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

>>Okay. We're here with Joe Peterson, the VP of cloud and security at clarify three 60. Hello, Joe. Welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. You're welcome >>On. Let's get right into it. How do you think about cloud, where we are today in 2021, the definitions evolve, but where do you see it today and where do you see it going? >>Well, that's such an interesting question is so relevant because the labels are disappearing. So over the last 10 years, we've sort of found ourselves defining whether an environment was public or whether it was private or whether it was hybrid. Here's the deal cloud is infrastructure and infrastructure is cloud. So at the end of the day cloud in whatever form it's taking is a platform. And ultimately this enabling tool for the business customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses. So let's also point out the cloud is not a destination. It's this journey and clients are finding themselves at different places on that road. And sometimes they need help getting to the next milestone, >>Right? And they're really looking for that consistent experience. W what are the, what are the big waves and trends that you're seeing around cloud out there in the marketplace? >>So I think that this, this hybrid reality is happening in most organizations, their actual it portfolios include a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. And we're seeing this blurred line happening between the public cloud and the traditional data center. Customers want a bridge that easily connects one environment to the other environment, and they want end to end visibility. Customers are becoming more intentional and strategic about their cloud roadmaps. So some of them are intentionally and strategically selecting hybrid environments because they feel that it affords them more control, uh, cost, balance, comfort level around their security in a way cloud itself is becoming borderless. The major tech providers are extending their platforms in an infrastructure agnostic manner and that's to work across hybrid environments. Um, whether they be hosted in the data center, whether it includes multiple cloud providers as cloud matures, workload environment fit is becoming more of a priority. So forward thinking where the organizations are matching workloads to the best environment. And it's sort of application rationalization on this case by case basis. And it really makes sense. >>No, it doesn't make sense. Okay. Well, let's talk about HPE GreenLake. They just announced some new solutions, you know, what do you think it means for customers? >>I think that HPE has stepped up. They've listened to not only their customers, but their partners, customers want consumable infrastructure. They've made that really clear, and HPE has expanded the cloud service portfolio for clients. They're offering more choices to not only enterprise customers, but they're expanding their, that offering to a truck. This mid-market client base, and they provided additional tools for partners to make selling GreenLake easier. Um, this is all helping to drive channel sales. >>Yeah. So better granularity, just, it increases the candidates better optionality for customers. And this thing is evolving pretty quickly. We're, we're seeing a number of customers that we talked to, uh, interested in this model, trying to understand it better. And ultimately, I think they're going to really lean in hard, Joe. I wonder if he could maybe think about or share with us, which companies are I going to say, getting it right. And I'm really interested in the partner piece, because if you think about, you know, the partner business, it's really, it's changing a lot, right? It's, it's gone from this notion of, of moving boxes. And there was a lot of money to be made over the decades and doing that, but, but they have to now become value, add, uh, uh, suppliers and really around cloud services. And in the early days of cloud, I think the channel was a little bit freaked out saying, Oh, they're going to cut out the middleman. Uh, but what's actually happened is, is those smart, agile partners are adding substantial value. They got deep relationships, uh, with customers, uh, and they're serving as really trusted advisors and executor's of cloud strategies. What do you see happening in the partner community? >>Well, I think it's, it's been a learning curve and everything that you said was spot on, it's a two way street, right? In order for VARs to sell residual services, monthly recurring services, there has to have been some incentive to do that in HPV. Really got it, right? Because they, again, listened to that partner community. And they said, you know what? We've got to incentivize these guys to start selling this way. This is a partnership and expect it to be a partnership. And the tech companies that are getting right are doing that same sort of thing. They're, they're figuring out ways to make it palatable to that barn, to help them along that journey. They're giving them tools, they're giving them self-serve tools. They're incentivizing them financially to make that shift. That's what's going to matter. >>Well, that's a key point you're making, I mean, the financial incentives, that's new and different, um, paying, you know, incentivizing for as a service models versus again, moving, you know, moving some hardware and paying for installing iron. That's a shift in mindset. Isn't it >>Definitely is. And HP, I think, is getting it right because I noticed, but I learned this 70% of their annual sales are actually transacted through their channel. And they've seen this 116 increase in HPE GreenLake orders in Q1, from partners. So what they're doing is working. >>Yeah. I think, I think you're right. And you know, the partner channel, it becomes super critical. It's funny, Joe. I mean, again, in the early days of cloud, the channel was feeling like they were going to get disrupted. I don't know about you, but I mean, we've both been analysts for awhile and the more things get simple, the more they get complicated, right? I mean the consumerization of it, the cloud swipe your credit card, but actually applying that to your business is not easy. And so I see that as great opportunities for, for the channel. Give you the last word. >>Absolutely. And what's going to matter is the tech companies that step up and realize we've got this, we've got this chance, this opportunity to build that bridge and provide visibility end to end visibility for clients. That's, what's going to matter. >>Yeah. I like how you're, you're, you're talking about that, that bridge, because that's what everybody wants. They want that bridge from on-prem to the public cloud, across clouds, going to be moving out to the edge. And that is to your, to your point, a journey, it's going to evolve over the better part of this coming decade, Joe. Great to see you. Thanks so much for, for coming on the cube today. >>Thanks for having me.

