(upbeat music) >> Hello, everybody. John Walls here, as we continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent here on theCUBE. And today we're going to go talk about the edge. What's out there on the edge, and how do we make sense of it? How do we use that data, and put it to work, and how do we keep it secure? Big questions, a lot of questions, and at the end of the day, what's the value prop for you, the customer, to make it all work? With me to talk about that is the Executive Vice President and GM of HPE GreenLake, Keith White. Keith, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> John, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity, and excited to have a conversation today. >> Yeah, good. Well, let's just jump right in. First off, about the edge. There was a time, not so long ago, that it was kind of the Wild, Wild West out there, right? And we were trying to corral this fantastic reservoir of data that was streaming in from every which point, to the point now where we've realized how to refine that, how to develop that, how to reduce that complexity, to make that actionable. Talk about that journey a little bit, about where we were with edge technology maybe five, six years ago, and how we've migrated to the point we are now, where GreenLake is doing the great work that it is. >> You know, it's really a great question, John, cause I think there's a lot of different definitions of the edge, and what does "the edge" actually mean. And you're right, you know, there's been a pretty big transformation over the last few years, especially as we think about things like IoT, and just being able to engage with edge scenarios. But today what you're seeing is a lot of digital transformations happening with companies around three big megatrends. Cloud, meaning hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, data, and how you analyze that data to make decisions. And of course the edge, like we're talking through. And you know, frankly, with the edge, this is where we see the connectivity and security requirements really connect, because that edge information is so important, so critical to stay secure, but also it's creating that tremendous amount of data, as you mentioned. And so folks want to pull that into their cloud environment, and then make decisions and analyze that data, and plug it into the systems that they have overall. And you know, you're seeing companies like Auckland Transport, right? They basically do an AI-enhanced video feed to optimize their transport routes. And as you think about supply chain and the big challenges that we're seeing today, or you think about public transportation, and, you know, really providing information with respect to customers, but how do you take and get all that information pulled together, to then make decisions from these various edge points throughout? Or a company like ABB, who's been building the factory of the future, and doing, basically, you know, robotics-as-a-service, if you will, in order to really get that precision required at the edge in order to manufacture what they need to. So, massive uses around the edge, massive data getting created, and HPE GreenLake's a great spot for folks to help, you know, really take and leverage that data, to make those those decisions that are required. >> You know, one example in terms of case studies, or in terms of your client base that you talk about, you know, the automotive sector. >> Yeah. >> And I think about what's going on in terms of, with that technology, and I can't even imagine the kind of mechanics that are happening, right? In real time, at 60, 70 miles an hour, through all kinds of environmental conditions. So maybe just touch base, too, about what you're doing that's in terms of automotive, and what's going to be- >> No, it's great, John, yeah. >> (indistinct) then? >> Yeah, no, it's an awesome question, because, you know, we're working closely with a lot of the car manufacturers, as well as their sort of subsidiaries, if you will. So you look at autonomous driving, which is a great example. All that data has to come in and get analyzed. And if you look at a company like Volvo, they use a third party called Zenseact, who basically uses our high-performance compute to deliver it as a service through HPE GreenLake. They get all this massive parallel computing, modeling and simulations happening, with all this data coming in. And so what we've done with GreenLake is we give them that ability to easily scale up, to grow capacity, to get access to that hundreds of petabytes of data that you just mentioned. And then, you know, really basically take and make analytics and AI models and machine learning capabilities out of that, in order to really direct and fuel their mission to develop that next-generation software to support that autonomous driving capability. And so you're seeing that with a ton of different car manufacturers, as well as a lot of different other scenarios as well. So you're spot on. Automotive is a key place for that. >> You know, and too, the similarities here, the common thread, I think, threads, actually, plural, are very common. We think about access, right? We think about security, we think about control, we think about data, we think about analytics, so I mean, all these things are factoring in, in this extraordinarily dynamic environment. So is there a batting