able to provision all of that from the time we mounted in the racks within five hours, which is incredible. It would have taken us easily three weeks before. In fact, it took us longer to take it out of the cartons than it did to provision. >> Well, so let me see if I... You're talking about maybe 200 servers. You're probably talking about 8,000 individual tasks configured. To get it done in five hours you probably perform what, 40, 50 tasks? Administrative steps? >> By the way, first time doing it. And our engineers were saying, we could've used more parallelism. We could've done it faster. You know, it's almost a challenge to see just how easy you can do this. >> But I got that right? Is it really like 98 percent reduction in the administrative tasks? >> Absolutely. >> Really? >> That's incredible. >> It is. >> Huh, alright. >> That's before you start flexing work, flexing resources against different workloads and dynamically reprovisioning. This is just provisioning the first time. But it, if you think about it, if you're gonna do it dynamically, it can't take forever, so you've gotta make it, the first time it's gotta be super fast. >> Okay. >> So, I have to admit I'm a little stunned, I didn't know that. So, and as you said, the whole point is that you can reprovision >> Yes. >> Over and over. Which means that the... There's something in economics and technology that's known as an asset specificity. And an asset has high specificity when you buy it and can appropriate it to a specific purpose. And about the only thing in tech that makes something an asset specificity is the administrative tasks of changing it to prepare it to do something else. And you just told me that I can remove nearly 100% of the transaction costs associated with taking an asset from this and applying it to that. >> If you're gonna destroy silos in the data center, that's what you have to do. >> But that's... >> Right, so silo is this asset specificity. If you can repurpose it immediately. >> So I'm excited, that's my second question. How did your people respond to this? Because I talked to a lot of other CIOs that say one of the biggest challenges I'm having, or CTOs, one of the biggest challenges I'm having is I'm able to converge hardware, I'm able to converge to some software, I'm able to converge Administrative tasks, but my people don't like converge. What, they don't like to converge. How are you walking your people through some of these changes to liberate these opportunities? >> Well we've been moving toward, from more traditional, we'll call it IT for now. From traditional IT to dev ops environment and, you know what, it's change. So we've been bringing people along in that you know, to, and some people adapt to it. They say wow this is gonna be great for my career. And engineers want to always use the new stuff, so from that aspect of I know how I work, and I know what I do, to here's a better way of doing it to be more automated, it's been a good experience for people. And you know what, the chance of human error in configuring things... If I look to my long history at Dreamworks, 21 years, I look at any down time we've had or any problems, 90% of that has been from misconfiguration. And it's usually from somebody fat fingering, you know a parameter in the set up of the servers. And now, that's virtually eliminated. >> Did you have to go through some kind of organizational, internal sort of discussion, transformation, whatever you want to call it to actually get to the point where you could buy this way, buy a sort of single SKU of Synergy? Because you maybe previously you were buying bespoke, kind of roll your own components. A little server here, maybe some storage over there, maybe some networking here. Now maybe it's all HP that made it simpler, but you probably had specialist in each of those areas, did you not? >> We did. >> How did you deal with that organizational friction? >> You know, that was an issue as and by the way, there's so many, there's so much technology that's being developed some of it open source, some of it in this partner ecosystem that you have. And trying to stay abreast of that has been a real challenge. And one of the things that we always dreamed of is wouldn't it be nice if there was one way that you could control that. The single pane of glass, which is you know, to be able to have an API layer that everybody could hook in to. I think you've got a company like Hewlett Packard Enterprise that has that dominance in the market place to be able to dictate, I'm using that word. >> Yeah. >> Maybe dictate isn't the right word. >> Offer. >> Offer. (group laughing) >> That's the word we use. Enable. >> Enable, you know those APIs. And all of those are being developed you know almost in parallel. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So this stuff is really coming in. Now we have our own... We're a snowflake like everybody else is to your point. And what we've done is we brought in the Pointnext team to go in and write those northbound APIs so that we can hook in to one view. To be able to manage all of our legacy, I'll call it legacy, our previous infrastructure along with you know, the new tech that we're buying. So that it makes it easy to manage. >> They made it match the composable API that we put into Synergy. It's natively integrated. All the ecosystem partners are adapting to it. And they said we'll just use that as our standard to even manage our legacy infrastructure. Plus, since Oneview runs on legacy infrastructure, all of the HPE stuff, it just adapts like that. So it's been a very good, good project. >> So you've got a lot of experience with this now. Can you share with, maybe you can quantify it, maybe you can't, but even subjectively the developer impact or the animator impact, the business impact to Dreamworks? >> So the biggest impact... Well I have three things that are my, actually I got this from Meg Whitman, I had a list of 12 objectives for the studio for technology and she said at one of the CIO summits, you've gotta have three. So I said okay, I've gotta pare it down to three. And one of those is provide the technology, the software and infrastructure to meet the creative needs. The second one was innovate for competitive advantage. And the third one was drive efficiency into operations. And if you look at what Synergy provides, it hits every single one of those. So we've actually, you know, over the past year or two, we've actually reduced the number of people that we have maintaining our infrastructure, which is amazing if you consider the fact that this year we doubled the size of our infrastructure. In what other business, in what other area can you actually reduce the amount of people that are maintaining something while you're doubling the amount that you're maintaining. That never happens. And I think it's because of this software defined infrastructure and the fact that you can write these recipes or profiles, whatever you want to call them, personalities. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> To be able to... And test them and harden them. And by the way, that reminds me, one of the things I really like about this is our ability to do proofs of concept, to try different workflows and all that without having to take away resources from the main thing that we're doing which is the artistic community. So we can actually say, you know what? We're gonna go in, reimage these servers. We're gonna do that at night to run this test, in the morning they're back, they're back in the pool. And that's an amazing thing. >> That's dynamic provisioning. No one else can dynamically provision. >> Yeah. >> All the converge systems, all the hyper converge, they're provisioned a certain way. They run VMs a certain way. They stay that way for their lifetime. This stuff dynamically reprovisions, and you guys, you're not even talking about kind of doing containers with VMs and containers with your bare metal, you can dynamically reprovision across that as well. >> Yeah, what he said. (laughter) >> Listen, we're just getting started so just relax, okay. These guys are telling me we gotta wrap. We're not gonna wrap. >> No. >> We haven't even gotten to One Sphere yet. >> We have other topics. Exactly. >> So let's get to One Sphere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I want to talk about One Sphere. But I do want to say. >> Go ahead, last thought. >> One more thing, so you talked about artists, but the other part of it is for developers so one of the things we don't want the engineering teams to be a hindrance to the developers. Because they want to be able to move quickly, they want to be able to be assessing, and I think one of the things that's not just an impact on our artists, to be able to do these new projects, but also it makes our developers more efficient. They don't have to wait. >> Yeah. >> Okay, great. Now let's talk multi cloud. >> Yep. >> A lot of complexity, the more things get simple, the more complex they seem to get. So, One Sphere. You guys announced yesterday. >> Yeah, so. A core pillar of the HP strategy, make hybrid IT simple, right. And you can see from this conversation we're making hybrid IT simple on-prem. Not only do we have Synergy, but we have a fantastic offering in our Simplivity space. And that platform's over 2,000 customers and growing like crazy as well. But after we did that, we said look, we've got fantastically simple virtualization clusters in Simplivity, we've got great dynamic reprovisioning and composable infrastructure, but customer are not... That's part of their hybrid IT problem, that's the on-prem part. They're also wrestling with I've got multiple cloud instances, I need to get insights into where I'm spending my money, where workloads are deployed and all that. So we started this program, HPE OneSphere. We've had it going for almost three years. We had a small team on it early on. We ramped up the staffing a couple years ago. And what it really does, it's pretty simple. It allows you to build clouds, deploy apps, and gain insights extremely fast. So it's designed for IT ops to be able to build and deploy a private cloud as fast as they can and assemble that with their public cloud assets. And provide one place to look at all of those. For developers, it provides a common multi-tenant environment that has all the services and tools they need to be able to deploy an application whether it's on-prem or off-prem, and you can choose, you can build applications that have some of both inside that developer environment. And then for the business, it shows insights into where's the money being spent? Where are those workloads running and what's it costing me? So, think of it almost as composable at that next level where it's not just resources within chassis, now it's resources across the hybrid IT estate. It actually is public cloud assets from any of the public clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, Cloud28+, as well as your private cloud assets. And it automates the life cycle stuff that we were just talking about through this application into OneView. It's a SaaS environment, so actually OneSphere is software as a service. It lives in the cloud, it's a subscription that our customers buy, and it does all of this capability to simplify their hybrid environment and taps into the capabilities we just talked about. It's fantastic, nobody has anything like it. >> Okay well we've heard that before, but now... >> Exactly. >> You're putting your money where your mouth is. >> So I was right on that one. >> Okay but it's early days for OneSphere. >> Okay. >> And your private cloud is what we call a true private cloud. >> Which you said on stage yesterday. >> I did that's exactly right. >> It's evidence by your ability to reduce staff to manage infrastructure. >> It's a con experience wherever the data requires is how we put it. >> Yes, yes. We want the simplicity of management and the availability of apps that you get in public cloud in the private cloud. >> And the pricing. Yeah? >> Well, yeah, well... No, cause it's actually more expensive to go public cloud. >> I mean pricing models. >> Oh yes, yeah. >> The consumption is what you're basically talking about, yeah. >> And so you, Jeff you guys are OneSphere or OneSphere betas? >> Yeah, you bet. >> So what were you trying to learn? What were you kicking the tires on, testing? Where'd you focus? >> We, you know, if we look at the future, we're not gonna be on-prem forever, and I certainly don't want to be on-prem forever, I want to take advantage of flexing to public cloud, but again, for our films, you know, we want to be able to provide the producers of those movies, what is that gonna cost me? What is that, how can I tell you what that costs? And where can we move as we start to do more different types of projects? Which ones should go to the public cloud? Which ones should stay inside? And be able to understand that. The other thing that made us nervous about public cloud. Was what they call the zombie cloud instances, you know where you went in, you provision something and then you forget about, and you, but you're paying, you know. And that's, a lot of money is made. >> Kind of like app subscriptions. >> Group: Yes, exactly. >> I'm still paying for that? (laughter) >> Exactly but this gives you all of that... >> 4,000 dollars a month. >> A little different right. >> Or 15,000 a month. (laughter) >> Yeah, that's for sure. That visibility is something that all... We talk about it, CFOs hate this thing... Some of the consumption model is shifting from cap ex to op ex, but CFOs hate surprise op ex. And that's where they're actually surprised by oh my gosh look at that bill. Well this provides visibility into all of those assets, whether they're on-prem or off-prem and what they're costing you. And it's always up to date, and it's always consistent across your entire farm, so you can choose and say that's costing me too much, I want to move those apps over here. And immediately do it. And for a lot of our customers, they're over-provisioned so they have spare capacity on-prem they're not taking advantage of. Why not use some of that and it's instantly provisioned. >> And that's where you initially, anyway, see the business value of OneSphere. >> Well, look, it's OneSphere to rule them all. And I believe whether it's private, public, you know we really want to have what is my total resource availability? So in the future, we never say no anymore. Really, we can tell them how much, but you don't have to say no. And the other thing is we can do this stuff instantly. So, we don't even say when, we just go now here's what you have to pay if you want to do it, we can provide those options. It's a new world. >> I love the demo of, I don't know if you guys saw it, there's a demo with Pong, you know, it's the IT guy of the past. >> Yeah the guy saying no. >> And then they made it vertical. It's the IT guy of the future. So, alright my last question. What cool movies can we anticipate? What's coming? >> Well you know what, How to drain... How to Train, how to drain your tragon I was gonna say. (laughter) How to Train Your Dragon 3 is our next film out and it's gonna be unbelievable. >> I'll bet. >> So my last question. Am I gonna have to continue to sit through 15 minutes of IT credits at the end of future Dreamworks movies as a consequence of Synergy? >> There's less, cause there's less resources required to manage your Synergy hardware. So it's less people. >> I know you don't sit through the credits. (laughter) >> I do. (laughter) I love credits. Alright guys, thanks very much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> It's been a great pleasure. >> Thank you, always fun. >> Alright keep it there everybody, Peter and I will be back to wrap up HPE Discover 2017 from Madrid, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> At Ducati, we create racing bikes and road bikes, and unique experiences for our bikers. The Ducati teams participate in 19 races, in 15 countries, on five continents, as part of Moto GP Championship around the world. When you own a bike, you are part of a new family, the Ducatisti. (engine revving) We have a DNA racing, that we bring into everyday's bike, you can be a racer, or you can be someone who want to go down downtown Bologna, or San Francisco, or Bangkok. Data is at the heart of the Ducati digital strategy, in racing we know how to analyze data, the experience is directly moved to our road bikes. In race bikes and road bikes we have physical sensors, now thanks to machine learning, artificial intelligence, we can bring to data together to create Bitron sensors, that give us information that were not available before. We are looking for a partner that truly understands the value and the power of data, and this happened to be NetAPP. We want to arrange data in new ways, to transform the sport of Moto GP racing, and the road bike experience. NetAPP has controlled data to make experimentation more quickly, the bike we race on Sunday, is the bike we sell on Monday, and we can test the riders sensation through data. I'm Piergiorgio Grossi, and I'm data driven. (techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering NetAPP Insight 2018, brought to you by NetAPP. >> Welcome back the the Cube our continuing coverage today, from the Mandalay Bay of NetAPP Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we have a couple of guests joining us. If you're a Motorsport fan, turn the volume up. First we have, welcoming back to the Cube, Jean English, the SVP and CMO at NetAPP, great to have you back Jean!. >> Oh thank you very much, excited to be here. >> And we have Konstantin Kostenarov, CTO of Ducati Motor, wow Ducati, there is by the way, I encourage you to go to the NetAPP.com web site after the segment here there's a very cool video about how Ducati is working with NetAPP on the racing side, these bikes are like flying IOT devices, as well as the consumer side. So Jean let's kick of things with you, this is day one, record breaking attendance for NetAPP, 5000 attendees, we were in the Keynote this morning, standing room only, talk to us about NetAPP as a Data authority, what's some of the feedback that you're hearing from your wealth of partners and customers that are here this week? >> Absolutely, well we're thrilled to have so many partners and customers and employees here with us, record breaking attendance, more customers and partners that have ever joined us before here at Insight a Data authority, people are asking us what do I need to do to maximize the value of that data, whether it's integrating the data, simplifying the data, they're trying to figure it out, and most of the time it's in a Hybrid role, it's in a multiclout world, and so we're just excited about where we are with our strategy, we're bringing it to life, more and more customers, like Ducati everyday are helping us to see this vision come true and we just can't wait to get started with everyone else. >> And this is a really interesting example, NetAPP has, in it's 26 year history, a massive install base, probably every industry, but when you look at something like Ducati, which probably every guy knows about, I have some Motorsport experience myself, it's much more of a, oh as a consumer, as a fan of the sport, so Konstantin, tell us about Ducati's decision to work with NetAPP, because you guys aim to not only utilize, all of the data, tons of data coming off the two bikes, every race weekend, to improve performance, but you're also wanting to use that speed, which is the new scale as George Curion said this morning, to even improve the consumer experience, and talk to us about Ducati's partnership with NetAPP. >> So we start to work with NetAPP about two years ago, more over, and in these, nowadays, every people around us talk about job thinking, extreme improvement, extreme increase of customer experience so in this world this will be Ducatis very excited challenge and this challenge requires us to respond with the best technology. The best technology that help us to collect the best information from our motorbikes, from our racing teams that we know how to collect the data, how to transformate this data into usable information, and how to generate the opportunity to have data sensors that we can transform in in information but also in knowledge that we hear before, and put all this information inside our fabric, and inside our shop floor, inside our R and D department, in order to be able to extremely increase the experience of our customers. >> I love that we get to work with one of the most innovative companies in the entire world of Motorsports, and I think really from the inception of Ducati, you guys have been really focused on how do you keep innovating through technology, and we talk about transforming the world of racing with data and how are we doing that together, so together with Ducati and NetAPP, how do we help enable them to have the best motors in the whole world, we're really excited! >> Jean, it's a great discussion, we've loved watching from just talking about the storage industry to where we're talking about data, and transformations so maybe explain to our audience that maybe not understand, you know, what's different about the industry today, and what's enabling this, NetAPP to be able to work with companies like Ducati, to help them through these transformations today, that they might not have been able to do a few years ago. >> Absolutely, I think there's just more and more data that we're finding every day, whether it's Ducati, Motorsports, if it happens to be in health care, and thinking about the millions and billions of genomes types of research that they're doing. We know even from banking how they're trying to connect the dots across an entire customer experience. Sure they're using technology like storage, absolutely, they're thinking about computers, they're thinking more and more though about services, and the cloud, APIs, how are they going to gain all this innovation through AI, analytics, but it's about making the customer experience better. What I love about the partnership we have with Ducati is it's not just about the bikes themselves, it's about the community that they have and that they're building and that community is yes, based on data from the bike, it's about the data coming from the riders, and it's about the data they collect so they all become a stronger community as a whole. >> Yeah, Konstantin maybe explain a little bit more to your audience the role of data as Ducati see's it, and how that drives innovation in your company. >> In the world like motorbike racing team, where every millisecond counts and the difference, in how we can collect in, very quickly mode the data, and to transform the information becomes determinate if you win or not because as you know, in Qatar we win with 29 milliseconds, and this is the work that we've done, days before, analyzing data, and set up the motorcycle, in the best way, because for us, the collaboration with NetAPP is not only storage, and is not only data, but is data management, and extremely short time to respond to our business requests and work to transform the paradigm of time, and money the paradigm of data and information, and we talk about performance with our line of business, not from the technical point of view but from the extremely business oriented, the customer oriented point of view, and we collect the data from the more than 60 sensors, from the racing motorbikes and transform it with artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, in vector sensors that give us information that we cannot reach from the normal road bikes, and this improves extremely our competitiveness, and we are able to give this, experience to our riders that becomes our families, because a good thing, a good product to all our customers, and with attention of environment in the behavior of the riders we would think that the good people in the good universe act in a good way. >> And we're happy to be part of that too. >> Before we get into that, the consumer side, so your riders, Andrea Dovizioso, and Jorge Lorenzo, how has their performance improved because you're able to take data, gigs per quali day, race day, analyze it in real time, how has their performance improved as a result of your NetAPP partnership? >> As you know, the racing motorbike is not able to stop in real time during the race, not like in Formula One so you need to use the best technology to connect the bikes to our minidata center inside the box during the race. Make our strategy to set up the bike as better as we can, and the speed which we can reach the, and collect the data, put it in the telemetry software, calibrate it, make the strategy decision is very very important. And