>>Okay. Okay. Now we're gonna go into the Green Lake Power Panel. Talk about the cloud landscape hybrid cloud and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud hybrid cloud as a service and, of course, Green Lake. And with me or CR Houdyshell, president of Advise X. Ron Nemecek, Who's the business Alliance manager at C B. T s. Harry Zaric is president of competition, and Benjamin Clay is VP of sales and alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thanks for having us >>would be here. >>Okay, here's the deal. So I'm gonna ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your company's add a little color to my brief intro and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud and think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going? Not just the snapshot, but where we are today and where we're going. CR, why don't you start, please? >>Sure. Thanks a lot. They appreciate it. And, uh, again cr Howdy Shell President of advising. I've been with the company for 18 years the last four years as president. So had the great great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. Uh, as it relates to advise X and where we're headed to with hybrid Cloud is it's a journey, so we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HP. We're very excited about where HP is going with Green Lake. We believe it's it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid. Cloud have been an HP partner since since 1980. So for 40 years it's our longest standing OM relationship, and we're really excited about where HP is going with Green Lake from a hybrid cloud perspective. Uh, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions in the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VM Ware perspective. But now, with where HP is going, we think really changing the game and it really comes down to giving customers at cloud experience with the on Prem solution with Green Lake, and we've had great response from our customers and we think we're gonna continue to see how that kind of increased activity and reception. >>Great. Thank you. Cr and yeah, I totally agree. It is. It is a journey. And we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kick off your little first intro there, please? >>Sure. Dave, thanks for having me today. And it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, business Alliance manager at C B. T. S. In my role, I am responsible for RHP Green Lake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the I T industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs for business outcomes. The best position them for sustainable and long term success. I'm honored to be part of the C B. T s and Annex Canada Organization, C B T s stands for consult Bill transform and support. We have a 35 year relationship with HP or a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati Ohio. We service 3000 customers, generating over a billion dollars in revenue, and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation VR team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2800 technical certifications 260 specifically with HP and in our hybrid cloud business. We have clearly found the technology new market demands for instant responses and experiences evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation and, of course, the global pandemic have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy we have. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as there Technology Advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital and financial statements, ratios and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective, comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications, ensuring proper alignment and costs with financial return. >>Great. Thank you, Ron. Yeah, Today it's all about the business value. Harry, please, >>I Dave. Thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North, where Canadian based company headquartered in Toronto, with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. What we would call a solution provider hard for my mother to understand what that means. But our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking and point in data center technology for a brand new hospital is now being mobilized for covid high risk patients. So talk about are all being an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud and cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud. But the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure but modernized and updated So it looks and feels a lot like a cloud. But they have the security. They have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on from. And so the Green Lake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have 1 ft in the cloud, 1 ft in their traditional data center, but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HP to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to rest >>your hair. It's interesting about what you said is is cloud is it is kind of chaotic. My word not yours, but but there is a lot of confusion out there. I mean, it's what's cloud right? Is it Public Cloud is a private cloud the hybrid cloud. Now, now it's the edge. And of course, the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >>Um, from a cloud perspective. You know, I think as an industry, you know, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily gonna win the day and were, in fact, in a hybrid world, there's certainly been some some commentary impress. Um, you know, that would sort of validate that. Not that necessarily needs any validation. But I think it's the linkages between on Prem, Um, and cloud based services have increased. Its paved the way for customers to more effectively deploy hybrid solutions in the model that they want that they desired. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. Um, you know, as the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive there services, initiatives, uh, you know, in particular managed services. So, you know, from from an arrow perspective, as we think about how we can help scale in particular from Greenland perspective, we've got the ability to stand up some some cloud capabilities through our aero secure platform. um that can really help customers adopt Green Lake. Uh, and, uh, benefit to benefit from, um, some alliances, opportunities as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through >>that. I didn't mean to squeeze you on a narrow. I mean, you got arrows. Been around longer than computers. I mean, if you google the history of arrow, it'll blow your mind. But give us a little, uh, quick commercial. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I've been with arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for alliances, organization, North America for Global value, added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement Company. Uh, you know, we bring scope, scale and and, uh, expertise as it relates to the I t industry. Um, you know, I love the fast paced, the fast paced that comes with the market, that we're all all in, and I love helping customers and suppliers both, you know, be positioned for long term success. And, you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and or to the discussion. >>All right, We got some good brain power in the room. Let's let's cut right to the chase. Ron, Where's the pain? What are the main problems that C B. T s. I love the what it stands for. Consult Bill Transform and support the What's the main pain point that that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies. >>Third day of our customers' concerns and associated risk come from the market demands to deliver their products, services and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenges is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure processes and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map for the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences, while managing their costs and, of course, mitigating risk to their business. This collaboration with our customer customers often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational and stranded asset costs in their on premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically through our customized workshops and assessments. We can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications through our partnership with HP and the availability of the HP Green Lake Solutions. Our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's economics and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, you know, the development costs at the experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HP Green Lake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now that achieves true utilization to cost economics. You know, with HP Green Lake solution from C B. T s. >>I love to focus on the business case because it's measurable. That sort of follow the money. That's where it's where the opportunity is. Okay, See, I got a question for you thinking about advise X customers. How are they? Are they leaning into Green Lake? You know, what are they telling you? Is the business impact when they when they experience Green Lake, >>I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We have to solve the business challenges first, and so far the reception's been positive. When I say that is, customers are open, everybody wants to. The C suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits, but what we're hearing, what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first put in, if you will. But as importantly, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that that say, What's the first thing that happens with regard to Green like Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as a as a service. That's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today, but when you can say we have a proven solution, it's working in in in our environment today. That's key. I think the second thing is is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this, this hybrid solution, you've got to be flexible for again. I think Ron said it well, you don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to. We're gonna build for growth, but we don't want to pay for it, so we'll pay as we grow. Not as not as we have to use because we used to do It was upfront of the capital expenditure, and I will just pay as we grow and that really facilitates. In another great examples, you'll hear from a customer, uh, this afternoon, but you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company, and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in Green Lake. They're looking at the flexibility to add the Green Lake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions and finally is really we see it really brings the cloud experience and as a service to our customers bring. And with HP Green Lake, it brings best to breathe. So it's not just what HP has to offer. When you look at hyper converged, they have Nutanix kohi