(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

>> Narrator: Live, from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering HPEE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with my co-host Peter Burris, and this is day one of HPEE Discover Madrid. Susan Blocher is here, she's the vice-president of portfolio marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Bruce Trevarthen joins her. He's the CEO and founder, I believe, of Layer X. Welcome back, both of you, to theCUBE. >> Thank you David. >> All right so Susan, big show for you guys, and we have these six months cadence of big messages >> Susan: Yes. >> And customer shows, so what are we going to hear this afternoon at the keynotes? >> Wow. I'll tell you we've got a lot of exciting news to talk about. First of all, the way customers are consuming IT is really changing, cloud is changing the game. We got some amazing announcements to talk about around how we're going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently. We're going to talk about how we're helping them manage across multi-cloud environments. We're going to talk about bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center which is really transformational. So, lot's of exciting news here. >> Good, okay! So we'll be covering the keynotes here just actually in about a half hour or so, we kick off. Meg, Antonio >> Yes. you've got a new leader so we're going to hear from him, we've been hearing from him for some time now. >> Very exciting. >> Looking forward to hearing from him. Okay, Bruce. It's been awhile since we talked about layerX. Tell us what's transpired in the last couple years. Set up layerX, what you guys are all about and what's new. >> Sure, so it's a cloud service provider based out of New Zealand. Multiple platforms giving us that resilience. You know, that sort of general cloud people all know what cloud is these days. But really for us the journey it just continues. We keep, from a strategy point of view we keep looking at where is cloud adoption at, where is cloud going, are these hyperscale providers going to enter every country and every market? And really, sort of, make us, sort of in country boutique operators less relevant. So you're always asking that question and then you're sort of hit with this new wave of expectations down from the clients. Hybrid IT has been the big push in the last 12 months and what's really encouraging for us when we get hit with this new sort of level of interest and a slight tangent on this manage services delivery is that HPE already thinking the same way. They've already come up with a product line that's going to plug that gap. So we work very closely with HPE with their edge line and the OEM team globally, to deliver HPE hardware on customer site or on premise. And then we put our own software on that, we link it back into the core V-grid environment, and that really, for a customer they keep those workloads on site where they need to be. And then you've got that public cloud environment for the disaster recovery and the workloads that don't need to be on site. >> So let's unpack that a little bit. Tagline, Hewlett Packard Enterprises uses make hybrid IT simple, that's the objective. >> [Susan]- That's right. >> You know, IT is complicated, hybrid IT is complicated. What's the starting point to make it simple Bruce, from your perspective? Is it to make the infrastructure as invisible as possible, is it bringing the cloud upward model? Maybe talk about those steps. >> Sure. Well, I mean, one of the first things we try to do to make it simple is we don't mention cloud. We talk ultimately about what workload is the customer consuming and where do they belong? And so, we're invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn't go centralized in a data center they should be on site. So, GPU accelerated desktops for oil and gas research, or some of our clients doing 3D engineering, you know, CAD design work. You can put that in a data center, and we have, but then you're at the mercy of the fiber connections. Speed of the fiber connection, the resilience of the fiber connection, and the cost absolutely. And so keeping some of those workloads on site just makes sense. But how can you then leverage the benefit of that centralized IT in the event of a disaster if all of your workloads are actually on site? And that's where it's got to be hybrid. You can have those workloads on site but all your files and all that capability is sort of mirrored in the cloud environment. So if you have a fiber cut, then you can use a cellular network to get there. Or if you have an on site disaster, then you can spend the equivalent resources in the data center, but on demand, rather than dedicated to you. >> We like to say that customers want or the way that we summarize it at Wikibon is, customers want the cloud experience where the data demands. >> Dave: 'cause we do talk about cloud >> 'cause we do talk about cloud periodically. Well, but you have to, because at the end of the day it's driving a new way of thinking. Not just about the technology, but how you solve business problems. And it comes back to how do you think about the business problem differently. I love New Zealand, I've been there a couple times. I've worked with a lot of customers and the minute that you said New Zealand I was like, right! How do, how does the cloud experience, how are you solving problems differently than you did a few years ago because of not only the HPEE partnership, but thinking differently about these problems? >> Thinking differently is definitely something you have to do to stay relevant, right, to keep up with the market. Almost ten years ago we thought what we felt was a little differently, when we adopted the HPEE 3PAR, and that really was a technology that gave us the ability to change our mind regarding storage. Spin forward now to 2017. In April this year we put in our first HPE Synergy platform. This month we're just putting in our second HPE Synergy platform. And Synergy gives us for compute what HPE 3PAR gave us for storage. The ability to change our mind, to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need. And so for a public cloud environment, that's basically spinning up compute nodes as required for the demand within the clusters. But it also introduces by way of the technology capability, a new channel, or a new revenue opportunity. Because now we can actually programmatically spin up compute nodes of any flavor, for a customer in a private cloud environment. So this is physical tend to the customer opposed to virtual, you know, cloud. We can do that just as easily as we can a VN because of Synergy. >> And that's really exciting. I think what Bruce is really representing here is that he can focus on business outcomes for his customers. And you, Dave, you said it makes the infrastructure transparent. Transparent but underneath that is really