with the HCI technology we can do it. >> How are you taking the transformation that you're making on the racing side and applying it to the consumer side so that, as I think I heard on the video, Ducati wants to deliver the bike that a guy or gal rides on a Sunday by Monday, that speed, speed is the new scale as George Curion mentioned this morning, how is the consumer side of Ducati Motorsport being influenced positively to enable those consumers to have exactly what they want? >> If you see our new creation, the Dopra, the Panigale V4, this is the right example how we transform racing motorbikes to the road bikes, and we give to our customers this kind of experience because all information we manage during the Sunday we are able to put in on Monday and sell the bike that have the same performance, safety, and pleasure of riding for the final customers and we have a racing that we bring to everydays motorbike, so when you buy a bike we give you experience that before you're riding, during the riding, and after your riding when you are at your home, with our uplink connection, we use the NetAPP technology to give the best experience of connected bikes. >> So when you think about customers, especially our partnership with Ducati, in order to be customer centric, or rider centric, we really have to be data driven, and so as we think about what are all the connections and the dots of data that happen, whether it's on the bike, the rider, the community itself, how does that bike that's driven or ridden on a Sunday, how is then really performed and given to customer that next day, it's all about the data. >> I'm curious, cause how have you been able to improve that speed of scale meta HCI as part of your data driven foundation, what's kind of a before and after, are you able to deliver bikes faster? Have you transformed the customer experience like Jean was saying? >> So before NetAPP, our production plan is more difficult to be connected to all other line of business and we are not able to collect the information from our final user, our customer. And give this information to our R and D department or the shop floor, in order to be able to transform in real time our production process, and to give the best experience for everyday bikers. >> So significant business impact? >> Exactly, and with our connected bike, this has become a reality. >> Jean, just want to bring it back to NetAPP for a minute here you've been on board for about two years, George Curion talked about the transformation that NetAPP is going through itself, can you speak a little bit to the culture, you know I think back for years and NetAPP has been known for one of the top places to work, it's talking about that transformation, what can you say about what's happening inside NetAPP? >> Sure, so I think the transformation has gone through a couple of different cycles. I mean one was really around the operational efficiency we needed to be as a company to really be focused on what were the customers caring about? What were the technologies and innovations that we needed to shift to that mattered to the customer? Cloud being one of those, whether it was a private cloud, or a public cloud, we also started to think through, is the right leadership that we needed to have in the company to start making those shifts? A big part of it is the culture though and that culture is ground up, it definitely starts across the leadership team we have today, but it is infused across all of NetAPP. It is one of the reason why I joined the company, when I first started interviewing with George, he wanted me to come help him write the new story, but so much a part of a story of a company is the people themselves, and so if you think about any kind of transformation, it is definitely strategy, it's technology, it's around what you do from processes, but culture and people are the biggest part of that, and we think of the brand inside of NetAPP, the people are the biggest part of it. And who we are and what we stand for, really always leaning in to the latest technology, because it's what customers care about, if I think about the history over the last 10 to 15 years, what could have broken NetAPP, moving from Linux to Windows, moving in to virtualization, now with the cloud, we've always leaned in, because we want to care about what the customer cares about. And that's every single person inside of NetAPP that makes that happen. So I love being at NetAPP and it's an exciting place to be! >> Cultural transformation is hard to do, it's essential for IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, I'm curious Jean, NetAPP has such a big install base of a lot of enterprise incumbents that weren't born in digital of course you've got some amazing customers like Ducati, talk to us about how your customers, you mentioned NetAPP is good at leaning in, how do you leverage that voice of the customer to help the sustain the cultural transformation you need to really put cloud at the heart of your strategy? >> Absolutely, even with the example of Dreamworks, we just started working with Dreamworks as one of our partners to start co-engineering with them, to help them on their own transformation. And so that's taking right from the customer, what are their requirements, how are they going to take this cutting edge digital content, and then be able to make it into beautiful, engaging films that we all know and love, How To Train Your Dragon's coming out very soon and we're excited about seeing it, but those kind of partnerships really matter, and how people are leaning in to the cloud, and how they're leaning in to hypercloud, multicloud, we want to hear what our customers need and work with them to be able to really build out that technology and innovation for the future. >> Konstantin, last question for you, what are you, I know you had a session yesterday, what are you excited to hear about from you partner NetAPP at the event this week? >> I'm excited to hear about the people, it's a very put attention of the details, of what the NetAPP mean regarding the data management. And the data driven company, what is the real time feedback to the customers, and improvement of the customer experience, and one of the things that I like is the simplicity to use the NetAPP technology that give us the speed of reaction, and transform the information into knowledge, and how can I say in experience to know how to do the things >> Well Konstantin, Jean, thank you so much for stopping by and giving us a really cool, sexy example of how NetAPP is helping a company like Ducati really revolutionize the racing side and the consumer side of the businesses. And we want to encourage you to go to NetAPP.com search Ducati and you will find a very cool video, on how these two companies are working together. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live, all day from NetAPP Insight 2018, Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. And this is the third annual Insight, with customers and partners and NetAppians and analysts and press. Stu this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Stu, that you and I both noticed, was at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, #datadriven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, health care, etc. To use data, develop a data strategy, to move their businesses into the digital age. >> Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. >> Always. >> And I'm excited, it's second year that we've been at this show, third of the NetApp Insights that we've done. Cause we've done both the U.S. and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh I'm showing my age, I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS, and FAS was the one operating system to rule them all, really grew into a very sizable business. Company's about $6 billion worth of revenue and I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. Today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now, so it's interesting to watch. George Kurian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because, most people when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that it's, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes, sometimes I mine some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp Gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid, multi-cloud software led something something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here, so that's what I'm excited to dig into. George Kurian he in the keynote this morning, laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into, but yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh Cloud Insights, and ONTAP in the Cloud, and HCI and Partnership News and things like that, so there definitely is some news, they just didn't talk about it in the keynote. >> Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me, and as theCUBE we go to a lot of keynotes, many times a year, and this was an interesting start to it. It's clear from the NetApp messaging on NetApp.com, NetApp Insight, things that are being put out on media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist Gerd Leonhard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity, the only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes minutes into they keynote this morning was when Anthony Lye got on, he's going to be on the show later today, talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp was wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principals of digital transformation that George Kurian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts there, more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer, I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks, "Shrek", "How to Train your Dragon", are becoming more morphing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was and interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. >> You know, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to. It was the storage budget, and oh how do I manage with the explosion of data, and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff? I thought we could actually take George Kurian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> (Lisa) Right. >> I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale, well how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big SolidFire acquisition which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multi-cloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software-defined before that was a thing, and they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that, but NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years, now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lye, this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to theCUBE Con shows for a couple years, and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments, and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it would be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and issue discussion. And the last piece is they said moving from data center to data fabric. >> Right. >> Which is the closest tie to the products as you said. >> (Lisa) Yes, exactly. >> To what they're doing. >> Well, Stu we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day. We're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers, so Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, theCUBE Live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be right back. (music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, the Intel Tech Lounge for a one on one conversation with Kane Lee, who's the head of content at Baobab Studios in California. Thanks for joining me here at the Intel Tech Lounge. >> Really excited to be here. >> You know we just had a panel on the new creative here, and Intel is showing some great technology. Things like volumetric, all kinds of really hardcore tech. Really powering some of the VR, AR, mixed reality, all the trends that are happening around user experience. But, a new creative artist is out there. A new storyteller. It could be a 12 year old to a 50 year old. You're in the middle of it. You're an award winning producer. So you're building the stories, you're building the content. What's the biggest thing happening here at Sundance? >> I think it's really interesting, because content has always been my passion. Good storytelling. And growing up, it was always books and films, and all these traditional mediums that inspired me to sort of dream, and right here in Sundance, we're in the middle of a great sea change going on, because technology and art are coming together in such a fast pace, to really usher in the new generation of storytelling, and we're all very fortunate to be in the middle of that. This is a very unique period in our history as humans, and our culture, to challenge what storytelling really means, because VR, for us at Baobab, is the next great medium. And Sundance recognizes that. Technology companies like Intel recognize that. So we're all coming together at the film festival, and working together to define what that will mean. >> Kane, you're an Emmy award winning producer. Baobab's doing some cutting edge work. Take a minute to talk about what Baobab is doing, and why is it so relevant? We know it's cool. We've interviewed the CEO and Founder before. Share with the audience, what is Baobab doing? Why is it so relevant? >> So, we formed a couple years ago, and at the time, VR was, and it still is, in its very nascent stage. One thing that we recognized, was an opportunity to try to create content that would appeal for people from the ages of five to 105. There was a lot of documentaries, there was a lot of experiential art house type of material. And there was a lot of gaming type of content for VR. For us, we're big lovers of animation and how that unites families, kids, grandparents, teenagers, and we saw an opportunity to try to create content that could appeal to all of these different types of people through animation. So that's sort of our mission, is to inspire your childlike sense of wonder, using two mediums that are so meant for each other, which are animation and VR. >> I'd like to talk about some of the work you got going on a little bit later, but I want to talk about that 12 year old in his room, or the 16 year old that's got a full rig, tricked out with the keyboard, they're laying down music, they're building music, they're gaming, they might be creating art. They are a living, breathing creative. And, they're self learning. They're jumping on Youtube. They're jumping into VR meetups and groups. They're self learning. >> Kane: Absolutely. >> How do you connect to them? What do they do? What's the playbook? How do these people go to the next level? What's the industry doing around this? >> I think, one example I'll give is, I was at Annecy Film Festival, and that's one of the biggest animation focused film festivals in the world, and I was showcasing our very first piece, it was called Invasion, starring Ethan Hawke, where you're actually in the body of a bunny rabbit, and you meet another bunny rabbit. You create a bond. And together you thwart an alien invasion on Earth. What was so interesting to me, was I had never seen that sort of, that demo, that teenage demo, where young boys and girls would actually bring their parents back to the experience, and say this is what I want to study in college. This is what I want to do in art school. So, I think that they, growing up with all this new technology, really sort of get the idea of being in realtime, and having storytelling in realtime. And seeing that level of interest from that age group was very sort of affirming to us that we're on the right track, in terms of the next generation of storytelling. >> Well you guys are definitely on the right track, I can say that. But I think what your point confirms, and connects the dots for people that might not be in the industry is that the old tech world was, the geeks did it, software was an art and you had to be in that CS club. The democratization is a big trend here, and what you're talking about is, people are humanizing, they can see real emotional, practical examples. So the young guns, the young kids, they don't have baggage. They look at it with a clean slate and going, I want that. I can see myself using this. I can self actualize with this. So really kind of tips the scales, and proves the point. >> Absolutely. We world premiered Asteroids, our second VR experience, starring Elizabeth Banks, and one of the biggest millennial stars, Ingrid Nilson, last year at Sundance. Even had the first red carpet VR premiere in Sundance history. And watching the younger generation, it was our first piece where we actually used the controllers that had just come out in that past year. And watching them go in with no preconceived notions on what using controllers could be, to be a character in the experience, it was just fascinating, because they picked it up faster than anyone, and learned the language of being a character, and having hand controllers as a robot, so you could play fetch with an alien dog, or you could mirror their actions, or they might mirror yours, and creating these bonds and these experiences. So, that sort of fresh perspective is really exciting. >> Talk about the role of these experiences, and how they connect people, because one of the big trends also online today, in today's, I would say, yeah the peg the evolution is, you're really getting into the immersive experience, I believe that. But, content creates bonds between people, and good experiences creates glue between relationships, and forges new ones, maybe enhances existing ones. This is a big part of the media. >> Absolutely. For us, emotional connection is the key to getting people to put on headsets, and to come back to our experiences. And that emotional connection for us, is what we've witnessed, in terms of people forming bonds with our characters. So, everyone knows that VR can bring you to brand new worlds, and exciting places, and immerse you in places that you can never go. But, the one thing that I think we learned in our experience with VR, is that if you can create a bond between the user and other characters in the experience that they believe is real, and we use psychology, technology, and storytelling to do that, then they want to come back again and again. So, one of the trickiest parts of VR is trying to get people to have repeat views. And the feedback we've gotten from a lot of the technology platforms is people come back time and time again, and it seems to be because they actually believe these characters are real, and that they're friends. >> So talk about your journey, because you're at the front end of this wave, and you're participating, you're creating art, you're creating work product. You're building technology with the Baobab Studios. What would you do if you were 16? If you were a sophomore in high school, knowing what you know, and you could go back in time, or you could be today what you know at 16, what would you do? >> When I was 16, I had no idea what I was going to do. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I was going to do. But what I will say is, VR is really unique because it's so interdisciplinary. So, it actually invites people from all different fabrics of society, and different types of education. The most, I would encourage 16 year olds to just be who they are, and to play. And if I talked to my 16 year old self, I would have just encouraged myself to follow my interest and pursuits more, because many years later, actually VR has brought me back to a lot of my roots, and different things that I studied growing up, and was fascinated by. >> So it ignited your passion. >> Absolutely. >> Or things that you were really into, that you might have forgotten. Is that- >> Yeah, I studied something called symbolic systems at Stanford University, and I had no idea what I was doing. It combined computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. And the first thing I did after college was pursue potentially a career as a lawyer. But now it all makes sense. VR makes, brings everything together. >> What could have been, you know? >> Absolutely. >> Well, a lot of neural network, symbolic systems, this is the underpinnings of this complex fabric that is powering this content market. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Is there a success formula that you're seeing emerging, I know there's no silver bullet yet. A lot of experimentation. A lot of new things happening. But as this technology, and the scaffolding around it is being built, while also original content is being built, it's still evolving. What's the success formula, and what's the pitfall? What to stay away from? >> I think it's about, it's really about good storytelling. And I think it's a time to be courageous and brave, and put forward stories that wouldn't have otherwise been told in the more traditional mediums. Our latest project in production that I'm so personally excited about, is called Legend of Crow. It stars John Legend as a beautiful bird with the most beautiful feathers, and the most gorgeous voice, who during dark and cold times, must go on a heroes journey to bring light back to the world. Something I feel like in this day and age, a lot of people can relate to. But, on top of this story being based upon a beautiful Native American legend that hasn't really been exposed to the world, we've taken the opportunity to take the themes of diversity and self sacrifice, and self acceptance, to create an all star cast of minorities and women, and that's something I feel the younger generations can really relate to, because having worked a lot in Hollywood as a producer in traditional TV and film, things take a while, and there's a certain way of casting and doing things that follow an older model, and I think younger audiences are excited to have a character like Moth in our experience who speaks both Spanish and English, because that's the way the world is today. >> So I got to ask you a quick, you brought up diversity and inclusion kind of in your comment. I got to bring this up, because you guys do hit a nice demographic that I think is super relevant and important, the younger generation. So I talk to a lot of young people all the time. I say things like, you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into this game. You can be super smart. You don't need to learn how to code hardcore coding to get into this. And they respond to that. And that's one kind of, I would say, narrative that conventional wisdom might not be right. And the other one is the diversity. So my son, 16 year old, says, "Dad, your generation is so politically correct. All this nonsense." So, the younger generation is not living what we're living in, in these dark times, I would say, certainly with diversity, but how does VR really equalize? And will the storm pass? Diversity, inclusion, all that great stuff that are core issues, certainly are being worked on. But, do we see hope here? >> Absolutely. I think disruption in the form of a new technology and a new medium is, while scary to some people, is actually the most exciting and fertile time to equalize. Our CEO, Maureen Fan, who is a college classmate of mine, always wanted to work in animation. And she finally saw the right opportunity when VR came, and we put on headsets for the first time, and saw how there could be a new wave of exciting animators, through this disruptive technology. Because everyone else in more traditional animation is so focused on the old model, and the old ways of doing things, of getting things off the ground, of financing, of creating certain kinds of content that have been proven over time, in the old sort of studio model. >> What were some of those things that were instrumental in this breakout, to forge this new ground? >> I think a lot of it is the technology finally being ready. Our CTO, Larry Cutler, actually studied virtual reality at Stanford a decade before Maureen and I were there, and he had always been waiting for the right time to go into VR. >> Does he preach down, hey kids, I used to walk in the snow with bare feet to you guys, or has he, what's his role, how's he doing? >> He's amazing. He was the head of global character tech for all of Dreamworks animation, and like I said, I think one thing that distinguishes us from some of the other people in VR is that we're so focused on characters, so focused on them making eye contact with you, or with their facial features reacting in realtime, and being very believable, and forging that bond between you and that character. So, for us, that character technology, and having the top people in that space work with