city, so I really believe it brings best to breathe. So, uh to net it out and close it out with our customers thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional with Green Lake Central has interface. Customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago, just re up, and it was a highly competitive situation. But they just said, Look, it's proven it works and it gives us that cloud experience So I had a lot of great success thus far, looking forward to more. >>Thank you. So, Harry, I want to pick up on something, CR said, And get your perspectives. So when you when I talk to the C suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, Cloud, they have a cloud agenda and and what they tell me is it's not just about their I t transformation. They want, they want that. But they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk Harry about competence, perspective on the potential business impact of Green Lake, and and also, you know, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know how to cost optimize in i t. But also the business value that comes out of that capability. >>Yes. So, Dave, you know, if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the cost. When they generate the revenue, they don't want to have all the cost up front and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is related to the pandemic. Employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home, and now they have to. They have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VD virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the off. Don't want to get into too much detail. But to be able to support that from an at home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the cost. And so the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, But then turning it off when you don't need it is really a benefit of a variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development if a customer is going to implement and you, let's say, line of business application essay P is very, very popular, you know, it actually, unfortunately takes six months to two years to actually get that application setup installed, validated, test it and then moves through production. You know what used to happen before they would buy all that capacity at front and basically sit there for two years? And then when they finally went to full production, then they were really getting value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost idle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it perfect Green Lake is the ideal solution that allows them to do that. >>You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it and what Harry was just talking about with regard to VD. You think about that. There's the dialing up and dialing down piece, which is awesome from an i t perspective and then the business impact. There is the productivity of Of of the end users, and most C suite executives I've talked to said Productivity actually went up during covid with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, you know Ben, I We said Arrow has been around for a long, long time, certainly before all of us were born and it's gone through many, many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does arrow and how do How do your partners think about building cloud experience experiences? And where does Green Lake fit in from your perspective? >>A great question. So from a narrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience and, of course, us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our aero screw platform. Um, just just a bit of a you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote single bill auto provision compared multi supplier, if you will Subscription management utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HP, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. So we're excited today to have Green Lake live in our platform available for our part of community to consume in particular the swift solutions that HP has announced. So we're very excited to to share that today, Um, maybe a little bit more on Green Lake. I think at this point in time, there it's differentiated, Um, in a sense that if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with, um uh, having the solutions himself available in a row sphere So, you know, I would say, Do we identify the uniqueness, um, and quickly partner with HP to to work with our atmosphere platform? One other sort of unique thing is, you know, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience the different geographies around the world. So, you know, we're available in north of 20 countries. There's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis, and frankly, hundreds of thousands and customers are leveraging today, so that creates an opportunity for both Arrow HP and our partner community. So we're excited. >>Uh, you know, I just want to open it up and we don't have much time left, but thoughts on on on differentiation. You know, when people ask me Okay, what's really different about H P E and Green Lake? As others you know are doing things that with with as a service to me, it's a I I always say cultural. It starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But But I wonder from your perspective because you guys are hands on. Are there other differential factors that you would point to let me just open that up to the group? >>Yeah, if I could make a comment. You know, Green Lake is really just the latest invocation of the as a service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a cell. And forget not that we ever forget about customers, but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years, you may have an occasional engagement with them. But it's not continuous. When you move to a Green Lake model, you're actually helping them manage that you are in the core in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant, and you want to be always there for them. >>You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to and and and in your in your remarks from your perspective as a partner because, you know, Hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset. But other thoughts, >>I think I think Dad did that day. I think Harry's right on right. What he the way he positioned Exactly. You get on the customer. Even another step back for us is we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution to leave with a compute. You can really have step back, have a business conversation, and we've done that where you don't even bring up hp Green Lake until you get to the point of the customer says, So you can give me an on prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work then? Then you bring up. It's all through this HP Green link tool. It really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HP. Green length. >>All right, guys. CR Ron. Harry. Ben. Great discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us, Dave. >>All >>right. Keep it right there for more great content at Green Lake Day. Right back? Yeah.

>>Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening. I am Kevin Duke with HPE GreenLake cloud services and welcome to the HPE GreenLake per private cloud session. I enjoined today by Raj mystery and Steve show Walter, who will walk us through today's presentation and demonstration. We'd like to keep this session interactive. So please submit your questions in the chat window. We have subject matter experts on the line to answer your questions. So with that, I'll hand over to Raj Kilz. Thanks Kevin. So cloud is now fast becoming a reality. We says HPE and what our customers say to is that it's not an expectation anymore. It's an absolute necessity. So the research and the stats that you see on the screen, just kind of like prove that over the last five to six years, organizations, enterprises are adopting cloud. Be it in the data center with the hyperscalers are a mixture of both. >>But the interesting thing that we see now is a moving investment to basically increase private cloud capability. Uh, and in that vein, what we've done with Greenlight cloud services is create a rich portfolio that delivers that cloud-like experience either at the edge in your data center, co-location the actually matches and actually embraces the work that you do with the hyperscalers. What we're doing here is we're providing self-service capability elasticity in the means and the way that you would use this and the way that you would flex things open down more importantly, all of this is one and operated for you, which comes true to what we say in terms of delivering that cloud experience within those locations, being at the edge, the data center or the Colwell, um, Greenlight for private cloud was initially launched, uh, in summer 2020, it was the first iteration of what we call the Greenlight platforms. >>What we're trying to do with this element of the Greenlight cloud services portfolio is four things which is eliminate the complexity of building things that live, breathe, behave, and act like in a cloud-like manner in the data center, because this is hard. Yeah, the visibility around the way that you would manage and understand and run and operate certain elements of that cloud, uh, the governance and the compliance pace, which is important, especially when it comes to things like applying policies, et cetera, that you would have. And then the skills gap that we do from our managed services perspective, that takes things off. So from an infrastructure standpoint, beginning of the left, well class HPE compute storage networks, which is embracing the virtualization and the software defined networking layer together with a pretty rich cloud automation and orchestration portal all wrapped up for you. Pre-built pre architected, removing complexity, increasing time to value, uh, and, and, uh, the, the actual delivery timescales, if we move to the actual experience, although this is actually, uh, embracing the way that you would access these, uh, solutions. >>So in, through GreenLake central, uh, that's where your other service experience begins with HPE is your entry point into the world of as a service from here on which you would actually access that service. So from a, from a private cloud standpoint, this is where you would initiate the cloud management portal. And then you would begin either working in that and the roles of either administrator, consumer, et cetera. Lastly, you know, pushing buttons and provisioning stuff is really easy, but a lot of our focuses is in the pulse provisioning processes, understanding is it turned on? Is it off? How much is it costing me? Am I getting the most efficiency out of it? Am I running out of capacity to deliver services to my users? All of this is finally wrapped up with the managed platform capability, which means you now have to understand and treat Hewlett-Packard enterprise as an MSP and a cloud provider within our data center. We take care of the infrastructure, the software, and the experience, your