order, or a pecking order, in terms of addressing those areas of concern, or what kind of, I guess, learning curve have we had on that front? >> Well, I think you're, I think the key is, as I mentioned earlier, so you have this connectivity piece, and you've got to be able to connect and be available as required. That might be through SD-WAN, that might be Wi-Fi, that might be through a network access point, et cetera. But the key is that security piece of it as well. Customers need to know that that data and that edge device is very, very secure. And then you've got to have that connectivity back into your environment. And so what we've learned with HPE GreenLake, which, really what that does, is that brings that cloud experience, that public cloud experience, to customers in their data center, on-premise, in their colo, or at the edge, like we're talking about now, because there's a lot of need to keep that data secure, private, to make sure that it's not out in the public cloud and accessible, or those types of scenarios. So as I think about that piece of it, then it turns into, okay, how do we take all that data and do the analytics and the AI modeling that we talked about before? So it's a really interesting flow that has to happen. But what's happening is, people are really transforming their business, transforming their business models, as we just talked about. Factory of the future, you know, transportation needs. We're seeing it in different environments as well. Automotive, as you mentioned. But it's exciting, it's an exciting time, with all of this opportunity to really change not only how a business can run, but how we as consumers interact and engage with that. >> And then ultimately for the company, the value prop's got to be there. And you've already cited a number of areas. Is there one key metric that you look at, or one key deliverable that you look at here, in terms of what the ultimate value proposition is for a customer? >> You bet. I think the biggest thing is, you know, our customers and their satisfaction. And so, to date, you know, we have well over 60,000 customers on the platform. We have a retention rate of 96%, so a very, very small number that haven't stayed on the platform itself. And that means that they're satisfied. And what we're seeing also is a continued growth in usage for new environments, new workloads, new solutions that a customer is trying to drive as well. And so those are some of the key metrics we look at, with respect to our customer satisfaction, with their retention rate, with their usage capabilities, and then how we're growing that piece. And the interesting thing, John, is what we've learned is that HPE, as a company, traditionally was very hardware focused, it was a hardware vendor, transacting, responding to RFPs for compute, storage, and networking. With GreenLake now moving into the cloud services realm, we're now having conversations with customers as their partner. How do we solve this problem? How do we transform our business? How do we accelerate our growth? And that's been very exciting for us as a company, to really make that significant transformation and shift to being part of our customer's environments in a partnership type way. >> Yeah. And now you're talking about ecosystem, right? And what you're developing, not only in your partners, but also maybe what lessons you're learning in one respect you can apply to others. What's happening in that respect, in terms of the kind of universe that you're developing, and how applicable, maybe, one experience is to another client's needs? >> Yeah, no, it's a great question, because in essence, what happens is, we're sort of the tip of the spear, and we're partnering with customers to really go in deep, and understand how to utilize that. We can take that learning, and then push that out to our ecosystem, so that they can scale and they can work with more customers with respect to that piece of it. The second is, is that we're really driving into these more solution-oriented partners, right? The ISVs, the system integrators, the managed service providers, the colos, and even the hyperscalers, as we've talked about, and why we're here with our friends at AWS, is, customers are requiring a hybrid environment. They want to leverage tools up in the public cloud, but they also want the on-prem capabilities, and they need those to work together. And so this ecosystem becomes very dynamic with respect to, hey, what are we learning, and how do we solve our customer's problems together? I always talk about the ecosystem being 1 + 1 = 3 for our customers. It has to be that way, and frankly, our customers are expecting that. And that's why we're excited to be here today with our, as I said, our friends at AWS. >> And how does open play in all this too, right? Because, I mean, that provides, I assume, the kind of flexibility that people are looking for, you know, they, you know, having that open environment and making an opportunity available to them is a pretty big attractive element. >> It's huge, right? Yeah, as you know, people don't want to get locked in to a single technology. They don't want to get locked in to a single cloud. They don't want to have to, they want to be able to utilize the best of the best. And so maybe there's some tools in the public cloud that can really help from an analytics standpoint, but