us, is the long term thing that is going to differentiate us from the crowd. >> I'd like to get your reaction to my comment about the computer science, and that's mainly, mostly a Silicon Valley thing, living in Palo Alto, so, but people are struggling when they go to college. What should I major in? And there's a narrative right now, oh you got to learn how to code, you got to be a computer science major. You don't. You don't have to be a CS major. Some of the most creative and technical brilliance can also come from other disciplines. What's your reaction to that, and what's your advice? >> I think people should just follow their effort. Because, if you follow what naturally comes to you, what you're good at, and that also has meaning and interest to you, and something that you can get feedback along the way, which is the great thing about being in a growing space, you are going to just spend your, you're going to spend a lot of late nights doing that stuff, and you can always bring it into your career path when that happens. And I think, we're in a very DIY time in VR. No one knows anything. We're constantly making mistakes, but then learning from them. And that's the most exciting process of being where we are. So, to people who are of college age, I would just tell them follow your effort. If you're interested in VR, it's an exciting time to just do it yourself. Learn from your mistakes. And then, and try to create something new. >> What does the new creative mean to you. When you hear that, new creative, what does that mean to you? >> You know, it's interesting being at these talks and panels, and at all these festivals, because I feel like a lot of people are looking for that new innovator who comes out of nowhere, and sort of just redefines the industry. And that could very well happen. But I actually think what's really exciting about right now is, it's more about having, understanding the bridge between all the different mediums and disciplines. I think new things are created when you combine areas that have not been traditionally aligned. So for example, Orson Welles arguably created one of the first great cinematic masterpieces in Citizen Kane, but he was able to do so by bringing values from theater, and from radio, and areas where he sort of learned the art of storytelling. And he was able to combine them in new and interesting ways that people hadn't seen before. So, for me it's less about looking for that silver bullet of a creative person who comes out of nowhere, but these younger generations who understand these different mediums, combining them and creating connections with them in an exciting way. >> Brooks Brown from Starbury Studios said on the panel, the next breakout star is going to be the kid in the basement that no one's ever heard of. >> Very possibly, but that kid in the basement, he needs to be passionate about a lot of different disciplines. So, what we've tried to emulate in doing so, is bringing the best people in gaming, bringing the best people from traditional film, bringing people who had interests in a lot of different areas, different art forms, and letting them kind of play together and learn from each other. Argue with each other, you know? And then come up with something that no one's seen before. >> We're going to have to come up with a camera, so that could be like an experiment. Like it's just a reality show in and of itself. All that talent, multi discipline together. >> Absolutely. >> John: It's like dynamite ready to explode. >> It's the challenge, it's the blessing, it's the curse and the blessing of our medium right now, because there's so much more to discover, but if people come in and have an open mind, and are willing ... If the people from Hollywood are willing to learn from the people who do gaming in Silicon Valley, who are open to learning from the people in New York who grew up on live theater, I feel those, finding that intersection, finding those beautiful intersections are where we're going to thrive. >> Well you guys highlight that multi disciplinary thing, but also highlights why diversity is so important. Diversity brings the most perspectives to the table, the most data, most contribution. It might be a little bit longer to work through the arguments, right? You got to be patient. >> Absolutely you have to be patient. We're really lucky to be working with John Legend on our VR piece. He had actually been looking for several years to find, wanting to play in this space, but not wanting to do it with the wrong partner at the wrong time. So, it's, there's an art to timing in everything that we do right now, and when we presented to him the story we're doing with the Legend of Crow, it felt like the perfect sort of match. >> Legend of Crow coming out. Head of Content, Kane Lee here, Baobab Studios. Thanks for spending the time here on the Cube Conversation. What's the timing of the release of the program? >> Probably late spring, but we're going to be announcing some news around that soon, and we have some more exciting updates about it that I can't wait to share. >> Alright, we are here at the Intel Tech Lounge as the Cube's Conversation at Sundance Film Festival, part of our coverage of Sundance 2018. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(tech 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 everybody this is the CUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vollante with my co-host Peter Burris. Jim Jackson is here, he's the senior vice president of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Happy to be here. Good to see you again and Jason Newton, vice president of global marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Guys, it wouldn't be a Discover without some big news, transitioning to Antonio. We're about to hear the key note but Jim, set up the week for us. The big news that we can expect. Show us a little leg. >> Yeah well first of all, thanks for having us here guys. We're really excited for this week. It's gonna be probably one of our biggest weeks of innovation. We've got a pretty amazing Discover lined up. So you're gonna see us talk about AI in the data center, so bringing predictive analytics from our Nimble acquisition it's called info site. We're extending that to three par so that really helps our customers predict and anticipate problems and solve them in advance. So that's really software-based leading with that. Another area is we're bringing consumption-based capabilities. A whole new suite of consumption offerings. We're branding it HPE Green Lake and it's really, think of purpose-built solutions for things like backup, SAP, data like environments but it's really outcomes as a service. So we're not able to give our customers the ability to have infrastructure as a service, and now outcomes as a service. And the other part of making hybrid IT simple that you're gonna hear about is how we're really helping our customers unify and manage that multi cloud environment. So applications are sitting in public clouds, private clouds, what we're hearing from our customers is, hey we need to be able to manage this a lot easier and have holistic ability to see all of that. So you're gonna see us talk about that on main stage as well. So new brands, a lot of innovation. We've also got some partnerships that we'll be rolling out later today. So a lot happening. >> Jason, you've spent a lot of time, sweat, toil, blood on branding. Obviously you're a big part of the branding exercise. Up leveling the messaging, we had you on two or three years ago, and you said, look, we're gonna change things. We're gonna shift the focus from product and widgets and really talk about what customers care about. How has that gone? Where are you at with that? It resonates extremely well with customers. In fact we just got out of a panel where we had four of our top customers, ABV, Dreamworks, IKEA and Nokia. And we just spent an hour just talking about their digital transformation journey and what they're all about. The room was packed. I think we had over 400 people who were in there. That's showing that we can be an innovation partner to those customers enabling them to share their stories at a venue like this is really powerful. >> We're becoming much more software and services led and it's really all about experiences. Providing that experience that our customers are looking for. >> Just follow up to that, so a lot of people think oh well HP, spun merge it's software business but you're leading with services and software. So help us clear that. >> We're doing a ton in software today. So if you just think of our software portfolio. We have HP 1V to manage our customers complete infrastructure estate, service storage and networking. We extended that last year with composability so HP and Synergy, we have over a thousand new customers since we announced that last year actually at this event. So we're seeing a lot of progress. Synergy enables our customers to really have one environment that can flex to the needs of multiple different applications so reduces over provisioning. AI, I talked about AI in the data center. So what we're doing with info site, that's software based, we're extending that to 3PAR and you'll see us extend that to other parts of the portfolio going forward. Nyara, and on the Aruba side of the house, software based. Aruba is very software centric and then of course, we'll be announcing this afternoon our code name project new stack, really about helping to manage that multi cloud environment. A lot happening in the software space and an area that we're very focused on. >> One of the things... By the way, we think that those three things that you mentioned, automation in the data center, on-premise capabilities and a cross multi cloud approach to management and managing your assets, absolutely spot-on. And we think ultimately and here's a question, we think that what's going to drive the determination is what does the data need? So talk to us a little bit about how you are articulating the idea of data as the new value source, the new value and hardware infrastructure and software and these capabilities, making it possible for the work to exist where the data requires. >> Yeah and I'll start maybe you can pile on a little bit. Our conversation starts with apps and data so we're starting the dialogue there and you know what we're seeing is you know really moving from large data centers, or only large data centers to centers of data that are really everywhere, right? So we're starting to see that edge really starting to proliferate and drive a lot more change, and what our customers are saying is wherever might, regardless of where my data sits, I need to manage it, I need to secure it, I need to process it, I need to be able to translate it into insight and that's really what our strategy is all about. We've been talking for the last couple of years about making hybrid IT simple. and we're really doing a lot in that space. So for example, we announced the acquisition of cloud technology partners and really what we're trying to do there it's the foremost authority really in helping customers understand how to migrate applications to to AWS or even to Google or Azure, and when you combine that with our on-prem capabilities, it really now starts to talk about data, we want to say your data is what matters and we want to help you manage that holistically. The software investments that we're doing enable you to have that complete view. And then from a consumption perspective, some of the things I talked about earlier, rolling that out right, making it easier to consume this as a service and only pay for what I use. So, we are in alignment. It all starts with data and wherever that data sits, it's how do I manage it? >> And that's why Aruba is such a great asset for us, because a lot of people think about Aruba as you know, you just replace copper wire and WiFi ... And hey, don't get me wrong, it's a money-making great business, but if you'd asked Kierty, he'd probably say we're a data business, right? >> Peter: We did ask him, and that is what he said. >> Is that what he said? Well, good, we're on message then. We're on message today, alright, yeah. I mean, because that's where the action is happening, that's where the data is being created, and so everything that they're doing around the the security 360 platform, the mobile first platform, everything is centered around, how do I draw a value in context from that data? >> Well I want to ask you about Aruba, because when you acquired Aruba, we said wow, this is a great business, it's gonna be a growth business, but is it a strategic weapon for HPE? Is it a strategic infrastructure component? From a messaging standpoint, It's all about the intelligent edge, that you've up-leveled that. Where'd that come from? Maybe take us through sort of the anatomy of-- >> Well I mean, the message is just exactly what we were saying. That if if value is gonna be created at the edge, if the data's gonna be coming from the edge, we have to drive a whole lot more intelligence into that edge in order to collect, process, analyze, secure the data that's coming in and make use of it, right? So I mean, that's where the genesis of the intelligent edge came from. >> Yeah, I mean I would say the other thing about Aruba that we're really seeing is all about experiences. So when we talk to our customers about Aruba, they're looking to deliver a different experience. Whether it's in retail, whether it's in stadiums, whether it's in the campus space. It's all about delivering a better experience. And that's really the value prop behind Aruba. Very software centric, open software, mobile solution. The other thing is, it's enabling us to engage more and more with parts of the company, customers that we might not have had as much engagement before. You know, the c-suite, you know, talking more with the line of business. because what they're focused on is how do I deliver that better experience? And Aruba's really playing a key role in doing that. We also have the view that ultimately, and you started the conversation about data, and we totally agree. But it has to be thought of from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. So whether we engage with Aruba, whether we engage with our core data center, capabilities, and our strengths there, or with services ... That's enabling us to holistically have a much more strategic conversation with our customers. So we're excited about that. >> I'd like to dig a little bit on this notion of AI for the data center, or AI for managing IT (mumbles). We'd like to talk about the difference between a breadth-first, which is I'm gonna do this, like in this big broad way, and we'll figure out how we're gonna get the components to participate, versus a depth-first. Which is, let's lean on suppliers, who know that hardware, know the software best, and ask them to create simulacrums, you know, digital representations that then will allow me to apply AI machine learning, et cetera. We like the depth-first approach, but customers ultimately want to see this bloom into a breadth approach. Talk to us a little bit about how individual elements are being represented, but in a coherent consistent way, so that you can get to a broader, overall set of automation across entire infrastructure. >> Well, I mean, I think that you're seeing the paradigm shift now. I mean for decades we've been chasing this idea that we can make the one tool to rule them all, this sort of magic management environment, one single pane of glass, everyone says that right? >> I've written a lot of research papers that suggested that, right? >> Right? And look, I think that's, we're done, alright? And the only thing we can do now is, how do we embed intelligence to make the infrastructure so smart it can take care of itself? And that's ultimately the experience that our customers are telling us that they want, right? Is, I don't want to be an expert on IT anymore. I don't wanna touch this stuff, I don't want to deal with it. >> Peter: Not just want, need. >> Right? I can't handle it, right? I mean, the scale and speed of everything is beyond the capacity ... I can't hire enough people to take care of it. So you know, I think starting there and saying, okay we're gonna start embedding that type of intelligence. Right now it's mostly predictive analytics type of stuff, but increasingly you're gonna see more true AI come in not just in the data center, with what we're doing with Nimble, right? But also with Nyara. Now we call it introspect, right at the edge. How do we start weaving that across to do a variety of things? Whether it's maintenance or performance optimization, or security. I think thinking of it like a continuous platform across the infrastructure is gonna give you that depth and kind of breadth of control that you're looking for. >> So that leads to kind of an ecosystem question, and I liked your comments on that. Because the question of breadth or depth, the answer is yes, you got to have both. The ecosystem posture has totally changed in the last year or so, subsequent. Because we had PWC on today. We've had Veam on earlier. These are-- >> Jason: They love us. Partners that you're putting forth, yeah. >> Jason: We're making them money. >> For sure, right. But they are partners that previously, you know, you wouldn't have profiled. Whether on stage, on the Cube, wherever. >> Jason: Yeah. >> How has the ecosystem evolved? >> I mean it's opening up a whole new set of opportunities for us. You know, if you think of when we had ES, a lot of people just felt like, hey we were gonna compete with them, right? Now that ES has spun out, we actually created another great partner in ES, but we've got a whole host of other SIs that want to engage with us. They want to take our capabilities in IT systems. Our consumption capabilities, and then align it with a value prop that they'll bring. So you talked about Veam for example, right? Data availability is really, really important for customers. So taking HPE and Veam together, we're able to deliver a great solution from data protection to recovery. Really powerful stuff, and we're seeing some great opportunities out there in the marketplace, and a very strong ROI. I mean, we have some data that says, hey over five years, is a 200% ROI. Another area, when you think of just partnering, right? Is what we're doing with our channel partners. So we're giving them more solutions that are channel centric, that we're driving through our channel organization, yeah. And then, we just announced a relationship a couple weeks ago with Rackspace. It's a managed private cloud, open source solution. We're using our consumption capabilities, combined with with Rackspace, their environment. And this is giving our customers the flexibility to now spin up very quickly, a private cloud environment that they're looking for with a lot of the public cloud capabilities. Very strong economics behind it. And then the edge, that's the other area we're seeing lots of new partnering opportunities as the edge continues to expand. So we believe that innovation is a team sport, and we're leaning in really hard, and I know you know the Gartner's and the IDCs don't track who are the best partners, but I think if they did, we would be at the top of the list. >> Well, probably a lot of this activity was going on previously, so it's not like you're starting from ground zero. >> Jim: Correct. >> But you just, from a marketing standpoint, you really didn't talk about it, because you had colleagues, whether it was from EDS or the software division that's saying, hey, don't talk about that, help us out here. So, how has that changed the way in which you market? One of the big values is your go-to-market. I mean, people are drooling to now partner with HPE. >> Yeah, and one of the big reasons is honestly, is point next. Because they see the value in what Accenture or PwC, or Wipro can bring from understanding a business, or whatever, versus the deep technical knowledge of a point next to come in, and what they really love is the consumption model stuff that we've been able to wrap around it. They see that customers want, that in order to move fast with less risk, right? You've gotta have some sort of financial lever that says, okay, I can start small and I can grow over time. I'm not putting all my money out in one place and we've been building that with flex capacity over the last several years. You're gonna see, well, I guess we announced yesterday, a new Green Lake ... Making that even simpler to consume. Every one of our partner says, I wanna take your IT expertise in that consumption based model and wrap it around a total solution. And that's what's like white-hot right now, and there's unlimited opportunity right now from ... As Jim said, edge to core to cloud. >> And we have another one we're gonna announce on stage in a couple of hours, so we're pretty excited about that as well. >> Well, you see that in the numbers too, yeah. >> Jason: I think we might have a clue what that is. >> We're excited about that. >> Yeah, I know, it is. Well, look, and you kind of you kind of gave something of a preview when you talked about the three things that you want to be able to do. Because there's one brand that hasn't been mentioned yet. But ultimately the business is recognizing that the technology questions that we're raising here are crucial to their future success, but they don't want them to be a continuous source of antagonism. >> Group: Right. >> So they recognize that they need the capability, but they want to dramatically simplify the degree to which it's evasive. I once had a CIO tell me that the value of my infrastructure is adversely proportional to the degree to which anybody in my business knows anything about it. So how do you then take steps to ensure that your customers don't know anything about the infrastructure, even though they have the infrastructure where the data demands, which is gonna be at the edge, and on premise? >> I think that's some of the things we're focused on now. So software to make infrastructure much more frictionless. And you're not really worrying about managing that infrastructure, it's just there to power the business, to deliver the business. Consumption-based offerings with Green Lake, this is truly purpose-built stacks for specific things, because our customers are telling us, I don't want to have to set all that up and manage it, but I want that outcome, and I only want to pay for what I use. So those are just a couple of examples of how we're trying to simplify it. Because ultimately it's all about the experience and the outcome and being able to translate all that data into insight. >> Well, when you're simplifying your face to the world, we heard in the last earnings call, new reporting structure going forward. Hybrid IT ... intelligent edge, and financial services, which is exploding, the consumption base modeling 22% growth last quarter. So organizationally, presumably, you've started to take that shape, and that's how you're presenting your face to the world. Is that right? >> Yeah, and that's helping us to really break down some of the silos, that has existed in this company for a while. And you're seeing that really, really becoming much more unified in terms of how we go to market, and how we think about engaging with our partners how we engage with our customers. >> Are your customers breaking down those silos at a consistent rate? Are you a little bit ahead, a little bit behind? How would you evaluate that? I think it's a transition, it depends on which customer, which sector. We still see some of some of them that are maybe a little behind. Some that are a little bit ahead, but really everybody wants to start the conversation much more about, how do I move faster? How do I accelerate my business? It's all focused on outcomes starting at that data level, and then how can you help me? And this is where I think some of the acquisitions that we've made, like CTP are very empowerful, and then all the software capabilities that we're bringing as well. So we're leading the dialogue much more around that. >> And the only way they're gonna get there is to break down those silos. >> Jim: Absolutely, absolutely. And we have to help them do that, right? We have to help them do that and give them the solutions to do this. >> So Jim, I want to go back to a point that you made about those other two research firms, Gartner and IDC I think it was. But you said that if they were measuring the value, or if there was a magic quadrant for who is the best partner, you guys would be up in the upper right hand quadrant? But partners in this world, especially here in Europe, are more than just the big guys. >> Jim: Yes. >> How are you taking steps to ensure that that large mass of crucially important companies out there, that still where a lot of that innovation, a lot of that excitement really is, are coming with you, are able to move with you? Because your ability to certainly provide them with financial support is important, but your ability to show them the future, and have them see their business in the future, is going to be crucial to whether or not they stay with you. >> And I think we're doing a couple of things. We created our Pathfinder program, I'm sure you guys are aware of that, right? So these are some of the newer partners coming up, we're actually investing in them, helping to scale them, because we think it's going to be unique innovation. Another area is this program that we have called Cloud 28 Plus, where we have a whole network of providers, service providers, ISVs, SPs, that's part of a network that we're able to grow and kind of scale that ecosystem, so I don't know if you want to comment anything more on that, but-- >> Jason: Up to 700 now (mumbles). >> Yeah, so Saviea is very passionate about this obviously, but he's done some some really good things-- >> Peter: And he should be passionate about it. >> But that gives us an ecosystem now of partners who are part of that HPE ecosystem, but different use cases, different compliance needs, they sit in different regions, so we're able to give our customers a lot of that flexibility. >> Alright, gotta give us something on the key note. Just a tidbit. What can you share? A little nugget? >> I mean, you know-- >> Dave: Teaser. >> Some themes we've talked about. You'll hear the word friction free a lot, how do we make things invisible? And really demonstrating how with services and software, and consumption-based service models, can we do that for customers? You'll hear a lot of those themes. We'll highlight some of the things we've announced over the last 24 hours, a few weeks. So we'll emphasize what we've done around Nimble and info site, and the importance of AI in the data center. We'll obviously spotlight point next, and Anna and her energy, she's gonna be out there and really firing people up. And a few surprises in the software space that will come today, that it'll probably cause the market to do a bit of a double take and say who is that that's doing this again? Yeah, it's us, it's HPE doing that. >> And you'll see us also talk about a little bit of a vision in terms of how we see the market starting more at the edge, bringing in AI, composing for different kinds of environments, and then how HPE has really been able to invest, so we're gonna start to show that over the last couple years, we have had a very clear agenda where we want it to go, and now that's all coming to fruition, so we'll start to show all that holistically in terms of our technology vision. So that's another thing that we're gonna be highlighting. >> Great. Perfect timing, we can hear the announcement. Keynotes are coming up, we'll be broadcasting those on our twitch channel. Siliconangle.com/twitch You can go to HPE.com and see the keynotes as well. Gents, great energy, awesome to see you. >> It's great to see you guys, thank you. >> We'll be watching the college football ranks. You guys have a fun little rivalry of Ohio State here. >> The Ohio State. >> Dave: ... Yale, but nobody cares. >> Baker for Heisman. >> Dave: Gents, thanks very much for coming. >> Thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (soft tech music)