entry point is that the cloud management layer, that's how we get you going. >>Hey, Roger, I know we made some announcements earlier today about a new scalable form factor version of private cloud. I was wondering if maybe you could talk about how that extends the value proposition for customers >>Question Steve. Um, so what the scalable form factor is really is it's also looking at market feedback, understanding of what our customers are bringing this as a entry point into the smaller and the more medium enterprise who are looking to deliver private cloud capabilities, you know, making it easier for them to embrace it and then scale. The other differences is the way that we actually have flexibility in the way that that cloud solution now grows. So different options, uh, available to customers in terms of what they want to do. We typically talk as a team and to our customers about different roles. So we have a notion of the cloud administrator or the cloud operator. This is more of your classic kind of like administrative role. So this is where our customers would come in, right at the cloud management layer and begin configuring their EMR environment, networking services, et cetera, from here, onwards is the cloud consumer. >>So applications, line, application, developers, lines of business, et cetera, they're presented with a self-service catalog for them to come and provision stuff. It could be normal VMs. It could be kind of like applications depending on what the administrators or the operators of Charles and to present to them. Lastly, it's around, how do I understand what's going on in the environment? So the focus, as I mentioned beforehand, visibility to them understand what's happening to then optimize later. So addressing the needs of lines of, or it leaders and business leaders within our customer base, although this then begins from our central point of access, which is GreenLake central from here, services and solutions that customers subscribe to are presented, depending on who you are, your privileges, your role within the actual environment, you get different options. So a cloud administrator may see different things in central because they require administrative functions within the cloud environment. I consume it such as me may have limited views in central access a service, but I can basically only read our provision set, things that are done for me from a lines of business or from an it leadership perspective. It's about providing predictive billing visibility into cost, understanding from a planning standpoint and allowing people to optimize it, ease and speed. So central is where your journey begins. And then from within there, you launch the necessary service like you're subscribed to today's focus is the private cloud. >>So who is this a solution built for Raj? Uh, initially we started off at the large enterprise level, Kevin, but what we've done as we did as HPE has listened to our customers. So we've reintroduced on them. We're launching today, the scalable form factor to address the needs of a multitude of clients, both large and small and enable people to have different kind of like deployment types. So remote office branch office for the larger customers, and for those smaller enterprises wanting to begin their private cloud journey, a great way for them to do that with HPE. >>All right. Thank you. >>Um, how does the customer access the private cloud environment, uh, by agreeing like central Kevin? Great question. That's our entry point for any of the services? Uh, easier to see later on in the demo that Steve's going to walk through, uh, it's where customers come in and depending on role access, privilege, rights, et cetera, you are presented with your services. And from within that you access the service depending on the role that's been assigned to you. So state, why don't you show us a little bit about what a cloud administrator or a cloud operator can do within the environment? Sure. Happy to rush. As we talked to these personas are use cases. You know, our experience, as Raj mentioned, will always start in GreenLake central. So the role or persona I'm taking on here is that of an administrator of this private cloud environment. So again, I start off by logging into GreenLake central. Once this stood up, services stood up and available, uh, within my data center, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, which gives me an overview of services I'm consuming. And some of the things that might be running in that environment, clicking on the tile, takes me to the cloud management platform dashboard. This is where I, as an administrator can configure and control lots of things in the environment on behalf of my end users. So a couple of examples of things I might want to do first off. Uh, there's an important >>Notion of grouping that we use for access control within the environment. So I may want to organize my users into groups to control what they can see, what they can do, what sort of policies I can apply to them next. I probably want to configure the underlying software defined network that Raj talked about. So again, we deliver a software defined networking capability from within the software defined network. This is where I can create things like underlying networks, underlying distributed V switches at an IP address pools. I can also configure and manage software defined routers, firewall rules, and some of those sorts of things within the environment, uh, in the IP address pools I have that I want to make available to some of those underlying networks I could manage from within here as well. We also feature software to find load balancing capabilities. So again, if I expect to my developers or my end users, to be able to provision resources that require some load balancing, I can create those load balancers define the types of load balancing I want to make available to those end users from within here as well. >>Finally, I can manage keys and certificates. So if I have things like key payers or SSL certificates, again, that I want to make available to my end users, um, I could manage all that from within here. And then one of the final things I might want to do is start to manage a, an automation library. So a library of virtual images, I don't want to make available for, for my end users because the private cloud solution is based on VMware. I might want to just pull in some existing VMware images. I have, I might want to create some new custom images, but really I have a central place to be able to manage that library of images and then, you know, decide who has access to which images and how I want to make those available to end users users to be able to provision and lifecycle manage. >>So that's a quick overview of some of the administrative capabilities, uh, Kevin, any questions at this point about that capability? I got one for you customers bring their own tooling to the private cloud. Oh yeah. So that's a great question. So, you know, almost every customer I talk to nowadays has made a large investment, typically in some sort of automation tooling. And one of the things that we want to provide is the ability to surface that tooling and kind of allow customers to be able to reuse that tooling within our private cloud environment. So within the private cloud platform, as an administrator, I can create all sorts of scripts and, you know, maybe some basic capabilities I wanted to find for scripts, but they also have the ability to integrate automation platforms. So we can see in this particular environment, I've, I've onboarded a, uh, a set of Ansible playbooks that exist in a get repo. Uh, I really just point the cloud management platform to that repo it scrapes all the playbooks that it finds there and those become available as tasks and workflows that I can use, uh, after I provisioned BM. So again, I can reuse that investment that I've made in automating things like application provisioning, application configuration for my end users within my environment. >>I've got another one for you. Uh, how do customers improve control and governance of their private cloud? Yeah. So there are a couple of different ways to do that. So, you know, we'll talk specifically. One of the capabilities I have within, uh, the cloud management platform is the ability to create, uh, policies. Policies are really a way I can provide my users with, you know, self-service access to kind of go do the things that they need to do, but provide some control around what they can do. So there's all sorts of policies I can create. So policies around things like if I've got certain group of users that I want to require to get provision approval, anytime they approve provision something, I wanted an administrator to approve it. I can also limit the things that maybe a group of consumers of consumers can consume within my environment. Maybe I want to define a certain host name rule. So rather than create your own host names, I have a rule I want applied. Um, if tagging and showback is important, I might want to force some tags within my environment, say, Hey, anybody who provisioned something needs to provide me a value for this tag. And then I can define how that applies within the environment. So hopefully that answers some questions and gives you a feel of how these cloud administrators would work within the environment, TB to be able to manage the overall environment itself. >>Perfect. Thanks Steve. So what we've just described in seeing is, is the ability for a cloud administrator to a do day one tasks, set things up, set some services off and more importantly, apply some rules, controls, and governance. So it keeps users safe and it keeps it happy. Really. So let's say I'm Raj, I'm the head of applications and I've got a team of developers. So I'm now going to come in as a consumer. Can you show me what I can do as a consumer pleaser? >>Sure. Raj. So again, just like with the administrative use case, we talked about as a, as a cloud consumer, my experience starts in GreenLake central. So once I'm logged into GreenLake central, if I've been provided access to the environment by my administrators, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, and I click on it to get to the cloud management platform. Just like the administrator you use. Now, I probably see a lot less because I probably have a lot less capabilities here, but one of the first places I'd probably want to go is take a look at what instances have been provisioned and maybe provision an instance on my own. So, you know, instance provisioning is very simple. Really. It's just a few clicks and answer a few questions. Uh, so in this case, if I have access to multiple groups, so kind of that logical separation that I talked about, I'd first pick, you know, which group is this a part of? >>Uh, again, in my particular case, I can provide a freeform name because that's the policy that's been set up for me. Um, I've got a forced tag, right? So I have to provide a tag or a label that tells me what, uh, what, what