we can store and we can process it locally in our data center, at the edge, or in a colo. And so that best of both worlds is there, but it has to be an open platform. I have to be able to choose my container, my virtual machine, my AI tools, my, you know, capabilities, my ISV application, so that I have that flexibility. And so it's been fantastic for us to move into this open platform environment, to be able to have customers leverage the best and what's going to work best for them, and then partnering with those folks closely to, again, deliver those solutions that are required. >> You know, this is, I mean, it appears, as I'm hearing you talk about this, in terms of the partnerships you're creating, the ecosystem that you're developing, how that's evolving, lessons that you've learned, the attention you've paid to security and data analytics. I get the feeling that you've got a lot of momentum, right? A lot of things are happening here. You've got big mo on your side right now. (Keith laughs) Would you characterize it that way? >> Yeah, you know, there's a ton of momentum. I think what we're finding is, customers are requiring that cloud experience on-prem. You know, they're getting it from AWS and some of the other hyperscalers, but they want that same capability on-prem. And so what we've seen is just a dramatic increase with respect to usage, customers. We're adding hundreds of customers every quarter. We're growing in the triple digits, three of the last four quarters. And so, yeah, we're seeing tremendous momentum, but as I said, what's been most important is that relationship with the customer. We've really flipped it to becoming that partner with them. And again, bringing that ecosystem to bear, so that we can have the best of all worlds. And it's been fantastic to see, and frankly, the momentum's been tremendous. And we're in a quiet period right now, but you'll see what our earnings are here in the next couple weeks, and we can talk more details on that, but in the past, as we talked about, we've grown, you know, triple digits three of the last four quarters, and, you know, well over $3 billion, well over $8 billion of total contract value that we've implemented to date. And, you know, the momentum is there, but, again, most importantly is, we're solving our customers' problems together, and we're helping them accelerate their business and their transformation. >> I know you mentioned earnings, the report's a few weeks away. I saw your smile, that big old, you know, grin, so I have a feeling the news is pretty good from the HPE GreenLake side. >> It is. We're excited about it. And you know, again, this really is just a testament to the transformation we've made as a company in order to move towards those cloud services. And you know, you'll hear us talk about it as the core of what we're doing as a company, holistically, again, because this is what customers are requiring, this is what our ecosystem is moving towards. And it's been really fun, it's been a great, great ride. >> Excellent. Keith, appreciate the time, and keep up the good work, and I'm going to look for that earnings report here in a few weeks. >> Awesome. Thanks so much, John. Take good care. Appreciate it. >> You bet, you too. Keith White joining us here, talking about HPE GreenLake, and defining what they're doing in terms of bringing the edge back into the primary systems for a lot of companies. So, good work there. We'll continue our coverage here in theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent. And I'm John Walls. (lively music)

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of HPE. Discover 22 live from Las Vegas, the Venetian expo center at Lisa Martin and Dave Velante have a very special guest. Next one of our esteemed alumni here on the cube, Antonio Neri, the president and CEO of HPE, Antonio. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. >>Well, thanks for free with us today. >>Great to be back here after three years away. Yeah. Sit on stage yesterday in front of a massive sea of people. The energy here is electric. Yeah. Must have felt great yesterday, but you, you stood on stage three years ago and said buy 20, 22. And here it is. Yeah. We're gonna deliver our entire portfolio as a service. What was it like to be on stage and say we've done that. Here's where we are. We are a new company. >>Well, first of all, as always, I love the cube to cover HP discover, as you said, has been many, many years, and I hope you saw a different company yesterday. I'm really proud of what happened yesterday, because it was a pivotable moment in our journey. If I reflect back in my four years as a CEO, we said the enterprise of the future will be edge centric, cloud enable and data driven in 2018. And I pledged to invest 4 billion over four years. And you see the momentum we have at the edge with our business. And then in 19, to your point, Lisa, we said, by the end of 2022, we will offer everything as a service. When you look at the floor behind us, everything is a as a service experience from the moment you log through IHP GreenLake platform to all the cloud services we offer. So for me, it is a proud moment because our team worked really hard to deliver on that province on the face of a lot of challenges, >>Tremendous challenges, the last couple years that nobody could have predicted or even forecast, how can we