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here, in San Francisco, for day two. We're winding down day two of two days of wall to wall coverage, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier the founder, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media (mumbles) the Cube our next guest Larry Cutler, co-founder and CTO of Baobab Studios. >> You got it right. >> And you're co-founder and CEO Maureen Fan was at our Grace Hopper event. >> Larry: Yes. >> Well thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys are doing great. Love the story-telling, gaming, tech culture coming together here at Samsung. >> Yep. >> And seeing the future. The future, if you connect the dots, is augmented reality voice-activated, headphones that can be hacked and programmed and customized. You guys are doing some interesting things, you've got some good awards. Take a minute to talk about your studios. What are you guys doing, what's the aha moment for you guys. What should people know? >> So we at Baobab Studios, we're reinventing animated storytelling using VR. And so what we've, our aha moment was feeling that you could completely immerse yourself in the world in VR. And when we started thinking about well what is so special about an animated film, it's really about transporting you to faraway worlds, and making those worlds so real that you could like reach out and touch them. And then if you think about VR, that's kind of the same thing, where VR's promise is being able to transport you to incredible places and to make you really feel like you're in those worlds and you're part of those worlds. >> And to relax and chill a little bit too. >> Well relax and chill as well. >> Or entertainment or to be thrilled. >> So in our case we wanted to take all the experience that we have telling stories at places like Pixar and Dreamworks and apply that into this new medium. And so we found that VR is an incredibly powerful medium, and it really is one that's unlike film and unlike games. So, you're talking about bringing together the expertise of people from films, and people from games. That's critical to what we're doing, and yet at the same time, the experience is something that's totally different. >> Yeah we were commenting with some of our guys in our office how Twitch was experimenting with using the comments to drive the game behavior. You start to see new kinds of game systems develop around the storytelling as more of a behavioral dynamic, not the boring game I figured out, or the multi-player game with my same friends, or whatever that's going on, you're seeing a whole new level of creativity going on, one. Two, the other question is how much does it cost to make these things, 'cause Dreamworks and these guys are spending a lot of dough to do animation. >> Larry: Yes. >> I mean it's not cheap, so how do you guys crack the code on keeping it low, not low-budget, but low-cost and also intelligent is that the secret sauce? >> Yes well that's certainly super important for us. You know we're a start-up company, so obviously we need to be able to have a pipeline that if we run efficiently and you know for us, I think what we've done is we've brought together some of the best people, you know. So we've hired our friends, we've hired people who are really experts in the field, and we're really creating a next-generation VR platform so that we can actually create these animated experiences, be able to experiment in this space. You know, sort of try out different techniques and storytelling methodologies and at the same time do it in a way that we can, you know, sort of experiment as much as possible. >> John: Talk about some of the awards you guys had, I mean, you guys done some things. Share some of the accolades you've gotten. >> Yes, so, I mean what's amazing is that we started with our first piece of content Invasion!, and we premiered it last year in April at Tribecca Film Festival, and it's really gone on to, first of all, from a consumer standpoint, it's one of the most popular downloaded pieces of content on all the VR platforms, and at the same time it's been shown at a number of different film festivals, and it recently won an Emmy, so we're very excited about that, and, you know, what we realize is that audiences just fell in love with this bunny character Chloe. So Invasion! is this story about two aliens that try to take over Earth, and they're thwarted not by humans with powerful weapons, but by cute little woodland creatures. In the first episode in Invasion! they're thwarted by this cute little bunny Chloe, and what happens is that at the very beginning of the piece, Chloe like hops up to you, and if you look down you're a little bunny in the scene, you've got bunny legs, you can hop around. And audiences, you know, the viewer just reacted in ways that you would never do in a film, like people are waving at Chloe, a lot of people reach out and try to pet Chloe, a lot of people mimic what Chloe's doing, and in short people are just treating Chloe as if she's real. And it made us realize that there's something really powerful here that is really worth kind of leaning in and digging deeper into. >> And what was the next step after that, so you went what you went, some development, was it the game, was it the character development? How do you double-down on them, I'm just kind of curious on thinking about how the, on the thinking behind it. >> It was really interesting because we, in Invasion! we were kind of the first to make you a character in the story, but at the time there really weren't hand controllers, or any of the devices so that you could actually really have sort of a more like increased role in the story. And so at the same time, people really felt that they were front and center, and they felt this sense of protecting Chloe from the aliens 'cause you're placed right in the center of the story. And so with Asteroids! when we started, we just wanted to dive deeper into that idea of you playing an active role in the story. And so in Asteroids! we focused on the two alien characters Mac and Cheez and their relationship, and you're a helper robot on the ship, so you have. >> So how do I get involved and get these stories, do I have to have a VR kit? So I don't have, I haven't bought anything yet VR-wise, so for me, how do I engage with you guys, what do I do? Do I buy Oculus Rift, or certain headsets? >> So our stuff is meant to be available for everyone. We really want to have as many people be able to see our content as possible. And so first of all, if you have a VR headset of any type, our, Invasion! is available on all those platforms, so that's the high-end headsets like the Rift and Vive, the PlayStation VR for Sony, as well as if you have a mobile phone like a Samsung phone, you can plug it into your VR. At the same time, we also have a Baobab Cardboard app, so you don't even need to have VR to see our product. So you just get an IOS or Android app, a Baobab app. >> So I'm in the market to buy a headset, I'm not price sensitive, what should I buy? What would you recommend? (Larry chuckling) >> Well there really are so many options, so you know obviously at the high >> John: What would you get? >> Well at the highest end, you know, getting a Rift or Vive really gives you the full VR experience because it's really tracking your position and orientation so you can actually walk around a space, the characters can react to you in believable ways, and it's all happening in real time. And on the other hand, the Sony PlayStation VR's are really affordable if you've got a Sony Playstation, you just buy the PSVR headset, you plug it right in and you're ready to go. I'm really excited looking forward to a world where you're not tethered to your computer, and so it's really exciting to see these stand-alone headsets that are going to come out that basically there's no tethering to a computer and yet you have that same inside-out tracking so that >> And this is the Samsung vision, right? The Samsung vision is to use their displays. >> Yes, exactly. See right now what you have, which is, which is already really exciting, is you take your Samsung phone, you plug it into a Gear VR, and the one thing that's missing is that you're not able to track both the position and orientation of where you are, and so the next generation headsets are going to have that. And the experiences will be much higher feeling. >> Alright cool, so then I, I'll actually download all of this stuff. So as the CTO of the venture, your job is to kind of look over the landscape. You have to have the 20 mile stare of the future, not screw it up, but you've got to win the present. >> Larry: Yes, we're all about being able to deliver in the present and look forward to the future. >> And that's the key, and you have that unique skill as an entrepreneur. What are you guys doing now technically and with the product, what are some of the key things that people should know about, because I mean I look at the CG and the animation world, and you see the Moore's law kind of coming that way, right, so you go wow, as someone with a live video, I would love to have a bunny and the cube set right here, right? So we see a future where I want to immerse myself with characters, not just stickers. >> We of course see that as well, so you know, obviously. >> John: Is expensive I mean it must be, 'cause in the old days what, you had the artists, monster storage, tons of compute, what's it like now? >> Well we're a really small start-up company, so we are not a, you know, 300 person organization that is producing a full animated film. We're a small team of artists and engineers working together in the same way that we had that same excitement in the early days. I started my career at Pixar in some of their earlier films, and it was that same >> John: Power work stations, you had that high-end gear. >> Yeah so it was that same excitement in those early days, like we just had to figure out like how are we going to actually create this shot, how are we going to like, you know, build this character, how are we going to like finish this on time. And we have that same exact excitement in the office. >> When were you at Pixar, were you there for the Toy Story kind of thing? >> Yeah, so I worked on the Toy Story films, and A Bug's Life and Monster's Inc., and then I went over to Dreamworks and headed up all of their character technologies on their various films. >> Okay so you guys do anything different than those guys, or are you guys more focused more simple? >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting is that this is really a new medium and it's a new skill set, because what's happened is that you are part of the world, and for us the thing that's most exciting is that by you being a character, first of all, the other characters are not just able to have, you know, sort of high-quality animation, but they're able to react to you, and so there's there A. a number of technical innovations that you need to overcome so that we can have that same high-quality character performance that I would expect from a Pixar or Dreamworks film happening, running in real time at 90 frames a second on my headset, and at the same time also be able to have those characters react to you and respond to what you're doing. And you know, so we've scratched the surface on that. So one of the things that's really interesting is how two people will actually have all these subconscious communication cues, you know, whether it's eye contact or whether it's two lovers sitting across the table and mirroring each other's behavior, that's the type of thing that we can add into our animation. And at the same time, we have stories where depending on what you do, whether you choose to participate or not, that actually affects the outcome, and affects the way that characters respond to you. And so having much smarter character performances is certainly one area that I think is really exciting. >> And that's going to be interesting for you guys because you have some structured ways to do that, and then some unstructured ways to do it with community data, machine learning, and then you can use bots in a way to help you get data, but you almost could have character developments be dynamic. >> You definitely could, and you know for us I think the thing that is always the biggest point that we come back to is story. And so on one hand we want to tell one story that's really told well, not ten different stories, and on another hand, because you're part of that story, depending on what you do, that's actually going to affect how the characters respond to you, and that could be in a really nuanced way, and so, you know, building up AI systems, and building up the smarts so that you can actually have that type of response, and yet still feel like these characters are alive and breathing. >> Well the Chloe example on Invasion! is great example, you'd love to have that automated, so when you see those magical moments, the story could evolve, you can kind of give it that programmable policy-based taping. (John laughing) >> Yeah exactly so you know, so this is the type of thing. >> We're geeking out here on the set, Larry, great to have you on, super informative content, and I love the world you're in, I think the world's changing, I think you're going to see some interesting dynamics coming, you certainly have the historical view, Pixar and Dreamworks, old school, if you call that old school. >> That's right. >> Now the new school's coming in, certainly AR looks good too. >> Yeah, we're really excited about AR as well. When we think about stories, you know, VR is about transporting you to a different world and having a story take place there. AR is about the characters being alive in your world, both are really exciting. >> Have you seen the Magic Leap demo? >> Larry: Yes, yeah. >> What's it like, can you tell us? >> I'm not allowed to tell. >> John: Is it good? >> Yes, yeah. >> So it's worth half of another half a billion, oh I can't wait. >> That I can't say, you know. I can't comment on their business, but. >> It's a freaking award chest. >> I think there's a lot of exciting things you know, AR. >> They must have a killer demo, I want to find out, I want to see this demo. Magic Leap, I want to to see your demo. All seriousness, great to have you on, and certainly come down to our Cube studios. I want to follow your story, I think you guys are on the cutting edge of a new user experience that's going to bring computer animation, computer graphics, into a new persona as a storytelling, so congratulations. Larry Cutler, how do you say the. >> Baobab. >> Baobab, B-A-O-B-A-B Studios in Redwood City, California. It's the Cube live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier, more after this short break. (peppy music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Maureen Fan. She is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studio, which is the industry's leading VR animation studio, so, welcome Maureen. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> It's excited to talk to you, because you just won an Emmy. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You just won an Emmy for "Invasion", so, tell us a little bit about invasion. >> It was our first piece ever and it was just an experiment to see if we could even create VR and it's a story about these adorable little bunnies and you are actually a bunny too, you look down, you have a furry, little bunny body and these aliens that come to try to take over the Earth, with their advanced technology and you and your bunny friend end up saving the entire Earth and it's starring Ethan Hawk and it just came out last year. And we're really excited, because it became the number one top downloaded VR experience across all the headsets and it's getting turned into a Hollywood Feature Film. >> Very cool, very cool >> Thank you. >> And you have another film coming out too and this is "Rainbow Crow" >> Yes. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about "Rainbow". >> So, "Rainbow Crow" is based off of a Native American legend about how the crow used to have beautiful rainbow feathers and a beautiful singing voice and it's John Legend, in our piece and how he decides to sacrifice himself, by flying into the sun to bring warmth and fire back to the Earth and in the process, loses all his beautiful feathers, becomes black and burnt and his voice becomes like the crow's voice, but it's about how beauty is within and there's also, huge themes about diversity and how if you learn to accept yourself and your differences, that's when you can accept others and that's why we specifically cast minorities and women, so, we have John Legend, Constance Wu, from "Fresh off the Boat" as a skunk character, Diego Luna, from "Rogue One", for the moth character, as well as Randy Edmunds, as a Native American elder, narrator, and we have a whole bunch of other stars to announce, soon-- >> Well we cannot wait to hear. That's already an amazing line-up. >> Thank you. >> So, when you're thinking about "Rainbow Crow" and particularly, because it's VR, which is relatively new, still experimental, I mean, the messages of diversity, does it lend itself to VR, better than, say, a standard animation film? >> Absolutely, because if you think about stories that you just watch passively, the reason why we need stories and humanity, in general is to experience characters and stories beyond those we can experience in our real lives and we think, "Oh, how would I feel if I was in the "position of that character or what would I do?" but in VR, because you are actually playing a character in a role, you actually have to decide at that point, "what would I do?" so, it's not just a experience that I just see, it's one where I'm actively experiencing it, so, I create a memory and remember afterwards and there's all these research studies at Stanford by Jeremy Bailenson, who is head of the Stanford VR lab, that shows if you are made a homeless person, inside a VR experience and you have to go through a day in the life of a homeless person or you would look in the mirror and see that you are a black woman, that you, when you get out of the headset, you act completely differently. You have so much more empathy for these people than you would normally and so, it gets you to care about these characters, in a way that you don't normally and in VR, because you're doing it in a real-time game engine, these characters can act and react to what you do, so you can turn that empathy into action and actually act upon your caring, which we call compassion, so, it really changes you in a way, that normal, traditional story-telling doesn't, so, I think that having voices and characters that are different, in front of the screen, and also, behind the screen are really important to create role models and different perspectives for all the people out in the world. >> And these are movies that are targeted at kids, children, but do you see a future in which, where there is more targeted at adults, for VR? >> Absolutely. The funny thing is, in the beginning, the VR distributors didn't think that people would want our VR animation, because they're like, "Oh, it's just going to be these hardcore boys "that just love to play games. "Are they going to want this animation?" and VR is targeted towards adults, that's why they were surprised and we were surprised when "Invasion" became the number one downloaded VR experience. It shows that the audience for our content is from little kids to grandmas and everyone in between and that's probably why it became the top downloaded experience, is because it's universally appealing and has themes that are appealing to just, every single generation, so, absolutely, but for VR to become mainstream, there needs to be more universally appealing content. Right now, the content tends to be for games, like parkour games, as well as documentaries, which are two amazing pieces of content for this medium, but for it to become mainstream, we need more universally appealing content and I'm excited about, right now, it's a new industry. This is when minorities and women in particular, can enter the space and help shape the voices and the direction of the industry. >> That is exactly where I wanted to go next. So, let's talk a little bit about Baobab Studio. It's not that old and VR is not that old and so, why are there more opportunities, would you say, for women, and minorities? >> Well, if you look at traditional animation in the traditional entertainment fields that's a very mature industry and to break into that industry, you have to either have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage, but VR, there's technological disruption, which means nobody has an advantage at all, means it's a level playing field and everybody can come in and start something, so, this is a perfect opportunity, when there's low barriers to entry of coming in, for women and minorities, anyone who wants their voice heard, to start companies or to make experiences and we can set the groundwork, because there's no one telling us what we can and can't do, because no one actually knows what we can and can't do yet. >> Right, right, but yet you are still of a female, asian figurehead of a studio, that will hopefully, someday