area this is a part of. And as I continue to drill down, now I get to a point where I can select my image based on the images that have been made, made available to me. Um, I can choose a size of a VM. So we have sort of some pre-provision sizes that might administrators have made available to me. And in some cases I can customize some things within those sizes, or maybe I can't, again, just depending on how this was created, select the network that I want to connect to, uh, and provide a few other options. One, the things I do want to talk about is this notion of tagging tagging is very important from a showback perspective. >>And we'll talk about when we get to cost analysis, how we can use any tags that get applied here to be able to do some show back reporting later. So if I want to provide a tag for an owner to make sure I can always write a report that says, show me everything that Steve has consumed. I've got the ability to provide those tags here. And again, through a policy, I can make those tags required. A couple of other choices. I have any of that available automation that maybe my administrators have made available. I can run here. I can select some scaling of my application, maybe go ahead and auto select the backup schedule, manage some lifecycle actions if maybe this VM only needs to run during weekdays. And I don't need it on the weekends. I can have it automatically shut down and start up. >>And at the end, just click on complete. Uh, and my VM is often being built. And then, you know, once my VMs are up and running, I've got access to be able to manage those VMs on a running basis. So, you know, if I have a VM that's running and I want to be able to manage it very simple again, from within the cloud management platform to go take a look at maybe how this VM is performing, maybe I want to log into the console. Maybe I want to take a look at the log stash that, you know, the log log error messages that this VM has created, or maybe I just want to stop it, start, it can create an image from it, or maybe, you know, after I've provisioned, it runs some of those workflows on it as a, as a end-user, I've got the capability to kind of fully manage and fully control those VMs once I have them up and running. >>So that's a quick overview of that cloud consumer use case. Uh, Kevin, do you have any questions right now about that use case? Yeah, I do, uh, cloud consumers today want more than a VM, so how can a private cloud deliver more value for cloud consumers? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we talked a little bit about the cloud management platforms, ability to integrate with existing automation, for things like, uh, application installation and configuration. Uh, but one thing I didn't talk about is kind of an alternate way. We can use that and that's through this notion of blueprints. So within the cloud management platform, I, as a developer or as an administrator can set up blueprints, which are really, uh, very complex applications. These could be multi-node multi-tiered applications where each tier may have a different application installed. They may be load balanced, all those sorts of things, and I can stitch all those together and make them available as a catalog item. >>It's just kind of one simple catalog item for an end user to consume. So they don't have to understand all the complexity or all the multiple nodes or all the workflows required on the backend to provide that service. I've already done all that hard work. I advertise it to them and they don't have to know, again, in this particular case, I've got a web tier made up of a couple of VMs, a database tier made up of a couple of VMs. Uh, there's some automation running, maybe through those Ansible playbooks, uh, in, in the backend to make all those things happen really, as an end user, I just say, Hey, I want one of these applications. I may need to answer a few questions, uh, depending on how the application or their blueprint is built. And then I could push that out as an application. And again, I don't have to understand all the complexities that make up that multi-node multi-tiered application on in the background >>Stay. That's really cool. So like phase as good as it can be. So, right. So we've pushed some buttons, we've set some stuff up, we've provisioned some stuff. So right at the beginning, you know, we spoke about the post provisioning stuff. So how do we actually manage the costs and also look at their usage within their environment, which is also important to our customers. >>Yeah. So it's a great question, Raj. So, you know, obviously customers want to understand what their overall green link consumption is, what their bill is, how all those things relate together. And then they probably want to do much more detailed cost analysis as well. So the good news here, we provide all this tooling and all this is available right through GreenLake central. So a couple of the tiles that you'll see in GreenLake central tie into the private cloud solution, just like they would any other GreenLake solution. So if I want to see overall what I've consumed, uh, within my private cloud, as a GreenLake resource, I can drill down to understand, Hey, what was actually metered as what I consumed, how did that relate to my GreenLake rate card? You know, how did that, how did that create the number that appeared on my GreenLake bill for this particular service at the end of the month, I've also got the tools to do capacity planning, again, just like every other green Lake environment. >>Uh, we want to be able to show kind of that capacity planning view so customers can understand kind of what they're consuming, uh, what direction that's trending. And when we need to add some, we may need to add some more additional capacity. So again, when a customer needs more, it's already there and ready to go, they just start to consume it and pay for it as a part of their green Lake bill. So Greenlight customers have a dedicated account team that kind of works with them to keep an eye on that capacity. And again, make sure we're working with customers to make the right decisions about when is the right time to add additional capacity to the environment. And then finally, you know, our customers also get access to consumption analytics for much more detailed cost reporting. So within consumption analytics, I can take advantage of those tags that I talked about previously. >>So here's a report I created where I want to see my private cloud consumption and use really broken down by cost center. And by the VMs that my users within each of those cost centers is consuming. So I wrote a report to do some showback costing based on those tags. So in this particular case, I can tell, for example, the colo engineer cost center that Hey you over the last month, you've consumed 32, uh, elements within the private cloud environment. You know, your total cost for that was $860. And I can give them the ability to, you know, if they want drill down on this. So, you know, now they'll see every individual VM that was provisioned, uh, where it ran when it ran. And in this particular case, I've broken down the cost between compute and storage, because I really wanted to see those separately as separate line items, but, you know, really give customers the ability to do whatever showback or chargeback reporting makes sense within their organization, based on the tags. >>They want to apply it and how they want to be able to show and consume those costs. So, Kevin, any questions about, uh, sort of this cost analysis use case? Yep. Is there a way to proactively monitor consumption of the private cloud environment? Yeah, so we actually provide a couple of different ways to do that. Uh, one right within consumption analytics that we talked about, one of the capabilities I have is, is the ability to set a budget. So in this particular case, I've set a budget again, kind of by that cost center that I can take a look at, Hey, you know, what are all these cost centers consuming within this private cloud environment? Uh, and how does that relate to, you know, what maybe, uh, an amount that I've given them to be able to use? So I can take a look at it and see, Hey, in the current period, you know, I've got one, a cost center that's over budget two that are under budget and take a look at their historical use as well. >>Going back to the cloud management platform. I also have more of a hard way to be able to set those consumption boundaries, uh, by using a policy. So again, if I want to create a policy that says, Hey, you know, Steve can only have 20 VMs. Uh, once he's provisioned those 20 VMs, he can't have any more, um, you know, he's got to come back and ask for more. And again, you know, when I create this policy, I could apply it to a group or an individual user just kind of based on how I want to put those guard rails around that environment and then sort of do that around that environment. So there's kind of a way to do this in more of a soft way based on cost to understand budgets and get notifications. When I get close to my budget limits or more of a hard way to actually, you know, be able to limit resources that customers can consume within the environment itself. So with that, Raj, I'll throw it back to you. >>Thanks, Dave, >>Just to wrap up really, you know, Steve and Kevin, thank you for the great demonstration and the chat, really, um, a few things for the audience and our customers, uh, to understand what we're now doing with Greenlight for private cloud and other platform solutions is helping you to get started really, really quickly, allowing you to begin your journey with us at the right level. And then you can scale depending on how you are actually managing your transformation, be it from an infrastructure standpoint application standpoint, or you are looking to basically just modernize the way that you deliver services back out to your internal users. The other side of it is, is the important fact that we now act and behave very much like a cloud. So because we run those environments for you, we eliminate the complexity of feeding them all, Trang, all the infrastructure, the configuration, and the updates of the software layer. It leaves you free to basically deliver the services like Steve has just shown the other side of it. Final point, is this all usage based? Uh, so again, lowering kind of like the initial investment risk for you guys, allowing you to, uh, benefit from the way that we've actually integrated the solutions and technologies. So you can just embrace them and take advantage of. >>Excellent. Thank you, Raj. So I would like to thank you all for today. Thank >>You, Raj and Steve, for a brilliant demonstration. If you would like more information or like to speak to someone directly, then please fill out the poll by clicking on the poll option at the top of the chat box. So in closing, if you are interested in HPE GreenLake for private cloud, then please start a trial. It's easy. Thank you. Thank you all and goodbye for now..