tolerate this? Talk to me about your customer conversations and how they have changed and evolved as every company today has to be a data company. >>Well, even this morning, up to this interview, I already met four customers in, in less than an hour and a half. And I will say all of them, first of all, really appreciated bringing HP discover back. And what they really appreciated was the fact that they had the opportunity to meet and greet and talk to people. The energy that comes from that engagement is second to none. And I think says something right about the moment we are at this time, where the return to work and everything else. I think this is a wake up call in many ways, but customers are telling us is that they want to engage with a partner that has a vision that can take them to their journey, whatever that journey is. And we know digital transformation is core to everything, but ultimately they are now more focused on delivering outcomes for the organization they're running in it. And that's why HP GreenLake is incredible well positioned to do so, you >>Know, just picking up on that. I, I, I counted Antonio. I think I've been to 14 HP and HPE discovers when you include Europe. Yeah. I mean, Frankford, London, Barcelona Madrid, of course, you know the us, and I've never seen why I've tweeted this out. I've never seen this type of energy. Right. People are excited to get back. That's part of it. The other big part of it is course the focus. Yeah. So that focus on as a service was a burn, the boat moment for HPV. >>I don't think it was a burn the boat moment. It was a moment that we have to decide how we think about the future and how we become even more relevant for customers. And we are very important to all the customers they buy from us. Right. But I think about the next 3, 5, 10 years, how we position the company, enter the future to be relevant to whatever they need to do. >>Well, what I mean by that is you're not turning back. No, the bridge is gone. You go, you're going forward. And so my question is, did the pandemic accelerate that move or did it, did it hinder it? And, and, and how so >>Actually it was an, a moment for us to think about how we go further and faster to what we call this journey to one, one platform, one experience. And, and we felt as a team, as an organization, this was a unique moment in time to go further, faster. So to us, it was a catalyst to accelerate that transformation. >>Yeah. Now I, I want to ask you a question in your keynote. I love this, cuz you say I'm often asked by customers, what workload should we move to the public cloud and what should stay on prem? I'm like, yeah, I get that question all the time. And I was waiting for the answer. You said, that's the wrong question. And I was like, wait, but that's the question everybody's asking. So it was really interesting that you said that. And I wonder if you could, you could comment. And I think you said basically the world's hybrid is your challenge with, with the customers in this initiative to actually get people to stop asking that question. Right. And not think about that. >>No, I think the challenge we all collectively have is that how we think about data and how we drive what I call a data first modernization, you know, strategy for our customers in an age to cloud architecture, which basically says you are living a hybrid world is not a question which workloads are put in the public cloud, which workloads are put OnPrem. You know, the, all the issues around data gravity and whatnot is a question of how I bring the cloud experience to all your workloads of data, wherever they live. And that's where, you know, the opportunity really exists. And as customers understand more and more about the new environments, how they work, how they enable these new experiences is all driven by that data. And that data has enormous value. So it's not about which cloud use is about how you bring the cloud experience to your data in workloads. >>When you're talking to CIOs, especially transformational CIOs, what's the value pro to those CIOs that wanna transform and need to transform with the power of HPE. >>More and more of them are becoming conscious about the fact that they need to go faster in everything they do. We have done some interesting analysis with the brands that have done a better job or have become way more proficient on extracting insight from the data. They are actually the brands that winning the marketplace, not just with customers driving the preference, but also in the market capitalization because they become where more sophisticated in driving better efficiency, which is a necessity today. Second is the fact that also they need to improve their security aspect of it, but they are creating new experiences and new revenue streams. And those transformational CIOs are transforming their business in the way they run it into more an innovation engine. And so that's why, you know, we love working with them because they are advanced and the push has to think differently in the way we think about the innovation. How >>Do you help customers go from data, rich insight, port to data, rich insight, rich actions, new revenue, streams, new services. >>Well, first of all, you have to deploy the right architecture, which starts with a network, obviously because digital transformation requires an on-ramp and the connectivity