be a major studio. You're working on it, but do you find that people take you as seriously in Hollywood? I mean, what are you coming up against? >> Well, it's really interesting, because I heard for even fundraising is one of the hardest parts of starting a company and there was a Stanford Research Study that showed that if you took a deck, a pitch deck for a company and you had a male voice-over versus a female voice-over the male voice-over was, I don't remember what, it was like 50% more likely to get funded than the woman with the same exact pitch deck, so I knew from that and they also show that if you are married and wear a ring you're taken more seriously, or if you're less attractive, also, you're taken more seriously and my hypothesis and some of the hypotheses out there, is it takes away the whole entire female attraction thing, like what does it mean to be an attractive female, so, I had to go into the meetings, knowing this. I even considered wearing a ring. I considered wearing a paper bag over my head. >> A bag over you head. Exactly, exactly. >> But at the same time I felt that I need to be myself and the best thing to, there's a correlation between the perceived leadership and confidence, that I needed to just go in there and be confident in myself so, I knew that, that could work against me, but I just needed to be myself, but I had to make sure that I was really confident and really believed in what I said and honestly, besides being confident and aggressive, I also, felt comfortable, because a lot of the people I talked to, I knew from my network and I had many of my male friends and female friends who knew these VC's, do the initial introduction, so I felt more comfortable going in, for them already knowing that I had somebody else saying that I was awesome. >> Yeah, and you've had many mentors and sponsors along the way too. >> Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most important things, for my career from the very beginning. When I graduated from business school, I actually emailed my mentors and said, "Here are the things I care about for finding a job." I didn't have to go find any jobs. They actually found all these jobs. for me, set up informational interviews, for me and I just went in and did it, all the informational interviews, got the offers and just choose one of them that I wanted to be in but, even for starting my company, my co-founder, Eric Darnell was a write and director of all four "Madagascar" films and I got introduced to him, through my mentor, Glen Entis who is the co-founder of PDI Dreamworks Animation and he was my mentor through Zynga and then, Gen Entis introduced me to Alvy Ray Smith, who is the co-founder of Pixar, who also became our advisor, Alvy Ray Smith, then introduced us to Glen Keane, who is the animator for "Little Mermaid", "Alaadin". >> The power of networks. >> It was all through the network and through my mentors that I found, a lot of the opportunities that I have and they also helped my through my personal life and how to navigate being entrepreneur and I rely on them so much. >> So, beyond finding the right mentor and sponsor what else would you give, your parting words to the young Maureen fans out there? >> I think there's a tendency for society to pressure you to conform, to money, fame, beauty and you don't need to listen to that and you don't need to be bucketed. I designed my own major at Stanford and with an eBay, I took four different roles. I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit and you can be who you are and create a category onto yourself and so, don't feel pressured to listen to what society is telling you. The other thing, is if you are faced with pushed back for being promoted and you feel like it's maybe because you're a woman, we have a tendency as women to start blaming ourselves and thinking there's something wrong with us, versus research shows men are most likely to blame the system, don't let it affect you and bring you down, because you need to actually be confident and believe in yourself in order to rise above. >> Great. Great advice. Maureen, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> And best of luck to you. >> Thank you, so much. >> Hope you win another Emmy. >> Thank you. >> Come back and talk to us again. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from Grace Hopper, just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas is SiliconANGLE's CUBE, our flight ship program. We go out to the event ... I'm John Furrier, My co-host David Vellante. Been watching 3 days of wall to wall exclusive coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. Our seventh year covering HP Discover, now called HPE Discover. Dave, we've covered them all. Now we're doing some European versions. I missed the last one in London, but you were there. But you and I have covered HP Discover, Now HPE Discover, for now our 7th year. Interesting times as they say. >> Dave: I'll say. >> We live in interesting times. HP's been getting hammered. Certainly the competitions been slamming them, The press has not been kind to them, People think they're irrelevant. Wall Street just slammed them, so Jim Cramer on CNBC, really taking Meg to task, But we always come back and we feel differently when we're actually at the event. When you actually talk to the people in the company. They got a lot of cash on the books. They've got a lot of customers. They got technology. They're doing the vendor R&D that you guys have pointed out in your recent, ground-breaking, true private cloud research market sizing you put out there. Astonishing change. And I think, my gut is, yeah, certainly HP's had some changes in corporate development, but the reality is that they now have set that up and the market is exploding. It's got the cloud market that's coming on premise. The private cloud business is taking off. >> Yeah, you know, John, we have documented this over the last seven years, and it's like the Band-Aid is coming off slowly, and it finally feels like this Discover (ripping noise) is finally almost there, right? Because you remember the split, and then the spin merge, and then the software business, okay. This has been the cleanest Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover that we've been to. There wasn't a lot of noise about software, they had a little separate event going on. Not a lot of talk about the spin merge, a lot of talk about Pointnext, I think that's good, I like their branding. >> It's like they cleaned up all the rooms in the house, and the outside's got a new fresh coat of paint. I got to say, last year- noticeably, the branding, which we were kind of originally critical on two and a half, three years ago; the show was beautiful, the branding's amazing this year, again, they're going to that next level, you're starting to see the clean messaging, it's as if the ship has been kind of re-readied. And we said that last year, but to be fair, we did say last year that they got to prove it to you, They got to show the results. And we were talking with Alain, who runs their data center infrastructure group, he agrees; the metrics that all the other analyst firms are using out there are irrelevant, and he believes that new metrics have to be redefined. This to me is the biggest story of this show, is that HP is eyeing a new sea change and I don't think people understand it. That's my personal opinion. >> I think you're right, I mean, the narrative on HP is, oh, they're just a hardware company, hardware's dying, what are they doing, et cetera. Well the reality is, people have been telling me the hardware business is dying since I've been in the business. The good trend for them is, the hardware business is consolidating. Of course, the tough news is, a lot of it's going to the public cloud. But as you've been pointing out all week, there's plenty of growth, on prem, in what we call the true private cloud. >> That's the biggest discussion of the show here, is the impact of the Wikibon research, the true private cloud report that you guys put out, I want to spend some time with you on that and ask you some really pointed questions. What is the true private cloud report that Wikibon put out, and what does it mean, why are people talking about this research so much here? >> So three years ago, the team at Wikibon started to quantify this notion of private cloud, and we looked at it and said, ah, this is cloud-washing. Really this is just virtualization. What we really want to see is, on prem, mimicking,to a substantial degree, the public cloud. Orchestration, certainly, >> Agility, >> Management, agility, pay-as-you-go, those types of things. Okay, so, the genesis of the market move is something that we heard from Alan Nance, our friend, several years ago at the Vertica user conference. He said- he was, at the time, CIO of Philips- he said, "my CEO said 75% of our spend in infrastructure "is non-differentiated, so we're going to eliminate it, "and everything we're going to do is going to be as a service." That was three years ago. So, massive change, and Philips went out to all of its suppliers and said, this is what were doing, if you can't do business with us this way, you're out. And remember, we wrote a bunch of stuff about it, and Alain came back, okay. So they were one of the early folks making that move. Everybody is now doing that. So what's happening is, there's going to be $150 billion that is going to vaporize out of non-differentiated heavy lifting. And it's going to go in two places: it's going to go into the public cloud, and it's going to go to what we call true private cloud, and that true private cloud business is going to grow to be about $250 billion within the next 10 years, okay? So that's a long term market forecast. >> So the addressable market for true private cloud is what, 260, or 250 plus- >> 250, just under $250 billion. Which is growing faster than infrastructure as a service, public cloud, and it will ultimately, we believe, be larger than that IAAS business. Not as large as SASS, that's going to be the biggest public cloud market, but it's a huge opportunity for companies, and it's a land grab, and it's a dogfight. >> So, I want you to explain this, 'cause I think this is important, and it took me a couple minutes to click on this. You had mentioned that- there's a point in your slide on that deck, the size of the market is huge, it's $250 billion, that's a lot of cash. But the TAM component of labor costs, now, this is the big fear, everyone thinks, "oh, my job is going away, AIs and auto ate my job away", but yet you're saying $150 billion of cash costs are going to shift. >> To where? >> Absolutely. Okay, so a couple of things. What is going to shift? Today, there's so much IT labor spent on provisioning servers, provisioning storage, tuning systems, tuning databases, all this stuff that can be now hyper-automated, as the CEO of Wipro said, so that's happening today, as we speak. So, vendor R&D, i.e., R&D money that goes into appliances, boxes, new systems, new software, is going to replace and automate out those non-differentiated tasks. So if your job is provisioning LUNs, you really want to re-skill. >> So what's that mean for the customer in HP, and why is that important to this show, why are people talking about this report, what's the relevance? >> Because everybody's talking about their digital transformation. And how do you fund a digital transformation, right? You've got to spend all this money to become a digital, data driven company. Well, where do I get that money? >> John: Real cash involved, basically. >> Yeah, there's cash involved, so how do I do that? Well, I have to shift away from things that aren't driving value for my business, and eliminate that, and put the resources in things that are driving value. Application development, new development paradigms, digital transformations, new partnerships, and that's where the money's going. And so again, if you're an IT infrastructure patch management pro, you either have to re-skill, or you're going to be out of a job. >> Did you see Kate Swanborg light up when we talked about the private cloud, 'cause that's exactly what was her point. >> Yeah, well they're seeing it at DreamWorks, because essentially what they're doing, they're changing the game in animation. My prediction is, they're going to be able to pump out many more movies within a year now, and that's going to make them more competitive. I think that's part of the reason why she didn't want to dig too deep into what they're doing, 'cause I think they see it as a competitive advantage. >> Yeah, and she did tease a little bit out by saying that the creative people are so much more productive, she mentioned the dragon. Alright, other impact: Wall Street. We see a lot of analysts kind of taking HP to town. We know the competition, we talked to Michael Dell, he came on The Cube; Meg stopped by but she did not come in, that's notable for the folks out there, Michael certainly sits down with us; Michael says, "hey, I got plenty of cash", when I bring up the debt thing, he thinks bigger is better, HP thinks smaller and nimbler is better- >> This is going to be really interesting- >> Your thoughts on that as we move forward? >> Look, there's two, sort of, bromides, right, with Wall Street. First disappointment is never the last; uh oh, that would be bad news for HP, but Meg said, "we have bottomed in terms of margins, margins will improve." And a big thing's going to happen next month, HP's gets the cash from the spin merges, right, that's going to happen, and that's a big deal because their balance sheet- they're going to have $12 billion in cash on the balance sheet, which will match their debt, and they're going to start to be acquisitive. Dell EMC can't be acquisitive right now. They got to retire that debt and delever. >> We saw SimpliVity and Nimble, front and center, a lot of good success with the software there. >> Yep, so this will be really interesting to see, is this the last disappointment, is this a buying opportunity? >> Yeah, we're going to watch it, and- >> So if I had to bet, if I had to bet I'd say it is a buying opportunity, based on what I'm seeing here. It's much cleaner, leaner, and they've also restructured the sales organization to a great extent, so hopefully the execution's going to be better. >> Well, I'm not that generous, I think I want to see more results, I think- >> I know, but if you see more results, you're going to miss the upturn. (laughs) >> Well the question, to me, is- I do believe that they have an advantage with the true private cloud report you guys put out, I think that validates the shift of spend in IT, which validates the fact that it's growing, not shrinking, and yes, people might not be buying boxes but they're going to be buying IT. >> And the big thing is, well you know, John, the street right now wants growth. That's why Amazon can make no money and still crank, right? But if HPE can eke out any growth and start throwing off cash again, I think the stock is going to do just fine. >> Other notable things; obviously, the outsource business is gone, Pointnext is the solution, we had Ana on from Pointnext, she was the leader; other notable thing is the absence of Chris Hsu with Micro Focus, we had a chance to ... saw him at the Foundation Room at the Mandalay Bay the other night, had a great conversation. Apparently, they're not included in HPE Discover because they're a separate company. They're apparently doing really well. >> Well Micro Focus is killing it, right? I mean, their stock price increased faster than Facebook last year (laughs) so, that's an interesting play. I think it's a new private equity play, John. You know, the private equity play used to be, suck as much cash out and then leave the carcass. I think the new private equity play is, invest, and then take it to market again, and try to get that value from the market, so increase the value. >> I think you're onto something, and this is why I've always been complimentary of HP's corporate governance game, because I think that private equity is all about taking things private, and being nimble, and then going public again, so- >> And Micro Focus, in my opinion, picked up those assets for short money. >> Yeah; well, HP owns a big part of the company, so- >> Yeah, of course, but that's why they did the deal, it's short money, and they wanted the cash, and that's why they had to put the security piece in there. >> Alright- Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier here breaking it down, ending our three days of exclusive coverage, at HPE 2017. Look for us at Madrid, the show there; I won't be there, Dave will be there; and again, HPE Discover, enjoy the rest of the conference, thanks for watching; this is The Cube out, thanks to the team and everyone here for a great job, see you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover, 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for our exclusive three day coverage from The Cube Silicon Angle media's flagship program. We go out to events, talk to the smartest people we can find CEOs, entrepreneurs, R&D lab managers and of course we're here at HPE Discover 2017 our next two guests, Andrew Wheeler, the Fellow, VP, Deputy Director, Hewlett Packard Labs and Kirk Bresniker, Fellow and VP, Chief Architect of HP Labs, was on yesterday. Welcome back, welcome to The Cube. Hewlett Packard Labs well known you guys doing great research, Meg Whitman really staying with a focused message and one of the comments she mentioned at our press analyst meeting yesterday was focusing on the lab. So I want ask you where is that range in the labs? In terms of what you guys, when does something go outside the lines if you will? >> Andrew: Yeah good question. So, if you think about Hewlett Packard Labs and really our charter role within the company we're really kind of tasked for looking at things that will disrupt our current business or looking for kind of those new opportunities. So for us we have something we call an innovation horizon and you know it's like any other portfolio that you have where you've got maybe things that are more kind of near term, maybe you know one to three years out, things that are easily kind of transferred or the timing is right. And then we have kind of another bucket that says well maybe it's more of a three to five year kind of in that advanced development category where it needs a little more incubation but you know it needs a little more time. And then you know we reserve probably you know a smaller pocket that's for more kind of pure research. Things that are further out, higher risk. It's a bigger bet but you know we do want to have kind of a complete portfolio of those, and you know over time throughout our history you know we've got really success stories in all of those. So it's always finding kind of that right blend. But you know there's clearly a focus around the advanced development piece now that we've had a lot of things come from that research point and really one of the... >> John: You're looking for breakthroughs. I mean that's what you're... Some-- >> Andrew: Clearly. >> Internal improvement, simplify IT all that good stuff, you guys still have your eyes on some breakthroughs. >> That's right. Breakthroughs, how do we differentiate what we're doing so but yeah clearly, clearly looking for those breakthrough opportunities. >> John: And one of the things that's come up really big in this show is the security and chip thing was pretty hot, very hot, and actually wiki bonds public, true public cloud report that they put out sizing up on prem the cloud mark. >> Dave: True private cloud. >> True private cloud I'm sorry. And that's not including hybrids of $265 billion tam but the notable thing that I want to get your thoughts on is the point they pushed was over 10 years $150 billion is going to shift out of IT on premise into other differentiated services. >> Andrew: Out of labor. >> Out of labor. So this, and I asked them what that means, as he said that means it's going to shift to vendor R&D meaning the suppliers have to do more work. So that the customers don't have to do the R&D. Which we see a lot in cloud where there's a lot of R&D going on. That's your job. So you guys are HP Labs, what's happening in that R&D area that's going to off load that labor so they can move to some other high yield tasks. >> Sure. Take first. >> John: Go ahead take a stab at it. >> When we've been looking at some of the concepts we had in the memory driven computing research and advanced development programs the machine program, you know one of the things that was the kick off for me back in 2003 we looked at what we had in the unix market, we had advanced virtualization technologies, we had great management of resources technologies, we had memory fabric technologies. But they're all kind of proprietary. But Silicon is thinking and back then we were saying how does risk unix compete with industry standards service? This new methodology, new wave, exciting changing cost structures. And for us it was that it was a chance to explore those ideas and understand how they would affect our maintaining the kind of rich set of customer experiences, mission criticality, security, all of these elements. And it's kind of funny that we're sort of just coming back to the future again and we're saying okay we have this move we want to see these things happen on the cloud and we're seeing those same technologies, the composable infrastructure we have in synergy and looking forward to see the research we've done on the machine advanced development program and how will that intersect hardware composability, converged infrastructure so that you can actually have that shift, those technologies coming in taking on more of that burden to allow you freedom of choice, so you can make sure that you end up with that right mix. The right part on a full public cloud, the right mix on a full private cloud, the right mixing on that intelligent edge. But still having the ability to have all of those great software development methodologies that agile methodology, the only thing the kids know how to do out of school is open source and agile now. So you want to make sure that you can embrace that and make sure regardless of where the right spot is for a particular application in your entire enterprise portfolio that you have this common set of experiences and tools. And some of the research and development we're doing will enable us to drive that into that existing, conventional, enterprise market as well as this intelligent edge. Making a continuum, a continuum from the core to the intelligent edge. And something that modern computer science graduates will find completely comfortable. >> One attracting them is going to be the key, I think the edge is kind of intoxicating if you think about all the possibilities that are out there in terms of what you know just from a business model disruption and also technology. I mean wearables are edge, brain implants in the future will be edge, you know the singularities here as Ray Kersewile would say... >> Yeah. >> I mean but, this is the truth. This is what's happened. This is real right now. >> Oh absolutely. You know we think of all that data and right now we're just scratching the surface. I remember it was 1994 the first time I fired up a web server inside of my development team. So I could begin thinning out design information on prototype products inside of HP, and it was a novelty. People would say "What is that thing "you just sent me an email, W W whatever?" And suddenly we went from, like almost overnight, from a novelty to a business necessity, to then it transformed the way that we created the applications for the... >> John: A lot of people don't know this but since you brought it up this historical trivia, HP Labs, Hewlett Packard Labs had scientists who actually invented the web with Tim Berners-Lee, I think HTML founder was an HP Labs scientist. Pretty notable trivia. A lot of people don't know that so congratulations. >> And so I look at just what you're saying there and we see this new edge thing is it's going to be similarly transformative. Now today it's a little gimmicky perhaps it's sort of scratching the surface. It's taking security and it can be problematic at times but that will transform, because there is so much possibility for economic transformation. Right now almost all that data on the edge is thrown away. If you, the first person who understands okay I'm going to get 1% more of that data and turn it into real time intelligence, real time action... That will unmake industries and it will remake new industries. >> John: Andrew this the applied research vision, you got to apply R&D to the problem... >> Andrew: Correct. >> That's