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: We are entering an age of insight where data moves freely between environments to work together powerfully, from wherever it lives. A new era driven by next generation cloud services. It's freedom that accelerates innovation and digital transformation, but it's only for those who dare to propel their business toward a new future that pushes beyond the usual barriers. To a place that unites all information under a fluid yet consistent operating model, across all your applications and data. To a place called HPE GreenLake. HPE GreenLake pushes beyond the obstacles and limitations found in today's infrastructure because application entanglements, data gravity, security, compliance, and cost issues simply aren't solved by current cloud options. Instead, HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you, bringing with it, increased agility, broad visibility, and open governance across your entire enterprise. This is digital transformation unlocked, incompatibility solved, data decentralized, and insights amplified. For those thinkers, makers and doers who want to create on the fly scale up or down with a single click, stand up new ideas without risk, and view it all as a single agile system of systems. HPE GreenLake is here and all are invited. >> The definition of cloud is evolving and now clearly comprises hybrid and on-prem cloud. These trends are top of mind for every CIO and the space is heating up as every major vendor has been talking about as-a-Service models and making moves to better accommodate customer needs. HPE was the first to market with its GreenLake brand, and continues to make new announcements designed to bring the cloud experience to far more customers. Come here from HPE and its partners about the momentum that they're seeing with this trend and what actions you can take to stay ahead of the competition in this fast moving market. (bright soft music) Okay, we're with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen, good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome, Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get green-late right for enterprise markets. And you got some news today, which we're going to get to but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim if you will, the edge, cloud as-a-Service all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact's been amazing and, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customer's digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the cloud to the customer in their data center, in their colo, or at the edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full cloud experience. All is a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them so they get that as I mentioned, true cloud experience. It's really sort of landing really well with customers and we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology. And we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that just cause as a quick aside it's, the definition of cloud is evolving and it's because customers, it's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across cloud, edge, you know, multiclouds, on-prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably saying it for yourself. The cloud is an experience, it's not a destination. The digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. And the first round of digital transformation focused on a cloud first strategy. For our customers we're looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the cloud speed and agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live, According to IDC, by the end of 2021, 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide, specifically, in the small and medium companies which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, the analysts agree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come. And speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the fair focus will be on internal processes and operations. The digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers, a dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem, we're helping our customers embrace our as-a-Service vision and stand out wherever they are. on their transformation journey. >> Well, thanks for those stats, I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business only 'cause.... I'm sure there's some exceptions, but you got to get on the digital bandwagon. I think pre-pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith, let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, the world is hybrid and the world is multicloud. And so, customers are expecting these solutions. And so, we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to General AVailability of our MLOps, Machine Learning Operations, and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC, customer edition, which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the colo. And then today we're introducing our new Bare Metal capabilities as well as containers on Bare Metal as a Service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a Service experience we talked about before, where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud, which is virtual machines, containers, storage, compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software, and our services, and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra-large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self-service capabilities we're integrating into our distributors marketplaces through a core set of APIs to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over 100,000 additional value-added resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1, over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake Cloud Services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand, extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships like our colos. The colocation centers are really key. So Equinix, CyrusOne and others that we're working with and I'll let George talk more about. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could pick up on that George. I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see an opportunity here.. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the old days moving iron. But I got to move, I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID's actually, you know, accelerating a lot of those changes, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, George? >> So I completely agree with Keith and through and with our partners we give our customers choice. Right, they don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers. We're driving special initiatives via Cloud28 which we run, which is the world's largest cloud aggregator. And also, in collaboration with our distributors in their marketplaces as Keith mentioned. In addition, customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SI's, our ISV's, to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. 'Cause customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient low latency networks. And the modern workload demands, secure, compliant, highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on colocation. We're partnering with colocation facilities to provide our customers with the ability to expand bandwidth, reduce latency, and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them, but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on-demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know, making ourselves easier to do business with. We've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake Central, and could provide their customers end to end support and managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities so customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts. And we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah, so, I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer-driven. To me what the customer wants is they want to come in, they want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on-prem, in the cloud, across clouds, at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me. Make it simple to do, not only the technology to work, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide and that's a bold vision. And then, make it easy to do business. Let me buy as-a-Service if that's the way I want to consume. And partners are all about, you know, reducing friction and driving that. So, anyway guys, final thoughts, maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George can call it timeout. >> Yeah, you summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers' apps, data, workloads, and solutions. And really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate and our ears are wide open, and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Right, George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills and embrace our competence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners and we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> That's great, we're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio, partners key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out and expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> Yeah, you bet, thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> You're welcome. (bright soft music) >> Okay, we're here with Jo Peterson the VP of Cloud & Security at Clarify360. Hello, Jo, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, let's get right into it. How do you think about cloud where we are today in 2021? The definitions evolve, but where do you see it today and where do you see it going? >> Well, that's such an interesting question and is so relevant because the labels are disappearing. So over the last 10 years, we've sort of found ourselves defining whether an environment was public or whether it was private or whether it was hybrid. Here's the deal, cloud is infrastructure and infrastructure is cloud. So at the end of the day cloud in whatever form it's taking is a platform, and ultimately, this enablement tool for the business. Customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses. So let's also point out that cloud is not a destination, it's this journey. And clients are finding themselves at different places on that road. And sometimes they need help getting to the next milestone. >> Right, and they're really looking for that consistent experience. Well, what are the big waves and trends that you're seeing around cloud out there in the marketplace? >> So I think that this hybrid reality is happening in most organizations. Their actual IT portfolios include a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and we're seeing this blurred line happening between the public cloud and the traditional data center. Customers want a bridge that easily connects one environment to the other environment, and they want end-to-end visibility. Customers are becoming more intentional and strategic about their cloud roadmaps. So some of them are intentionally and strategically selecting hybrid environments because they feel that it affords them more control, cost, balance, comfort level around their security. In a way, cloud itself is becoming