is the first step. Second is to make sure you have a true end to end visibility of that data. And that's why we announced yesterday with the data fabric, right? A, a revolutionary way to think about that age to cloud architecture from a data driven perspective. And then the third piece of this is, is the aspect of how we bring that intelligence to that data. And that's where, you know, we are enabling all these amazing services with AI machine learning with, with, you know, HP GreenLake, which is ultimately the way we are gonna enable them. >>What's your favorite announcement from this week? >>I think HP GreenLake, you know, I think I >>Mentioned a lot of GreenLake, >>36 times HP GreenLake. And to me, you know, as I think about what comes next, right, is about how we innovate now on the platform at the pace that customers are demanding. And so for me, there is a lot of things there, but obviously the private cloud enterprise edition was a big moment for us because that's the way we bring the cloud operating experience on-prem and at the edge, but also all the hybrid capabilities that Brian showed during the demo is something that I think customers now say, wow, I didn't know. We can do that. >>And thinking about your business, you know, despite some macro headwinds and, and like you, you reaffirmed your guidance on the, on the last earnings call. Does GreenLake give you better visibility or is it harder to predict? >>No, I think the more we get engaged with customers in running their workloads and data, the more visibility we get, you know, I said, you know, customers voted with the workloads and data. And in, in that context, you know, we already have 65,000 customers more than 120,000 users. And the one interesting stat, which I hope it didn't go lost during that transition was the, the fact that we now have under the GreenLake management over an next bite of data. And so to me, right, that's a unique, a unique opportunity for us to learn and improve the whole cycle. >>So obviously a big pillar of your strategy is the data. And I wanted, if you could talk more about that because I, I would observe, you know, we, the cube started in sort of as big data, you know, started to take off and you saw that had ecosystem and, and that ecosystem has dispersed now. Yeah. So gone into the cloud, it's got snowflakes pulling and some in Mongo. Now you have the opportunity with this ecosystem yeah. To have a data ecosystem. How do you look at the ecosystem and the value that your partners can build on top of GreenLake and specifically monetize? Well, >>If you walk through the floor, one of the things we changed this time is that the partners are actually in the flow of all our solutions, not sitting on a corner of the show floor, right? And, and, and that's because what we have done in the last three years has been together with our partners, but we conceive HP GreenLake with the partners in mind, at the core of everything we do in the platform. And that's why on Monday we announced the new partner one ready vantage program that actually opens the platform through our APIs for allowing them to add their own value on the platform, whether in their own services to the marketplace or the other way around they to use our capabilities in their own solutions. Because some of these cloud operating capabilities are hard to develop, whether it is, you know, metering and billing and all the other services, sometimes you don't don't have to build yourself. So that's why, what we love about our strategies, the partners can decide where to participate in this broad ecosystem and then grow with us and we can grow through them as well. >>So GreenLake as a service, the focus is, is very clear. Hybrid is very clear. What's less clear to me is, is that I'll and I'll ask you to comment, is this, we go a term called super cloud and super cloud is different than multi-cloud multi-cloud oh, I run in AWS or, and, or I run in Azure. I run in, in, in GCP, Supercloud builds a layer above that hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs, and then builds new value on top of that, out to the edge as well. You guys talk about the edge all the time. You have Aruba a as an asset, you got space space born. You're doing some pretty edge. Like, well, >>We have it here. Yeah. Yeah. We are connected to the ISS. So if you were to that show floor, you can actually see what's being processed today. >>I mean, that's, you don't get more edge than that. So my question is, is, is that part of the vision to actually build that I call super cloud layer? Or is it more to be focused on hybrid and connecting on-prem to the cloud? >>No, I, I don't like to call it super cloud because that means, unless you are a superpower, you can't do what you need to do. I, I think I call it a super straight okay. Right. That we are enabling to our H to cloud architecture. So the customers can build their own experiences and consume the services that they need to compete and win in today's market. So our H to cloud approach is to create that substrate with connectivity, obviously the cloud and the data capability that you need to operate in today's >>Environment. Okay. So they're fair enough. I would say that your customers are gonna build then the super cloud on top of that software. >>Well, actually we want to give it to them. They don't have to build anything. They just need