differentiated capability and value like the ability to spin up and spin down composable infrastructure on demand. Like the ability to bring world class security to that infrastructure. So all of those things are underpinning the services that layerX is able to deliver. >> So I would think part of making Hybrid IT simple is not just throwing a bunch of products at your customers. >> Right. >> We heard on the last financial call that HPE is changing the way... >> Exactly. >> ...it reports. It's going to report hybrid IT, which is essentially your portfolio. >> Susan: Exactly. >> So it's server, storage, networking and relevant services around that >> That' right. >> Susan: And software. >> And software that powers all that, so talk about how you're going to market and how that aligns with how you guys want to buy. >> Yeah, well think about it from, let's talk about it from the layerX perspective. When you look at Synergy, that is not a piece of hardware, that is truly software defined intelligence built into innovative hardware. Based on our Gen 10 server platform, which in and of itself is the world's most secure industry standard server platform because we have built in silicon route of trust, and things like that, so what you get is all of that put together. All of that integrated. That software defined intelligence, the technology innovation, the infrastructure innovation. And wrappered with the services that both support the layerX company and their customers. >> Maybe talk about your customers a bit more. What are they really pushing you hard to do? What are the big challenges they face, and how are you addressing those? >> One of the most common conversations with cloud is obviously cost. Everyone's trying to commoditize this resource to the Nth degree every day, but the vGrid which is the our brand for our cloud platform, The vGrid position really is around performance and reliability and we back that up through HPE hardware platforms and a software stack that enables that. But our customers are really driving us to make sure that we stay relevant. Not only with that performance and reliability but still on cost. Even though we are giving them enterprise and beyond capabilities as an SMB, cost is still a major defective for an SMB. So for us to keep our overheads low we need automation. You know we're not going to go put in, no disrespect to the product line, but we're not going to go and put in maybe an Apollo or a CloudLine solution, we're going to stick with Synergy and previously the ProLion because of the added value wrapped around that that actually gives us the peace of mind and the operational efficiency through our engineering team to get the work done far more effectively. Now with Synergy takes it up to a whole new level because this is all composable now. My CTO mentioned to me the other day they just put in a new 8450 3PAR. And he said, "All I had to do "was create the CPG's in the 3PAR and OneView did the rest." He's like I don't have to go into all these other steps that he used to have to do. So, it saves time and time is expensive. Not only from a human resource point of view, but go to market speed. >> Well, converged hardware was about having a common set of support technologies. The whole notion of hyperconverge starting to converge the actual administrative tasks. But what I remember, the last time that I was in New Zealand and talked with large users, was a real emphasis on analytics because of New Zealand being an island with great resources in some respects and less resources in others, energy, telecommunications. How is the modern economy of New Zealand with some of the constraints that it faces driving the use of digital technology to lift up industry, services, and the quality of life in New Zealand? >> We're seeing that in a very far reaching kind of industry verticals. And more so now with obviously IOT's become a pretty hot topic, but IOT backed by all the smart and on-demand composable architecture is really making a difference to primary industries, making them more productive more effective, more efficient. But really the customers in New Zealand we're a nation of early adopters. We have 96% of our companies are six or less people. So, we're dealing with SMB's that have to box above their weight. They have to adapt, they have to do more with less. You know all of this cliches that really encumber the average small company, and we have a lot of them. So the demands from an IT perspective are give me what my enterprise counterparts have but at a per user, or resource unit per month kind of model so cloud just makes so much sense for them. >> Susan, big takeaways from Madrid? What do you want the world to walk away with? >> Well I think first of all, when we say we're going to help make hybrid IT simple, what we're talking about and really exemplified with layerX is we're talking about from the edge to the core to the cloud. So, really end to end. The other really exciting thing that we're here talking about is AI, artificial intelligence. Deep learning, machine learning. And you talked about it in the context of edge computing and IOT which is obviously super hot, but we are also bringing AI to the data center. So as we look at-- >> Peter: In other words, making data center operations, IT operations, >> Making the data center autonomous, self healing, self managing. You look at the automobile industry, autonomous cars, right? Well think about how that's going to be applied to autonomous data centers. That's what we're going to be talking about. >> Shoes for the cobbler's children. >> You got it. >> Well, and think about the impact that has on the business where you're allowing people not to spend money on whatever, lung provisioning, >> Right. >> And server management, but really focusing on some other more strategic aspects of their business whether it's digital transformation, AI, other data-oriented activities. >> Exactly. >> Sometimes the data has to be here and you want to make sure that when the data's there it has the same services are available to the business, >> Susan: Yes. >> to take advantage of that asset where it is. >> Real time analytics for the data that matters to our customers at the edge and in the cloud, as well as applying that same AI to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient, more effective, more autonomous and self-healing. >> Awesome. So, keynotes are coming up very shortly. We'll be running those on our twitch channel twitch.com/siliconangle. You can check those out obviously at HPE as well, HPE.com Susan and Bruce, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, >> Thank you so much, appreciate it. >> setting up the afternoon. Really appreciate your time. >> No problem. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep right there buddy. We'll be back after the keynotes. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid. (electronic music)