what he's getting at but you got to also think differently. You got to bring in talent. The young guns. How are you guys bringing in the young guns? What's the, what's the honeypot? >> Well I think you know for us it's, the sell for us, obviously is just the tradition of Hewlett Packard to begin with right? You know we have recognition on that level even it's not just Hewlett Packard Labs as well it's you know just R&D in general right? Kind of it you know the DNA being an engineering company so... But it's you know I think it is creating kind of these opportunities and whether it's internship programs you know just the various things that we're doing whether it's enterprise related, high performance computing... I think this edge opportunity is a really interesting one as a bridge because if you think about all the things that we hear about in enterprise in terms of "Oh you know I need this deep analytics "capability," or you know even a lot of the in memories things that we're talking about, real time response, driving information, right? All of that needs to happen at the edge as well for various opportunities so it's got a lot of the young graduates excited. We host you know hundreds of interns every year and it's real exciting to see kind of the ideas they come in with and you know they're all excited to work in this space. >> Dave: So Kirk you have your machine button, three, of course you got the logo. And then the machine... >> I got the labs logo, I got the machine logo. >> So when I first entered you talked about in the early 1980s. When I first got in the business I remembered Gene Emdall. "The best IO is no IO." (laughter) >> Yeah that's right. >> We're here again with this sort of memory semantics, centric computing. So in terms of the three that Andrew laid out the three types of sort of projects you guys pursue... Where does the machine fit? IS it sort of in all three? Or maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Kirk: I think it is, so we see those technologies that over the last three years we have brought so much new and it was, the critical thing about this is I think it's also sort of the prototyping of the overall approach our leaning in approach here... >> Andrew: That's right. >> It wasn't just researchers. Right? Those 500 people who made that 160 terabyte monster machine possible weren't just from labs. It was engineering teams from across Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It was our supply chain team. It was our services team telling us how these things fit together for real. Now we've had incredible technology experiences, incredible technologist experiences, and what we're seeing is that we have intercepts on conventional platforms where there's the photonics, the persistent memories. Those will make our existing DCIG and SDCG products better almost immediately. But then we also have now these whole cloth applications and as we take all of our learnings, drive them into open source software, drive them into the genesys consortium and we'll see you know probably 18, 24 months from now some of those first optimized silicon designs pop out of that ecosystem then we'll be right there to assemble those again, into conventional systems as well as more expansive, exo-scale computing, intelligent edge with large persistent memories and application specific processing as that next generation of gateways, I think we can see these intercept points at every category Andrew talked about. >> Andrew: And another good point there that kind of magnifies the model we were talking about, if we were sitting here five years ago, we would talking about things like photonics and non-volatile memory as being those big R projects. Those higher risk, longer term things, that right? As those mature, we make more progress innovation happens, right? It gets pulled into that shorter time frame that becomes advanced development. >> Dave: And Meg has talked about that... >> Yeah. >> Wanting to get more productivity out of the labs. And she's also pointed out you guys have spent more on R&D in the last several years. But even as we talked about the other day you want to see a little more D and keep the R going. So my question is, when you get to that point, of being able to support DCIG... Where do you, is it a hand off? Are you guys intimately involved? When you're making decisions about okay so member stir for example, okay this is great, that's still in the R phase then you bring it in. But now you got to commercialize this and you got 3D nan coming out and okay let's use that, that fits into our framework. So how much do you guys get involved in that handoff? You know the commercialization of this stuff? >> We get very involved. So it's at the point where when we think have something that hey we think you know maybe this could get into a product or let's see if there's good intercept here. We work jointly at that point. It's lab engineers, it's the product managers out of the group, engineers out of the business group, they essentially work collectively then on getting it to that next step. So it's kind of just one big R&D effort at that point. >> Dave: And so specifically as it relates to the machine, where do you see in the next in the near term, let's call near term next three years, or five years even, what do you see that looking like? Is it this combination of memory width capacitors or flash extensions? What does that look like in terms of commercial terms that we can expect? >> Kirk: So I really think the palette is pretty broad here. That I can see these going into existing rack and tower products to allow them to have memory that's composable down to the individual module level. To be able to take that facility to have just the right resources applied at just the right time with that API that we have in one view. Extend down to composing the hardware itself. I think we look at those edge line systems and want to have just the right kind of analytic capability, large persistent memories at that edge so we can handle those zeta bytes and zeta bytes of data in full fidelity analyzed at the edge sending back that intelligence to the core but also taking action at the edge in a timeframe that matters. I also see it coming out and being the basis of our exoscale high performance computing. You know when you want to have a exoscale system that has all of the combined capacity of the top 500 systems today but 1/20th of their power that is going to take rather novel technologies and everything we've been working on is exactly what's feeding that research and soon to be advanced development and then soon to be production in supply chain. >> Dave: Great. >> John: So the question I have is obviously we saw some really awesome Gen 10 stuff here at this show you guys are seeing that obviously you're on stage talking about a lot of the cool R&D, but really the reality is that's multiple years in the works some of this root of trust silicon technology that's pretty, getting the show buzzed up everyone's psyched about it. Dreamworks Animation's talking about how inorganic opportunities is helping their business and they got the security with the root of trust NIST certified and compliant. Pretty impressive. What's next? What else are you working on because this is where the R&D is on your shoulders for that next level of innovation. Where, what do you guys see that? Because security is a huge deal. That's that great example of how you guys innovated. Cause that'll stop the vector of a tax in the service area of IOT if you can get the servers to lock down and you have firmware that's secure, makes a lot of sense. That's probably the tip of the iceberg. What else is happening with security? >> Kirk: So when we think about security and our efforts on advanced development research around the machine what you're seeing here with the proliance is making the machines more secure. The inherent platform more secure. But the other thing I would point to you is the application we're running on the prototype. Large scale graph inference. And this is security because you have a platform like the machine. Able to digest hundreds and hundreds of tera bytes worth of log data to look for that fingerprint, that subtle clue that you have a system that has been compromised. And these are not blatant let's just blast everything out to some dot dot x x x sub domain, this is an advanced persistent thread by a very capable adversary who is very subtle in their reach out from a system that has been compromised to that command and control server. The signs are there if you can look at the data holistically. If you can look at that DNS log, graph of billions of entries everyday, constantly changing, if you can look at that as a graph in totality in a timeframe that matters then that's an empowering thing for a cyber defense team and I think that's one of the interesting things that we're adding to this discussion. Not only protect, detect and recover, but giving offensive weapons to our cyber defense team so they can hunt, they can hunt for those events for system threats. >> John: One of the things, Andrew I'll get your thoughts and reaction to this because Ill make an observation and you guys can comment and tell me I'm all wet, fell off the deep end or what not. Last year HP had great marketing around the machine. I love that Star Trek ad. It was beautiful and it was just... A machine is very, a great marketing technique. I mean use the machine... So a lot of people set expectations on the machine You saw articles being written maybe these people didn't understand it. Little bit pulled back, almost dampered down a little bit in terms of the marketing of the machine, other than the bin. Is that because you don't yet know what it's going to look like? Or there's so many broader possibilities where you're trying to set expectations? Cause the machine certainly has a lot of range and it's almost as if I could read your minds you don't want to post the position too early on what it could do. And that's my observation. Why the pullback? I mean certainly as a marketer I'd be all over that. >> Andrew: Yeah, I think part of it has been intentional just on how the ecosystem, we need the ecosystem developed kind of around this at the same time. Meaning, there are a lot of kind of moving parts to it whether it's around the open source community and kind of getting their head wrapped around what is this new architecture look like. We've got things like you know the Jin Zee Consortium where we're pouring a lot of our understanding and knowledge into that. And so we need a lot of partners, we know we're in a day and an age where look there's no single one company that's going to do every piece and part themselves. So part of it is kind of enough to get out there, to get the buzz, get the excitement to get other people then on board and now we have been heads down especially this last six months of... >> John: Jamming hard on it. >> Getting it all together. You know you think about what we showed first essentially first booted the thing in November and now you know we've got it running at this scale, that's really been the focus. But we needed a lot of that early engagement, interaction to get a lot of the other, members of the ecosystem kind of on board and starting to contribute. And really that's where we're at today. >> John: It's almost you want it let it take its own course organically because you mentioned just on the cyber surveillance opportunity around the crunching, you kind of don't know yet what the killer app is right? >> And that's the great thing of where we're at today now that we have kind of the prototype running at scale like this, it is allowing us to move beyond, look we've had the simulators to work with, we've had kind of emulation vehicles now you've got the real thing to run actual workloads on. You know we had the announcement around DZ and E as kind of an early early example, but it really now will allow us to do some refinement that allows us to get to those product concepts. >> Dave: I want to just ask the closing question. So I've had this screen here, it's like the theater, and I've been seeing these great things coming up and one was "Moore's Law is dead." >> Oh that was my session this morning. >> Another one was block chain. And unfortunately I couldn't hear it but I could see the tease. So when you guys come to work in the morning what's kind of the driving set of assumptions for you? Is it just the technology is limitless and we're going to go figure it out or are there things that sort of frame your raison d'etre? That drive your activities and thinking? And what are the fundamental assumptions that you guys use to drive your actions? >> Kirk: So what's been driving me for the last couple years is this exponential growth of information that we create as a species. That seems to have no upper bounding function that tamps it down. At the same time, the timeframe we want to get from information, from raw information to insight that we can take action on seems to be shrinking from days, weeks, minutes... Now it's down to micro seconds. If I want to have an intelligent power grid, intelligent 3G communication, I have to have micro seconds. So if you look at those two things and at the same time we just have to be the lucky few who are sitting in these seats right when Moore's Law is slowing down and will eventually flatten out. And so all the skills that we've had over the last 28 years of my career you look at those technologies and you say "Those aren't the ones that are going "to take us forward." This is an opportunity for us to really look and examine every piece of this, because if was something we could of just can't we just dot dot dot do one thing? We would do it, right? We can't just do one thing. We have to be more holistic if we're going to create the next 20, 30, 40 years of innovation. And that's really what I'm looking at. How do we get back exponential scaling on supply to meet this unending exponential demand? >> Dave: So technically I would imagine, that's a very hard thing to balance because the former says that we're going to have more data than we've ever seen. The latter says we've got to act on it fast which is a great trend for memory but the economics are going to be such a challenge to meet, to balance that. >> Kirk: We have to be able to afford the energy, and we have to be able to afford the material cost, and we have to be able to afford the business processes that do all these things. So yeah, you need breakthroughs. And that's really what we've been doing. And I think that's why we're so fortunate at Hewlett Packard Enterprise to have the labs team but also that world class engineering and that world class supply chain and a services team that can get us introduced to every interesting customer around the world who has those challenging problems and can give us that partnership and that insight to get those kind of breakthroughs. >> Dave: And I wonder if there will be a tipping point, if the tipping point will be, and I'm sure you've thought about this, a change in the application development model that drives so much value and so much productivity that it offsets some of the potential cost issues of changing the development paradigm. >> And I think you're seeing hints of that. Now we saw this when we went from systems of record, OLTP systems, to systems of engagement, mobile systems, and suddenly new ways to develop it. I think now the interesting thing is we move over to systems of action and we're moving from programmatic to training. And this is this interesting thing if you have those data bytes of data you can't have a pair of human eyeballs in front of that, you have to have a machine learning algorithm. That's the only thing that's voracious enough to consume this data in a timely enough fashion to get us answers, but you can't program it. We saw those old approaches in old school A.I., old school autonomous vehicle programs, they go about 10 feet, boom, and they'd flip over, right? Now you know they're on our streets and they are functioning. They're a little bit raw right now but that improvement cycle is fantastic because they're training, they're not programming. >> Great opportunity to your point about Moore's Law but also all this new functionality that has yet been defined, is right on the doorstep. Andrew, Kirk thank you so much for sharing. >> Andrew: Thank you >> Great insight, love Hewlett Packard Labs love the R&D conversation. Gets us a chance to go play in the wild and dream about the future you guys are out creating it congratulations and thanks for spending the time on The Cube, appreciate it. >> Thanks. >> The Cube coverage will continue here live at Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprises annual event. We'll be right back with more, stay with us. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media's, theCUBE's exclusive coverage for three days for HPE Discover 2017. We're on day three, down to the wire here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE with my co-host Dave Vellante, my partner in crime with Wikibon. Our next guest, Ric Lewis. Software Defined Cloud Senior Vice President, President and GM of HPE, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Kate Swanborg, Senior Vice-President Tech Communications and Strategic Alliances, DreamWorks Animation. Welcome back as well. >> Thank you. >> John: Great to have you guys back. >> It's good to be here. >> So obviously DreamWorks, you guys are a big customer, Ric you are now leading up the team for Software Defined infrastructure, as we call it programmable infrastructure, a lot of great things. >> Ric: Yeah. >> Synergy we talked heavily about last year. >> Ric: Yeah. >> I kind of was geeking out with you on that in terms of all that programming ability and automation. Meg story this week was simplifying hybrid IT, which is the key part of where Software's coming in. >> That's exactly right. >> And so we got DreamWorks here, what's your vision in how that's going to happen? How do you take that simple message and put it into practice? >> Yeah so, we're completely about making hybrid IT simple, and we have three primary vectors that we're driving in order to make that happen. The first is our hyperconverged appliances that we deliver, and the second is HPE Synergy, our composable, and the third is our hybrid IT management stacked software that we have. And we've got momentum across all of those. In Hyper Converged, you guys know we acquired SimpliVity, it closed in February. Got a lot of customers on that. We had Red Bull on-stage here at Discover talking about their use case of that in their racing. It was a packed house, people completely interested in all the things we're doing in hybrid IT. That's SimpliVity. Synergy, we now have almost 400 customers that have adopted Synergy. We started shipping in volume in December, and DreamWorks Animation is one of those customers, and real excited for you to hear a little bit about how they're using it, but we had, I think we had around 10 customers from Synergy across all kinds of verticals and use cases, including service providers that were on-stage here. And the final thing is our hybrid IT management stack, a program that we introduced here at Discover called Project New Stack. So, that's what's going on in Software Defined & Cloud, it's a lot right now. >> And we had a SimpliVity customer on by the way, they were really glowing. >> Yeah. >> Great to see that happen. >> That was a great story. >> Great story, Kate, so DreamWorks, you guys have a business, you've got to put a product out there and so you got to look at technology, make it work for you, and sometimes you got to get in the weeds, there's pieces and pieces, at the end of the day you got a product to deliver. How are you guys taking some of the things that are coming out at HPE and putting them into action? What are some of the things you're doing? >> Well, I think one of the things that is often surprising to people is just how much technology we consume to make a CG feature animated film. These films take 80 million compute hours to render the images, petabytes of storage and we're typically working on five or six active films in production because they take us four or five years to make. And so we want to be able to have the capability of releasing two or three films a year, we must have simultaneous production. But of course, not all of the productions are exactly the same, and we've also got other media opportunities, whether it's television or theme park. And so, what's critical to us is that we're actually able to provision the right amount of digital resource to the right project quickly and easily so that as those creative inspirations are growing and burgeoning at the studio, we've got the resource behind it in an effortless fashion. >> And how are you making that happen with the Synergy for example, because last year we were looking at thinking well this has got a lot of potential. I mean you can do it through the orchestration, making the management work kind of takes that, abstracts away a lot of the complexity. How are you guys dealing with that, I mean how have you put that into action? >> Well, we've been working within a hybrid environment for years now, so the idea of a hybrid environment isn't new to us. The key however, is that it's labor intensive. It's time-consuming. In order to get all of the right configurations of the networking and the storage, the compute to actually work in a realtime environment for our artists, that has taken us an enormous amount of effort over the years. What we're looking for in the Synergy deployment is to reduce those weeks down to days and those days down to hours. Once we're able to do that, our engineers can go off and focus on the niche technology solutions that actually matter to the artists. And that's where we want to get the business benefit. >> And with Synergy, compute, storage and fabric all managed under the same management domain. >> That's right. >> Single API that you can get access to all those resources, so it makes it super easy. It's the world's easiest way to do infrastructure as a service, it's built into the platform natively. >> That's right, and one of the things that's been so impressive to us is that we've been working with the Pointnext team to come in and actually configure this for our environment. Everybody uses a high-performance compute environment, but nobody's is exactly the same. The configure ability of this and the customability of this to our environment has been critical, and we've seen incredible benefits from that. >> So Ric, we kind of pushed you in theCUBE last year, cause you were saying "there's nothing like this in the marketplace". We said, okay define what's different. (John laughs) One of the things you touched on was the fluid pools of infrastructure. >> Yes. >> And Kate, what you just described is bringing technology to different digital teams. >> The dynamicism if you will. >> Absolutely. >> Being able to dynamically configure the thing, yes. >> So, let's test it. I mean, it sounds like that's exactly what you're doing, and how is this different than the infrastructure that you used to have? >> So, the reason that it's different is that we've got, we've got a simply said, a single infrastructure. We've got a compute farm, we've got storage, and historically what we had to do was actually partition off certain pieces of that for certain productions in order to protect their resources. The problem with that is that any given day, particularly in a creative environment, maybe they're using all of it, maybe they need more, maybe they need less. The challenge is is that historically if they needed less we can't reprovision that to another production in order to take advantage of their inspiration and their business motivations. Now we can. Now we have the opportunity to actually have the infrastructure be as dynamic as our creative environment, and that's saying a lot. >> And you can reconfigure those resources three clicks, five minutes, you literally can deprovision -- >> Kate: That's it. >> So the old way they're like bitchin and moanin, where's the servers? >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And running around scrambling. >> They're on order. (all laugh) >> Six weeks. No this what we're talking about. >> Yeah. >> This is about speed, right? I mean this is -- >> It absolutely is. >> Alright, so I want to ask you a question about the HPE event. You mentioned you're here. So, a lot of people go to these events and they try and extract all the action. You've heard a lot of firsts, last year was Synergy first, big claim there. We're hearing some security stuff with servers here. >> Ric: Yeah. >> As a practitioner that