to run the business. Well, they don't have the time to really build stuff. They just need to innovate that's our, our value proposition. So they don't have to waste cycles in doing so if it comes ready to go, why you want to build it? >>Well, when I say build it, I'm talking about building their business on top of it things you're not gonna, I agree with that, bringing their tools, financial services companies with their data, their tools, their ecosystem, connecting OnPrem to the clouds. Yeah. That above that substrate that's their as a digital. >>Yeah. And that's why I said yesterday with our approach, we're actually enabling customers to power the next generation business models that they need. We enable the substrate, they can innovate on the platform, these next gen business models, >>Tap your engineering mind. And I'd like you to talk about how architectures are changing you along with many, many other CEOs signed a letter to, to the us government, you know, urging them to, to, to pass the chips act. As I posted on LinkedIn, there were, there were a few notables missing apple wasn't on there, meta wasn't on there, Tesla wasn't on there. I'd like to see them step up and sign that. Yeah. And so why did you, you know, sign that? Why did you post that? And, and, and why is that important? >>Well, first of all, it's important to customers because obviously they need to get access to technologies in a more ubiquitous way. And second it's important for the United States. We live in a, in a global economy that today is going to a refactoring of sorts where supply chain disruption has caused a lot of consternation and disruption across many industries. And I think, you know, as we think about the next generation supply chains, which are built for resiliency and obviously inclusion, we need to make sure that the United States address this problem. Because once you fall behind, it takes a long time to catch up. Even if we sign the chips act, it's gonna take many years for us, but we need to start now. Otherwise we never get what we need to >>Get. I, I agree. We're late. I think pat Gelsinger has done a very good job laying out the mission, you know, to bring, I mean, to me, it's modest, bring 20% of the manufacturing back to the us by the end of the decade. I mean that that's not gonna be easy, but even so that's, >>That's, we need stuff somewhere. Absolutely. You know, we are great partners with Intel. I really support the vision that path has laid out. And its not just about Intel again, it's about our customers in the United States, >>HP and HPE now cuz H HP labs is part of, of HPE. I believe that's correct state. Well, >>We refocus HP labs as a part of our high performance. Yeah. And AI business. Yes. >>But H HP and, and now HPE possess custom Silicon expertise. We may, we always >>Had. >>Yeah, exactly. And, and you know, with the fabulous world, do you see, I mean, you probably do in some custom Silicon today that I don't really, you know, have visibility on, but do you see getting more into that? Is there a need for >>That? Yeah. Well we already design more than 60 different silicons that are included in our solution. More and more of that. Silicon is actually in support of our other service experience. That's truly programmable for this new way to deploy a cloud or a data fabric or a network in fabric of sorts. When you look our, our age portfolio as a part of green lake through our Aruba set of offerings, we actually have a lot of the Silicon building. Our switching portfolio that's program. Normally give us the ability to drive intelligent routing in the network at the application layer. But also as you know, many years ago, we introduced our own ILO, the lights out technology, the BMC type of support that allows us to provide security to the root of our systems. But now more implement a cloud operating security environment if you will, but there is many more in the analog space for AI at scale. And even the latest introduction with frontier. When you look at frontier that wonderful high performance exit scale system, the, the magic of that is in the Silicon we developed, which is the interconnect fabric. Plus the smart mix at massive massive scale for parallel computing. And then ultimately it's the software environment that we put on top of it. So we can process billion, billion, square transactions per second. >>And when you think about a lot of the AI today is modeling, that's done in the cloud. When you think about the edge actual real time in, you're not gonna send all that back to the cloud. When you have to make a left turn or a right turn, >>Stop sign. I think, you know, people need to realize that 70% of the data today is outside the public cloud and 50% is at the edge. And when you think about the real time use cases, actually 30% of that data will need to be processed real time. So which means you need to establish inference the rate at the edge and at the same time run, you know, the analytics at the edge, whether it's machine learnings or some sort of simulation they need to do at the edge. And so that's why, you know, we can provide inference. We can provide machine learning at the edge on top of the connectivity and the edge compute or cloud computing at the edge. But also we can provide on the other side, AI at scale for massive amount of data analytics. And >>Will that be part of the