borderless. The major tech providers are extending their platforms in an infrastructure agnostic manner and that's to work across hybrid environments, whether they be hosted in the data center, whether it includes multiple cloud providers. As cloud matures, workload environments fit is becoming more of a priority. So forward thinking where the organizations are matching workloads to the best environment. And it's sort of application rationalization on this case by case basis and it really makes sense. >> Yeah, it does makes sense. Okay, well, let's talk about HPE GreenLake. They just announced some new solutions. What do you think it means for customers? >> I think that HPE has stepped up. They've listened to not only their customers but their partners. Customers want consumable infrastructure, they've made that really clear. And HPE has expanded the cloud service portfolio for clients. They're offering more choices to not only enterprise customers but they're expanding that offering to attract this mid-market client base. And they provided additional tools for partners to make selling GreenLake easier. This is all helping to drive channel sales. >> Yeah, so better granularity, just so it increases the candidates, better optionality for customers. And this thing is evolving pretty quickly. We're seeing a number of customers that we talked to interested in this model, trying to understand it better and ultimately, I think they're going to really lean in hard. Jo, I wonder if you could maybe think about or share with us which companies are, I got to say, getting it right? And I'm really interested in the partner piece, because if you think about the partner business, it's really, it's changing a lot, right? It's gone from this notion of moving boxes and there was a lot of money to be made over the decades in doing that, but they have to now become value-add suppliers and really around cloud services. And in the early days of cloud, I think the channel was a little bit freaked out, saying, uh-oh, they're going to cut out the middleman. But what's actually happened is those smart agile partners are adding substantial value, they've got deep relationships with customers and they're serving as really trusted advisors and executors of cloud strategies. What do you see happening in the partner community? >> Well, I think it's been a learning curve and everything that you said was spot on. It's a two way street, right? In order for VARs to sell residual services, monthly recurring services, there has to have been some incentive to do that and HPE really got it right. Because they, again listened to that partner community, and they said, you know what? We've got to incentivize these guys to start selling this way. This is a partnership and we expect it to be a partnership. And the tech companies that are getting right are doing that same sort of thing, they're figuring out ways to make it palatable to that VAR, to help them along that journey. They're giving them tools, they're giving them self-serve tools, they're incentivizing them financially to make that shift. That's what's going to matter. >> Well, that's a key point you're making, I mean, the financial incentives, that's new and different. Paying, you know, incentivizing for as-a-Service models versus again, moving hardware and paying for, you know, installing iron. That's a shift in mindset, isn't it? >> It definitely is. And HPE, I think is getting it right because I didn't notice but I learned this, 70% of their annual sales are actually transacted through their channel. And they've seen this 116% increase in HPE GreenLake orders in Q1, from partners. So what they're doing is working. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, the partner channel it becomes super critical. It's funny, Jo, I mean, again, in the early days of cloud, the channel was feeling like they were going to get disrupted. I don't know about you, but I mean, we've both been analysts for awhile and the more things get simple, the more they get complicated, right? I mean the consumerization of IT, the cloud, swipe your credit card, but actually applying that to your business is not easy. And so, I see that as great opportunities for the channel. Give you the last word. >> Absolutely, and what's going to matter is the tech companies that step up and realize we've got this chance, this opportunity to build that bridge and provide visibility, end-to-end visibility for clients. That's what going to matter. >> Yeah, I like how you're talking about that bridge, because that's what everybody wants. They want that bridge from on-prem to the public cloud, across clouds, going to to be moving out to the edge. And that is to your point, a journey that's going to evolve over the better part of this coming decade. Jo, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE today. >> Thanks for having me. (bright soft music) >> Okay, now we're going to into the GreenLake power panel to talk about the cloud landscape, hybrid cloud, and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud, hybrid cloud as a Service and of course, GreenLake. And with me are C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. Ron Nemecek, who's the Business Alliance Manager at CBTS. Harry Zarek is President of Compugen. And Benjamin Klay is VP of Sales and Alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Okay, here's the deal. So I'm going to ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your companies, add a little color to my brief intro, and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud? And think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going, not just the snapshot but where we are today and where we're going. C.R., why don't you start please? >> Sure, thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. And again, C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. I've been with the company for 18 years, the last four years as president. So had the great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. As it relates to Advizex and where we're headed to with hybrid cloud is it's a journey. So we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HPE. We're very excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. We believe it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid cloud. Have been an HPE partner since, well since 1980. So for 40 years, it's our longest standing OEM relationship. And we're really excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions, the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VMware perspective. But now with where HPE is going, we think, probably changing the game. And it really comes down to giving customers that cloud experience with the on-prem solution with GreenLake. And we've had great response for customers and we think we're going to continue to see that kind of increased activity and reception. >> Great, thank you C.R., and yeah, I totally agree. It is a journey and we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kickoff your little first intro there please. >> Sure Dave, thanks for having me today and it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, I'm a Business Alliance manager at CBTS. In my role, I'm responsible for our HPE GreenLake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the IT industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs, for business outcomes to best position them for sustainable and long-term success. I'm honored to be part of the CBTS and OnX Canada organization. CBTS stands for Consult Build Transform and Support. We have a 35 year relationship with HPE. We're a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. We service 3000 customers generating over a billion dollars in revenue and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation via our team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2,800 technical certifications, 260 specifically with HPE. And in our hybrid cloud business, we have clearly found that technology, new market demands for instant responses and experiences, evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation, and of course the global pandemic, have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as their technology advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital, and financial statements, ratios, and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications ensuring proper alignment and cost with financial return. >> Great, thank you, Ron. Yeah, today it's all about the business value. Harry, please. >> Hi Dave, thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North. We're a Canadian-based company headquartered in Toronto with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. We're what we would call a solution provider. How hard for my mother to understand what that means but what our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments. Just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking endpoint and data center technology for a brand new hospital. It's now being mobilized for COVID high-risk patients. So talk about our all being in an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud, I mean, cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud, but the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure, but modernize it, update it, so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud. But they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on-prem. And so, the GreenLake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in their traditional data center but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HPE, to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to run. >> You know Harry, it's interesting about what you said is, the cloud it is kind of chaotic my word, not yours. But there is a lot of confusion out there, I mean, what's cloud, right? Is it public cloud, is it private cloud, the hybrid cloud? Now, it's the edge and of course the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >> From a cloud perspective, you know, I think as an industry, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily going to win the day and we're in fact, in a hybrid world. There's certainly been some commentary and press that was sort of validate that. Not that it necessarily needs any validation but I think is the linkages between on-prem and cloud-based services have increased. It's paved the way for customers more effectively, deploy hybrid solutions in in the model that they want or that they desire. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. As the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive their services initiatives, you know, in particular managed services. >> From an Arrow perspective is we think about how we can help scale in particular from a GreenLake perspective. We've got the ability to stand up some cloud capabilities through our ArrowSphere platform that can really help customers adopt GreenLake and to benefit from some alliances opportunities, as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through. >> And Ben, I didn't mean to squeeze you on Arrow. I mean, Arrow has been around longer than computers. I mean, if you Google the history of Arrow it'll blow your mind, but give us a little quick commercial. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for Alliance organization in North America, We're a global value added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement company. And we bring scope, scale and and expertise as it relates to the IT industry. I love the fast pace that comes with the market that we're all in. And I love helping customers and suppliers both, be positioned for long-term success. And you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and look forward to the discussion. >> All right, we got some good brain power in the room. Let's cut right to the chase. Ron, where's the pain? What are the main problems that CBTS I love what it stands for, Consult Build Transform and Support. What's the main pain point that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies? >> Sure, Dave. Our customers' concerns and associated risks come from the market demands to deliver their products, services, and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenge is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure, processes, and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map with the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences while managing their costs, and of course, mitigating risks to their business. This collaboration with our customers, often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration, and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational, and stranded asset costs in their on-premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically, through our customized workshops and assessments, we can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications. Through our partnership with HPE and the availability of the HPE GreenLake solutions, our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's, economics, and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on-premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, the development costs that they experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HPE GreenLake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now, that achieves true utilization to cost economics, you know, with HPE GreenLake solutions from CBTS. >> I love focus on the business case, 'cause it's measurable and it's sort of follow the money. That's where the opportunity is. Okay, C.R., so question for you. Thinking about Advizex customers, how are they, are they leaning into GreenLake? What are they telling you is the business impact when they experience GreenLake? >> Well, I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We had to solve the business challenges first and so far, the reception's been positive. When I say that is customers are open. Everybody wants to, the C-suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits. But what we hear and what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first foot in, if you will, but as important, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that say, what's the first thing that happens with regard to GreenLake? Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as-a-Service, that's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today but when you can say we have a proven solution it's working in our environment today, that's key. I think the second thing is,, is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this hybrid solution, you got to be flexible for, again, I think Ron said (indistinct). You don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to do is we want to build for growth but we don't want to pay for it. So we'll pay as we grow not as we have to use, as we used to do, it was upfront, the capital expenditure. Now we'll just pay as we grow, and that really facilitates in another great example as you'll hear from a customer, this afternoon. But you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in GreenLake. They're looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions. And finally is really, we see, it really brings the cloud experience and as-a-Service to our customers. And with HPE GreenLake, it brings the best of breed. So it's not just what HPE has to offer. When you look at Hyperconverged, they have Nutanix, they have Cohesity. So, I really believe it brings best of breeds. So, to net it out and close it out with our customers, thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional. I mean, with GreenLake Central, as interface, customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago just reopened, it was a highly competitive situation, but they just said, look, it's proven, it works, and it gives us that cloud experience so. Had a lot of great success thus far and looking forward to more. >> Thank you, so Harry, I want to pick up on something C.R. said and get your perspectives. So when I talk to the C-suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, cloud, they have a cloud agenda. And what they tell me is it's not just about their IT transformation. They want that but they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk, Harry, about Compugen's perspective on the potential business impact of GreenLake. And also, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know, how to cost optimize in IT, but also, the business value that comes out of that capability. >> Yeah, so Dave, you know if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the costs when they generate the revenue. They don't want to have all the costs upfront and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is you know, related to the pandemic, employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home. And now, they have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VDI, virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the office. I don't want to get into too much detail but to be able to support that from an an at-home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now, there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that, people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the costs. And so, the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, but then turning it off when you don't need it, is really a benefit of the variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development. If a customer is going to implement a new, let's say, line of business application. SAP is very very popular. You know, it actually, unfortunately, takes six months to two years to actually get that application set up, installed, validated, tested, then moves through production. You know, what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity upfront, and it would basically sit there for two years, and then when they finally went to full production, then they were really value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost sidle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it, perfect. GreenLake is the ideal solution that allows him to do that. >> You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it. When Harry was just talking about with regard to VDI, you think about that, there's the dialing up and dialing down piece which is awesome from an IT perspective. And then the business impact there is the productivity of the end users. And most C-suite executives I've talked to said productivity actually went up during COVID with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, we said Arrow's been around for a long, long time. Certainly, before all of us were born and it's gone through many many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does Arrow and how do your partners think about building cloud experiences and where does GreenLake fit in from your perspective? >> Great question. So from an Arrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience in of course us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our ArrowSphere platform. Just a bit of, you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote, single bill, auto provision, multi supplier, if you will, subscription management, utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HPE, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. And we're excited today to have GreenLake live in our platform available for our partner community to consume. In particular, the Swift solutions that HPE has announced so we're very excited to share that today. Maybe a little bit more on GreenLake. I think at this point in time, that it's differentiated in a sense that, if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with having the the solutions themselves available in ArrowSphere. So, I would say, that we identify the uniqueness and quickly partner with HPE to work with our ArrowSphere platform. One other sort of unique thing is, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience. The different geographies around the world so, you know, we're available in North of 20 countries, there's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis. And frankly, hundreds of thousands end customers. that are leveraging today. So that creates an opportunity for both Arrow, HPE and our partner community. So we're excited. >> You know, I just want to open it up. We don't have much time left, but thoughts on differentiation. Some people ask me, okay, what's really different about HPE and GreenLake? These others, you know, are doing things with as-a-Service. To me, I always say cultural, it starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But I wonder from your perspectives, 'cause you guys are hands on. Are there other differentiable factors that you would point to? Let me just open that up to the group. >> Yeah, if I could make a comment. GreenLake is really just the latest invocation of the as-a-Service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a sell and forget. Not that we ever forget about customers but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years you may have an occasional engagement with them but it's not continuous. When you move to our GreenLake model, you're actually helping them manage that. You are in the core, in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant and you want to be always there for them. >> You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to it in your remarks. From your perspective as a partner, 'cause you know, hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset, but other thoughts? >> I think to add to that Dave. I think Harry's right on. The way he positioned it it's exactly where he did own the customer. I think even another step back for us is, we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution, you don't have to lead with compute. You know, you can really have step back, have a business conversation. And we've done that where you don't even bring up HPE GreenLake until you get to the point where the customer says, so you can give me an on-prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work? Then you bring up, it's all through this HPE GreenLake tool. And it really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake. >> All right guys, C.R., Ron, Harry, Ben. Great discussion, thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> Appreciate it Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more great content at GreenLake Day, be right back. (bright soft music) (upbeat music) (upbeat electronic music)