comes to these shows, what's your strategy when you come to an event like HPE Discover, and obviously the schmooze is going on and getting wined and dined by HP, a big customer, but like when you go in there, what are you looking for, how do you connect the dots, what tea leaves do you read, what's your strategy? >> Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really interests me about Discover is we've got a deep partnership with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're talking to Hewlett-Packard Enterprise all the time. So we might actually think that we know what's going on. It's not true, there's so much innovation happening that when we bring our team to this show, we learn things that could really help our business. I'll give you a great example, so we learned this week about SimpliVity. Now, we had sort of heard about it, but we had not taken our time out of our schedules to really understand how that could help our VM environment. Our team's sitting in one of the panels this week, and he's texting other engineers on our team going "We have got to look at this next week at DreamWorks Animation". That's the kind of environment this is. I'll tell you something else, New Stack, we're going to lean heavy into New Stack because we believe that the innovation that we're seeing in that space is really, finally going to deliver on this promise of cloud that's been out there. >> What specifically about New Stack do you like? I want to just double down on that. Is it the rule of your own, is it the flexibility, what's the big thing there? >> Well, again this is one of those things where our team today is actually writing code and creating architectures that are sort of New Stack-like, but we're having to do it, we're having to invest our own time. It's trial and error, some of the things work some of the things don't, and that time is not being spent focused on our animation productions. The fact of the matter is, here's Hewlett-Packard actually doubling down and making sure that there is going to be a robust solution that works, that we can bring into our environment. >> We're in enterprises across the world every day. We're having these conversations, and most enterprises are doing kind of a roll-your-own cloud kind've thing. >> That's right. >> They're playing with OpenStack, they're playing with Kubernetes, they're playing with all these tools, they got a bunch of custom code, but we're really what we're trying to do with New Stack is take the best of what they're all trying to do, constrain that down, take our standard Software Defined infrastructure as the base, put a stack on top of that that they can count on to do a private cloud with bridge-to-hybrid capabilities, that's standard, that ships, that delivers and has updates, so that they're not messing around with it. Their developers don't want to spend time doing that, they just want to have a private cloud installation that has hybrid capabilites and have it installed. >> This is super relevant, this is super relevant, and we call you a tech athlete because you want to go out there and deliver value to your group and actually build products, right? >> That's right. >> The film. But Dave's team just put out the True Private Cloud Report which shows on PRAM, cloud-like environment, $260 billion dollar TAM, but the notable thing is that the labor costs were non-differentiated spend is going up by a $150 billion shifting in 10 years. >> Yeah. >> That's exactly the point here that you're talking about, is my guy's aren't working on the product that they need to be building. They're doing the R&D, so the OpenStack and all these things you're talking about, they're doing the R&D. Here, you're doing the R&D, delivering the product to the customer. >> Well and when we deliver that, we're still going to leverage all of those technologies. OpenStack is a key part of New Stack. Kubernetes is a key part of New Stack, but what we're doing is pulling that together so that they don't have to curate their own private cloud. >> Kate: That's right. >> We create that, deliver it in a way that's an appliance-like way, just like we deliver Hyper Converged today, in a controlled plane that manages that hybrid IT estate and gives them visibility into public cloud uses and private cloud, and it's really going to help them a lot, and it's going to help a whole lot of other customers cause we're making it standard and easily deployable. >> Well, we've seen this story unfold over this decade, where the corner office has said I don't want to spend money on that caching and provisioning. Okay, so go to the cloud. And then IT said, well, eh, we can't do that. (laughs) Okay, and so they get in with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and others say what's the answer? Okay, but what you've described is this horizontal infrastructure capability that you can throw any workload at. >> That's right. >> And so my question is, what does it mean for the business? Does it mean you can do things faster, you have happier animators, you can do more movies, what does it mean? >> I think it means a couple of things. First of all, opportunity cost. In our business, a new opportunity for a creative endeavor, that comes up all the time, and the key is is that you want to be able to explore that as quickly as possible. Creative ideas work out sometimes, sometimes they don't, but they key is is that if takes you time and effort and money to just explore it, you've got an opportunity cost you don't want. >> Yeah, yep. >> Something like Synergy will allow us to provision resources to new ideas and new potentials quickly enough, easily enough, and at a cost-effective measure, so that we can actually determine which creative endeavors are going to work more quickly in our environment. That's a huge deal. >> So you were missing opportunities because of the infrastructure limitations, is that right? >> That's -- >> The mockups and everything have to get done. >> That's right! >> All the CG work. >> Again, when our filmmakers have a new idea for a new sequence, a new character, those types of characters, they take tremendous amounts of resources. I often talk about the dragon in Shrek. Back in 2001 we released Shrek, and it had this beautiful, huge pink dragon in it. And she was fantastic, but frankly she was so complex and so computationally heavy, we actually had to cut her out of parts of the film because we couldn't produce the shots she was in. Fast forward a few years, and we decide to make a movie called How to Train Your Dragon that's nothing but dragons. The key is is that we never want to be in a position again where we're tabling a great creative idea because we can't resource for it. And solutions like SimpliVity and Synergy and particularly where we're going with New Stack and the ability to actually harness the cloud without having to do all the work ourselves, that's going to bring that potential to reality. >> John: And then you know, your application in this opportunity cost is for your business. Other companies have apps, right? So their opportunity costs are very similar. >> That's right. >> John: This is the classic how shadow IT was born. >> Oh, yes! >> And people want to experiment, show proof of concept. Not a PowerPoint, an actual demo of real working product. It may not have the scale there, but you get to that point of where it's workable. >> Look, every business is facing some element of this right now, and I will tell you the other reason of the two reasons that I think that this is going to make a difference. It's future-proofing our environment. >> Ric: Yeah. >> The world is so dynamic right now, things are changing so quickly. Even in our environment with media and entertainment, the world of what people want to consume and how they want to consume it and the nature of how we're looking at innovation in both filmmaking techniques, as well as new media opportunities, the key in all of that is is that we have to be dynamic in order to be future-proofed. These types of solutions give us the confidence that we're actually putting the money in the right place. It's an investment in our future. >> Earlier you mentioned Pointnext services, and the narrative from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is my inference is it's more cloud-like. Do different types of business models. Are you seeing that? I mean, is it more than just a new name, a new brand, are you starting to see an evolution of the way in which you engage with Hewlett-Packard services? >> We absolutely are, and it's one thing to talk about strategy, but at the end of the day, you don't call up your technology and have a conversation with it, you call up people. And what we're seeing is that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is investing in a level of expertise within the Pointnext services organization that is unparalleled. That is a massive change over the course of the last five, six, 10 years. These folks are coming into our environment now and we're finding that we are inspired by their strategies. We're not having to teach them about our business, they're actually coming in with all of these other learnings that they've gotten from all of these corporations and they're looking at our ambitions and going hey, we think we've got some ideas here. I'll tell you, our engineers are hard to impress. >> That's the truth. >> They are used to, what was your phrase, rolling it on their own. >> Yeah. >> They are used to being responsible, and they have very little tolerance for actually giving other people time within our organization. Pointnext has blown them away. We could not be doing the work that we're doing on Synergy as quickly and as effectively, installation and strategy around that without the Pointnext team. >> Well, that's the proof, that is the proof in the pudding in my opinion when your people who are, I won't say cocky, but they're kind of, sounds like they're pretty cocky. (laughs) >> Ric: Confident. >> But that you're in a, you're in media entertainment. It is one of the most disruptive, being disrupted markets right now. Smart Cities, IoT, media entertainment it's, you're the leading trend in IT right now, media entertainment. >> And in our team, there's simply no tolerance at DreamWorks Animation for technology getting in the way of the business. The fact of the matter is technology always has to be enabling the storytellers, enabling the filmmakers, enabling the business and ambition. And the key is is that our engineering team, they feel responsible to that. One of the things that we're finding with the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the Pointnext team, Ric's team with the Synergy deployments, is that we actually feel like we've got a partner that can up our own game. >> John: Good. >> And we do deep beta programs with them on everything that we're doing to make sure that we're meeting that next generation of what they need. It's a fantastic partnership. >> Well Ric, congratulations on the success, and Kate thanks for sharing all the great stories and your experience DreamWorks Animation. Great to see that trend, again media entertainment, you guys are doing great stuff. We're doing our share with digital TV here, we're not a, we live on the edge of the network with theCUBE here at HP Discover. With DreamWorks Animation, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, stay with us for more day three coverage here in Las Vegas at HP Discover. We'll be right back. (tech music)

(upbeat pop music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (synthesizer music ticking) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for SiliconANGLE Media. It's theCUBE. This is our coverage of HPE Discover 2017, our seventh year covering HP Discover, now HPE Discover. I'm John Furrier with my Cohost, Dave Vellante. Our next two guests, Paul Miller, Vice President, Software Defined and Cloud Group Marketing at HPE, welcome back to theCUBE, CUBE alumni, Danny Yeo, System Administrator at BYU, Brigham Young University, guys, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, guys. >> So, tell us-- >> Glad to be here. >> So, tell us, what's your experience in Vegas, so far? What's the take, here, from your perspective on what's happening at the show, your takeaway? >> A lot of exciting technology, with HPE, some things that I wasn't aware what they were doing and I'm very impressed, really impressed. >> John: Like what, what are the things that-- >> One of the things, I was just telling Paul, is their memory driven computing with genomic research. I'm with the College of Life Sciences, specifically, at Brigham Young University and we have people doing research in that area, mapping the human genome, for example. We've got people doing DNA analysis and so forth, so that, that was really fascinating. >> About computing, the Meg Whitman keynote, really, >> Yes. >> redefining compute, it's the vision, >> Yeah. >> and the messaging, hybrid cloud, obviously the center of the action. How does that fit into the portfolio with hyperconverged still on fire? I mean, IT is just getting more automated in a way, but it's more scalable infrastructure. >> Yeah, so we see, you know, our mission in our organization is to drive software defined everything, right, and hyperconverge is all about software defining and making virtualization environments easy and the SimpliVity and the SimpliVity architecture, which is built on rich data services, will enable us to take software defined storage to the next level to make it super, super scalable and extensible and give customers that resilience that they need, the inline dedupe, compression, all those great technologies. You'll see us, you know, push really hard in the hyperconverge space. As you say, it's on fire and I can tell you the sales are on fire. The sessions, here, are on fire, standing-room-only for every SimpliVity session, hands-on labs booked beyond capacity with people loving and learning the technology, but we're not stopping there. We're going to take that same technology and embed it in our Synergy offering. So, just think about the ability to compose and recompose highly scalable software defined storage for enterprise applications and enterprise scale and then you'll also see it be a key part of our technology on the new stack, so, a lot of cool things. The sessions are really hot and on fire, as you say. >> So, Paul, if we go back to the 2009 timeframe, it was converged infrastructure, >> Yeah. >> HP, at the time, kind of coined the term and then it, but essentially, it was some compute, some storage and some networking kind of screwed together >> Yeah. >> and, you know, pre-tested and pre-engineered. >> Yeah. >> That's all good, but it's really evolved dramatically and when you think hyperconverged, you think software defined, software defined everything. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of what Synergy was all about, fluid pools of infrastructure, >> Yeah. >> we heard you guys talking about that, last Discover. So, tell us, help us understand SimpliVity and how that fits in that portfolio. >> Okay, so, yeah, so the whole convergence thing was all about static building blocks, right? You built 'em, you deployed 'em, but they were really static. What we're trying to go to is fluid pools of everything. So, think about SimpliVity being a fluid pool of storage other you could compose and recompose for different workloads. And, in our overall portfolio, the biggest advantage we have, like with the Synergy product, is the ability for a customer who has, needs the scalability and resilience of SAN, today, to be able to on the time you're deploying an application, compose it for that workload, but now I want software defined because I may need some, a lower cost basis, be able to, at time of deployment, at time of provisioning, deploy it there. So, we see this being a very complimentary strategy, where, now, we have composability from software defined all the way up to the largest SAN type software architectures. >> All right, Danny, let's get into this, sort of your situation. So, can you help us? Paint a picture of what's going on in your shop. You know, what are the challenges that you're having? What are the drivers that are affecting your IT decisions and take us through, sort of, what you're doing with infrastructure. >> Absolutely, so, before we got into hyperconverge, we were essentially like everybody else who had not been exposed to hyperconverge. We have the traditional service stack. You got compute nodes, you got fabric, you got storage nodes and then you got the fabric for them to communicate. And, you know, when you have problems, you get the finger pointing, right? (hosts laughing) And so, that was really frustrating and then, of course, you got a hypervisor and all that put in place in the mix. It was frustrating and supporting that, the outbacks was (object banging) a little bit challenging because, you know, for example, my systems engineer would have to stay, sometimes after hours, after five and he'd start doing things and, you know, patching, upgrading, you name it and sometimes to way after midnight. That was problem. We were trying to minimize that. The other challenge that I had in my shop was backup. We had a backup window, during the weekend, that we cannot meet. At some point in time, the RTO and RPO weren't sufficient and, so, we had to look at a different strategy. Disaster recovery, that was like something unachievable. It's like out there, somewhere, right? >> You can't even meet your backup windows. >> Right, sure. >> Dave: I mean, forget about disaster recovery, right. >> So, summer of 2014, I went to a VMware user conference, stopped by the SimpliVity booth and they asked me if I knew about the technology; I didn't, so they spent some time explaining that to me and after that, they asked me if I just had a little bit more time so that they can do a demo for me, a demonstration. During the demonstration, the engineer basically did a failover from California to either Boston or New York. It was in seconds, 22 seconds if I remember correctly. And then, he says, "Well, that simulated a disaster. "And so, you failover and if the disaster is "now all over and averted, you want to failback, right, "to your primary location, " and he did that, again, in seconds. I was blown away. I was sold. It reminded me of when in 2005, I saw VMotion from VMware. >> Yeah right. >> Yeah (laughs). >> John: Right, everybody went, "Wow." >> Game, game changer isn't it? >> Game change, yes! >> Yeah. >> Right. >> And so, I thought to myself, I need, you know, it was like that movie, I got to get me one of these (laughing). And so, I asked them to come over and visit us on campus, do a deeper dive of the technology and so that way we can ask questions back and forth. They did and then we decided to do a Proof of Concept, so we did that late 2014 and after the Proof of Concept, we were convinced that was the technology to acquire. >> So, you had to make sure it was real? >> Yes, now-- >> You did the proofs, Proof of Concept? >> I have, sorry, go ahead. >> No, please, continue. >> So, I had the unique situation where after I have acquired SimpliVity and was running it in production, a competitor, I'll just put it that way, came in and asked us if we would consider doing a POC with their product. And, we're like, "You know, well, I've already bought this," and they said, "Not a problem, we would like you "to try our product and if our product is superior, "we want to swap out those SimpliVity boxes." So, I thought, well, what do I have to lose? (Paul laughing) So, I had the opportunity to run both hyperconverged technologies, side-by-side. >> Okay. >> As we were thinking how best to really test which one works, which one's superior or if they're essentially the same thing, we had an engineer suggest, "Why don't we simulate a drive failure, "start pulling out drives?" And so, we did, we started pulling out drives and I had three nodes on, with SimpliVity and on the other I had four nodes and a box. As we pulled out the, after we pulled out the sixth drive, the other technology failed. We couldn't recover data, basically. We would have to send it to a data recovery center. SimpliVity was just, you know, it was business as usual. It was going, no sweat. >> Dave: Because you had it replicated? Is that right, or-- >> Not yet. We haven't had it replicated, >> Oh, okay. >> but it was an evaluation. >> Dave: Just all synchronous, that's what happened. >> So, it's their technology, right, it's the RAIN and RAIN architecture. >> Yeah. >> and, that's the thing, the RAIN architecture that protected us, so we were able to pull the sixth drive. It was still continue, it threw up a lot of flags, >> Yeah. >> alerts and we knew that-- >> Redundance with the nodes, redundancy at the node level >> Yes. >> as opposed to just the drive level? >> But, that little experiment basically proved to us that we bought the right thing. It validated our acquisition. >> John: So you did the bake-off. That's awesome, right? >> Yes. >> John: So, what did you say to the other guys when they came back and said, yo, your stuff's not working? >> Well, we asked them first. We asked them first, "Help. "Your box is not responding, help." They threw up their hands in the air. >> It's your fault. (hosts laughing) >> Yeah, here's the answer. >> John: You got finger pointing? >> Here's the answer, >> Come on. >> you'll love this, right, the answer is, "You know, you can't just pull out the drives. "You've got to time 'em. "You know, you can't just, willy nilly, you just yank 'em. "You've got to time them." >> Say that to the tornado that's coming down or the earthquake >> Yeah, yeah, sure. >> that's happening or floods, I mean, you? >> Yeah, how do you time those? >> It's a disaster. >> Yeah, how do you time those, yeah? >> So, we decided, look take your product back. We're happy with SimpliVity. We'll keep it. >> This is a huge issue. I mean, Hurricane Sandy, which happened in New York, >> Oh, yeah. >> that was a game changer for a lot of the folks we talk to on theCUBE. You don't know when this is going to come and, literally, this disaster recovery thing is, has to be part of the plan and that's really the key. Now that you have SimpliVity, now that it's part of HPE, what's your world like now with HPE with the SimpliVity? >> It's too soon to tell. (all laughing) No, really, honestly, but after the keynote yesterday, I'm pretty convinced other SimpliVity has, is in good hands. >> John: Yeah. >> And, only time will tell, right? >> So, I want to just sort of summarize the story 'cause we were throwing in all kinds of buzz, RPO, RTO, so, but basically you had a problem with your backup window. That's where this all started. You weren't meeting >> That's where it started. >> your backup window? >> Yes. >> You really didn't even have a disaster recovery, an adequate disaster recovery plan. >> Danny: Not at all. >> So, RPO is a Recovery Point Objective, essentially a measure of how much data you're going to lose, right, >> Yeah. >> and then RTO is Recovery Time Objective, the time it takes you to get your applications back up and running. >> Right. >> And, of course, nobody wants to lose any data, but there's always some exposure. If you want to spend a billion dollars, maybe you can minimize that to near zero, but, and I presume, you didn't spend a billion dollars on this, >> No (laughs). >> but those are the drivers. So, you essentially solved your backup window problem and, at the same time, >> Right. >> you got disaster recovery out-of-the-box, is that correct? >> Yes, so backup is in seconds, right? It's, you know, to do a backup, takes us only a few seconds, like six seconds and so forth. We bought an additional node, put it in a remote site and replicated to it and now we can failover to that node and run only mission-critical apps and when everything's good in the primary location, we can just failback. >> And, that gives you your disaster recovery. Now, and your RPO, is what? I mean, what's the-- >> Seconds. >> Oh, seconds? >> Seconds, yeah, seconds. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> Your RPO is down to seconds? >> Danny: It is that impressive, yeah. >> Okay, so you're at risk of losing seconds of data, which is not the end of the world, necessarily, in your world. And your RTO is minutes? >> About there. >> Yeah. >> Tens of minutes kind of thing? >> No, no. >> No. >> Minutes? >> Just minutes. >> Minutes. >> Minutes, yeah. >> Under 10 minutes? >> Danny: Under 10 minutes, yes. >> Oh, yes. >> Okay. >> Yeah, we're not as huge as some other data center, in the College of Life Sciences, so, so-- >> Dave: Well, you know, and you're not financial services. >> Right. >> So, now, when you, what has been the reaction from your user base? I mean, do they even know? >> They have no clue. >> They don't know. >> It is completely transparent, too. We are now able to do maintenance work during the work day, business hours. We can upgrade. We can patch. They have no clue that this is all going on in the background, which is great because, now, my systems engineer does not have to work after five, hardly ever. >> Dave: So, is this why you bought the company? >> Absolutely, we looked at 'em all, right, and I mean all of 'em and we did similarly. We brought 'em into our labs, we did failover, we did scalability. and that's another huge advantage of the SimpliVity platform built and designed for scalability, compression, because system utilization is very, very, important. And, you know, SimpliVity had a really great marketing tool that we're continuing: it was their guarantees. Guaranteed 90% capacity savings, guaranteed the failover time, a terabyte of VMs in under three minutes, so we're carrying on those guarantees, but what those guarantees actually did was really highlight the architectural advantages that SimpliVity designed in. They took a different approach, right. A lot of people started at, I'm going to simplify the VM management layer. They said, "No, I'm going to make "the most robust virtualization data services platform "in the world," and that's where we really see the core advantage and, again, we looked at 'em all. We put 'em through paces and nobody came close on scalability, availability, disaster tolerance than SimpliVity. >> Paul, what does this mean for your other customers, now, extending out through your portfolio? Obviously, there's different categories, campus and the different use case, but for the other use cases with the composability vision, how does this fit into the hyperconverging, overall? >> Yeah, so we have multiple customers, now, who are running a hyperconverged and composable in their same shop, where they want to have just virtualization and a simple easy deployment, whether it for robo sites or for different work groups. Drop in SimpliVity, up and running in minutes. There are other use cases where they need the high performance of bare-metal or they want to move into containers on bare-metal and that's where Synergy plays out. We have people like you saw, Dreamworks, using Synergy for rendering. >> Right. >> You need bare-metal, you need the power. They can compose and recompose for different movies that they do, different animations. They really love that. We were talking about a genomics research company we're working with. They're using it for bare-metal as well. HudsonAlpha, they're driving bare-metal, but they also have hyperconvergence where the developer community says, I just need to do a few, build a new couple applications. Log in, self service, get your work done on a few VMs and then, when they're done, then they'll move that research into bare-metal, so a lot of different use cases across the board. >> Right, what I love about that, John, is it's horizontal infrastructure >> Yeah. >> that can support multiple workloads and multiple applications, which is kind of infrastructure nirvana for a pro, you know, a practitioner, right, I mean >> Sure. >> having that single platform that you can throw multiple apps and workloads at is, I mean, we've not had that in the industry before, right? >> Paul: No. >> No. >> No. >> So-- >> And building it on one view makes things easy for our customers to manage across the board, so, yeah, we're seeing, I mean, what's interesting about, I think, where we're heading is not only working with, you know, IT leads, but now, developers are starting to become part of our core customers who we're talking to. >> Now, you guys are really, really checking the boxes on making IT easier and as it shifts to the cloud and hybrid, you know, this is the kind of thing; you want out-of-the-box experiences, literally, here and then recovery, this is a good trend. >> Yeah. >> Paul, thanks so much. I know you guys got >> Yeah. a hard stop and you've got to roll to another appointment. Danny, thanks so much for sharing your story. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. >> Love that story, real practitioner, you know, on the ground, on the front lines, doing the bake-off, SimpliVity story, great, great job, thanks so much for sharing. It's theCUBE with more live coverage from HPE Discover after this short break Stay with us. (upbeat pop music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Hello and welcome back to Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover 2017 or HPE Discover 2017. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconeANGLE media. We go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE. with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest, Jason Newton, Vice President of HP Marketing Pan-HPE Market cross HP, and Jim Jackson, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Group Marketing. The big dogs here at HP laying out the show here for 2017. Guys, great show again, our seventh year, appreciate it. But this year, more than ever, is a seminal moment, obviously everyone knows what's going on in the news, is a huge shift in the market place, what's happening at the show, set the scene for us, what's the backdrop? You guys lined up all the messaging, you have the whole set up to the show, tell us: what is this show about this year? >> First, welcome to Discover, guys! We're really excited to have you guys here. And you know, we got a lot going on at this show, so for example, yesterday, we had our Global Partners Summit so we brought out top 1300 partners, and we had an amazing session with them. This week starts Discover, so it's going to run for the next three days. We've exceeded our tenants targets, so we're feeling really good about it. I think what that shows is there's a lot of interest, a lot of energy, a lot of passion, for what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise can bring. You know, I'm not going to go through all the mechanics of the separation and the spin merger, but I would say that that was all designed to make us a faster, more nimbler company, and one that is really aligned to where we want to take our partners on their digital transformation journey. You know, what we're seeing today, is digital transformation is impacting every single customer and every single industry, and digital business is technology, and really, that's where we play and that's why we're so excited to get our story out. And when you look at over the last year, there's a lot that's happened at this company around really innovation, acquisitions, and ecosystem. Just look at some of the innovation that we've brought to the market, Synergy. Amazing innovation, it created a new category, it really enables our customers to now get a public cloud experience, but on PRIM. And we're hearing from a lot of customers, I want to leave my applications on PRIM, but I need that capability. So we're delivering that with that kind of innovation. Another one is HPC. High growing market, we're leading in that space. What we're doing in the storage flash space, we rebooted, and rebranded our services organization, it's not called Pointnext. We want to help our customers point next to whats' next for their business. When you look at the Edge, just amazing innovation happening there, whether it's Aruba technology, whether it's what we're doing with all of our Edge compute solutions, so just a tons of things happening and then when you layer on top of that all the acquisitions. SGI, we're already the leader in HPC, we have 140 of the top 500 systems, SGI makes our position that much stronger. That's a hot market, it's growing at six to eight percent. SimpliVity, when we brought our capabilities, our UI from our technology, combined it with the data services from SimpliVity, we now have the leading HC solution in the industry. When you look at Niara, that gives up additional capabilities at the Edge to help secure that. When we look at Cloud Cruiser, we can help customers understand and balance what's happening across their workloads. And then Nimble gives us just an amazing portfolio across storage. We're really the leader now in the storage space when you look at the ability to dress almost any use case, from MSA to SimpliVity, for customers looking for more of that hyperconverge play, to Nimble, to 3PAR. Our strategy, super simple. Make hybrid IT simple, power the Intelligent Edge, and it's not just the compute, it's to bring the analytics so that we can translate insight into action, and really to bring the services to help our customers on their journey. And those services are our Pointnext services complimented by our partner services. So, you know what, we're fired up, we're excited, there's a lot happening. >> You guys got so much going on and we've documented the whole spin merge thing 'till the cows come home, we've already done that. You guys got a lot going on, a lot of customers are talking a lot of people are talking about you in the industry, at an industry level, certainly at a partnership level, you guys have always been customer focused. We heard that, you mentioned that, they kind of want to know: what is HP going to do now? You're going to put the stake in the ground, they want to know what's happening, where is the phoenix coming from out from all this decoupling, and more agile messaging, it's a lot of corporate governance, corporate development, I get that, what's next? When are you guys going to put the stake in the ground, you going to be aggressive, when are we expecting to hear from Meg Whitman? >> This week, right, you're going to see it this week. I think that's why we're so excited, this is our opportunity to bring our story together and talk about the innovation and the outcomes that we're delivering for our customers. We are playing offense, and you're going to see that this week. You know, I think one of the themes about this whole week is really about outcomes. I just hosted a panel, with four amazing customers, we had Dreamworks on there, we had CenterPoint Energy, we had CallidusCloud, and I had one more, can't think of it, Merck. And just amazing stories in terms of their digital transformation journey and how HPE is helping to enable that. You're going to hear that on main stage, we're going to have additional customers, Symmetry, others, talking about their digital transformation journey. So, we're really fired up about the main stage, and the story that we're going to get out today. Backstage talking with the executives, they're ready to rock and roll. You know, we know we have a great story and we need to package it, we need to send it out there to the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen later today. In addition to the outcomes, and I think that's what's different about us maybe from some of our other competitors who come to these similar events and just have a bunch of products, we're really talking about how our technology is enabling outcomes but you're going to see a lot of innovation today as well really themed along our strategy. We're going to highlight and roll out the next generation of our compute experience. We're going to talk about how we're delivering the industry's most secure industry standard servers. That's complimented by a whole set of announcements we did last week on our storage portfolio, and the software defined space updates to our synergy solution to HP OneView, and then we're going to be previewing our multi cloud hybrid stack, which will be available later in the year. When you look at the edge, new campus solution, core solution, so what we're really doing is if you think of a data center course which we're bringing that to the campus, so we can essentially now manage from the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. So we're bringing all the capabilities. Asset tracking capabilities coming in as well. Pointnext, we're bringing in new innovations to the marketplace around Consume. Jason, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the IOT Edge stuff that's coming out as well. >> Yeah, I mean we think, a core part of our strategy is to power the Intelligent Edge. We think that's where all the innovation is going and increasingly, you know, we think about data and getting insights from data, right? Going forward, we're going to start thinking about how do I take data and put it into action, right? The Edge is a place, and there's lot of different places that we can bring technology to bear to put into action and create value and so, tons of examples of what we'll be talking about with customers and really interwoven within that are the need for analytics, you know, big data, high performance computing, having a renaissance because of that, and the need for hybrid computing right because the stuff needs to be secure and it needs to be driven by applications, and so it really is a great way to try to exemplify why our strategy is the right strategy and why it's a winning one, because those are the unique elements that are going to power this world going forward, and we've got 'em. >> 43% of data will be analyzed at the Edge by 2020, so think about that, right. >> Yeah and we actually think that it'll be much higher over time, that moving around all this data is going to be challenging, I know you're working on the speed of light problem in the labs, and that number I think will increase. So, I wanted to ask you about messaging because messaging in very important. It clarifies your vision and it underscores your relevance to customers and previously a lot of the HP and now it's HPE, messaging was very product centric, and one tended to get lost in that. How have you sort of transformed your messaging architecture to address things like outcomes and business impacts. >> Yeah, you know customers today, it's really about outcomes, right, so technology matters but if you just look at making hybrid IT simple, as an example, that's a easy statement to say, hybrid IT is not simple. So when you, think of the messaging though, of how we're talking to our customers about that it's really at multiple different levels and let me give you a couple of examples. It's, first of all, the services from Pointnext, how do we come and engage them, and help them characterize their applications, understand their environment, and ultimately give them a roadmap with the right mix of technology, not only for today, but for the future. So, that's an example of leading much more with services in terms of our Pointnext services, in terms of how we're engaging our customers. Getting very disciplined in terms of when you think about okay how do I want to run my hybrid IT environment? We believe it runs best on a software defined infrastructure solution, Synergy gives us that. So, customers are telling us, hey I want to have more on PRIM, or I want to be able to run my applications on PRIM but I need the same experience that I can get from a public cloud, we can now do that with Synergy. Fully programmable, we're seeing amazing interaction with it we have almost 400 customers engaging, and that pipeline is continuing to grow. And then I think the third part of it, when you talk about solutions, again it's not just about technology, it's how do I want to consume this, right? So, we're hearing from our customers, you know, I need, not all of them want to just buy it from us and install it. So, we do amazing things here that we probably haven't gotten out to the market, and you're going to see us get a lot louder this week about that. For example, through our flexible financial services organization, we have amazing capabilities to really engage with other parts of the line of business, the CFO, and talk to them about how do you really want to finance this, what kind of business relationship are you looking for? With Flexible Capacity services, we bring amazing capabilities to help our customers get a public cloud experience on PRIM, so it's sitting on their environment, we're managing it, they only pay for what they use. The other part of it is, it is customers are telling us increasingly, hey you know what I want to actually have a network of service providers that I can get services from. We have done that through our Cloud28+ and our service provider partner ready program, we have a whole set of service providers optimized for infrastructure, for applications, many of them are located close to our customers, so just a few examples, I think of how we're trying to bring this all together, and a solution message is really elevating it and saying: what is the outcome you're trying to drive, starting there, and then looking at engaging them holistically across all of that. So you're seeing more and more of that. Our demos highlight that, that's the stuff we're trying to highlight at the show. >> Dave, can I pile on to the message piece, too, as well? His messaging guy here, for Jim. You know, there's a lot of noise also out on the marketplace, and I think one of the keys is the advantage of being a more focused company now, we can be much more simple, and forthright and direct in our messaging, right, in terms of who we are, what we're about, what's our strategy, what are the elements that we're putting in place to execute that strategy and it's I think it's really important because you don't get but 60 seconds, right, in front of a customer, or to grab their attention off a Twitter feed, or whatever and so, simplicity is really really important, and I think the advantage of an event like this is it brings our strategy and that message to life, I mean it's three dimensional out there right. It's living and breathing, we bring the customers forward first, that's the lead of every message because that's what other customers want to hear about, what are you going to do for me, right? >> Well, lets talk about the messaging and how it translate, from as I always say, if you got the sizzle you better have the steak, to use that old expression. Just as a random example, the user experience is changing significantly in IT, I mean yesterday I was delayed coming in Southwest coming from Silicone Valley and, you know they sold my seat, they didn't have to drag me off the plane, but you know I'm getting some help in the analog face to face but I got on Twitter, had to DM Southwest, instant channel to Southwest. That proves that the interface to technology in a digital business is changing. Now IT is transforming in a similar way, how are you guys taking the messaging of simplicity at the same time as the product evolution is shifting and architectures are changing. The people who have to consume and manage this stuff, their work is changing, so how do you guys talk about that because that's really where the meat on the bone is sitting that's where the rubber is hitting the road, your thoughts? >> I'll start, and maybe Jason you can pile on, you know I think Jason poked at it, we are a much simpler company today, so our strategy is very clean. It's to make hybrid IT simple, it's to power the Intelligent Edge, and it's to bring the services to help our customer go along that journey. So just starting with that simple message means that we can get out whole organization, our partner organization, on message in terms of what we bring and how we can help them to do that. I think the other part this that's really important is we view innovation today as really a team sport, and as we become more focused, we're actually leaning in a lot harder to our partner ecosystem. Whether it's our traditional partners, like Microsoft and SAP, whether it's new partners like Docker, Mesosphere, you know bringing the containerized environments, or actually curating a new set of partners for the future with Partner Next. Because it is about getting it down the simple thing of what's the outcome you're trying to drive, what's the technology, and the ecosystem and how can we be the company to help bring that forward? And I think that's a lot of the simplicity that you're going to see. You know on stage later today, I think why we're so excited about this is, you know you're going to hear Meg talk a little bit about the journey we've been on but more importantly the outcomes that we're delivering for customers and then what we're going to do is we're going to feature three customer scenarios, talking about what they have done, what their journey has been, their outcomes, their experiences and what they can do today, and then of course, how HP technology is enabling that. >> We had in our opening, Dave and I always talk about this, because we love the shiny new toy. Certainly I'm from Silicone Valley, he's from the east coast but the reality is that all this stuff about declining markets here and there is always a shift to another growth market, even on PRIM, you know, people might buy and consume and interface differently with technology but it doesn't mean that the data is slowing down, it doesn't mean that the value creation is changing, it's shifting. So I think that has really been something that I think you guys have had online, maybe lost in some of the tactical things but, you know, from new style of IT, to this, it's been kind of a cadence that you've been on it's not like you guys are groping for messaging. >> What goes down, yeah, and you can't just snap your fingers and be the transformed company that you want, right, but we're moving at break-neck speed on that and it does all go back to the advantage of that strategy, and the world you just described, right, you want to be nimble. You know, there may be something next month we've never heard of that disrupts the entire container market, right, containers become oh that's so yesterday, we want to be the company that's ready to pounce on the next thing, right, and we're geared to do that. You know, competitors - >> John: (mumbles) containers in microseconds is kind of a big deal, and it's coming out of the labs. >> Well you know, the other thing, I want to just add, so you talk about customers, you start with the customer the technology business is always moved faster pretty much than any business, but now, every customer is technology company, and so they're accelerating the pace, so you've got to accelerate that pace with them and be that provider. Digital transformation is all about data, it's all about becoming a technology company. So what's the message to your customers in terms of your role in helping them accelerate their transformation? >> Well, I think you pretty much hit it, right, in the statement that I use is digital business is technology. You are not going to seed with your digital transformation unless you have the right technology foundation and that's what we heard from those customers on the panel. It's about speed, it's about flexibility, it's about having the right technology that enables me to deliver services back to my internal clients at the speed I need to do it. And you know, that's where our innovation is really focused today, and that's why we're seeing a lot of customers coming to us and saying I want to understand how you did it for CenterPoint, or for Dreamworks and how we can take advantage of that. The other part of it is, technology is a big part of it but it's also the learning and the expertise that we can bring to actually make that technology work in that customer environment - we know how to do that. We're proven in doing that, and I think that's something because we're close to the technology, we not only have the right innovation, we have the right expertise to make it work for our customers, and that's important. >> I don't even think it's early innings either, Dave, I think it's not the game hasn't even started and I think you know one of the things that we believe and we're doing some research on is, we think asset evaluations is going to be completely data driven. Data will be an asset and that will impact the evaluation mechanism to >> Dave: Data is the new currency! >> John: To companies' value, so I think the shift is so early. So, riding the wave, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE we really appreciate it. Looking forward to the keynote from Meg Whitman to hear the messaging. Congratulations as you guys continue to - >> Dave: We're fired up! >> Jason: He's fired up. >> Dave: There's a lot of energy, Meg's fired up >> Jason: She's going to bring it today - >> Dave: Antonio is fired up, there's a lot of energy at the company, and you know, we're just excited to get our story out and engage customers. Thanks guys for the opportunity. >> Live here from HPE Discover, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, we'll be back with more live action. Three days of wall to wall coverage after this short break. (electronic music)