GreenLake? >>We already offered that experience. We already offered that as a HPC, as a service is one of the key services we provide at scale. And then you also have machine learning operations as a service. So we have both and with the data fabric, now we're gonna take it to one step forward so we can connect the data. And I think one of the most exciting services, I actually, I'm a true believer. That is the capability we develop through HP labs. Since you asked for that early on, which is called the swarm learning technology. Of >>Course. Yeah. I've talked to Dr. GU about there you >>Go. >>So, so he >>Will do a better job than me explaining, >>Hey, I don't know. You're pretty, pretty good at it, but he's awesome. I mean, I have to admit on your keynote, you specifically took the time to mention your support for women's rights. Yes. Will HPE pay for women to leave the state to have a medical procedure? >>Yeah. So what happened last week was a sad moment in a history. I believe we, as a company felt compelled to stand up and take a position on the rights of women to choose. And as a part of that, we already offer as a part of our benefits, the ability to travel and pay all the medical expenses related to their choice. >>Yeah. Well thank you for doing that. I appreciate it. As a, as a father of two daughters who have less rights than, than my wife did when she was their age, I applaud you for your bravery and standing up and, and thank you for doing that. How excited are you for Janet Jackson? >>I think is gonna be a phenomenal rap of the HP discover, I think is gonna be a great moment for people to celebrate the coming together. One of the feedback I got from the meetings early on from customers is that put aside the vision, the strategy, the solutions that they actually can experience themselves is the fact that the, the, the one thing that really appreciated it is that they can be together. They can talk to people, they can learn with each other from each other. That energy is obviously very palpable when you go through it. And I think, you know, the celebration tonight and I want to thank the sponsor for allowing us to do so, is, is the fact that, you know, it's gonna be a moment of reuniting ourselves and look at the Fu at the future with optimism, but have some fun. >>Well, that's great, Antonio, as I said, I've been to a lot of HP and HPE discovers. You've brought a new focus clearly to the company, outstanding job of, of getting people aligned. I mean, it's not easy. It's 60,000, you know, professionals a around the globe and the energy is like I've never seen before. So congratulations. Thank you so much for coming back in the queue. >>Thank you, Dave. And as always, we appreciate you covering the, the event. You, you share the news with all the audiences around the globe here and, and that's, that means us means a lot to us. Thank you. Thank you. >>And thank you for watching. This is Dave Velante for Lisa Martin and John furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest. Live from HPE. Discover 2022 in Las Vegas.

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here bringing you day one of theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 22. We've had a lot of great conversations so far. Just a few hours in. We have two of our alumni back with us. Powerhouses, two powerhouses from Nutanix. Two for the price of one. Mandy Dhaliwal joins us. The CMO of 90 days at Nutanix. It's great to see you. Congratulations on the gig. >> Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here and great to be at Nutanix. >> Isn't it? And Tarkan Maner, the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. Welcome back Tarkan. >> Great to see you guys. >> So this is only day one of the the main show Tarkan. We've been hearing a lot about cloud as an operating model. We've heard your CEO Rajiv talking about it. Break that down from Nutanix's point of view. >> Yeah, look at the end, the tech conference we are talking a lot technology but at the end it is all about outcomes. I saw Keith was here earlier, you know, GreenLake's story. We were on a session earlier. Everything is about business outcomes for the customers. And obviously our partner Ecosystems, NBC all these double technologies come together and become an open model. And our customers are moving from a CAPEX model, old school model, what I call dinosaur model, into an OPEX model, subscription model. Which Nutanix basically the category creator for this, in a hybrid multi-cloud fashion. One platform, one experience, any app, any user, anytime, and make it count. Let the customers focus on business outcomes. Let us deal with infrastructure for you. >> What are some of the key outcomes that you're seeing customers achieve? We've seen so much change in the last couple of years. >> Tarkan: Right. >> A lot of acceleration. >> Tarkan: Right. >> Every company has to be a data company today to compete. >> Right. >> What are some of the outcomes that you're really proud of? >> So look, at the end of the, day's it's all about digital transformation and it's a big loaded word. But at the end of the day every company is trying to get digitized. And hybrid multicloud is the only way to get there in a cost effective way. So that cost is a big story. Highly secure. Manageable, available, reliable, total cost ownership definitely depressed and take the complexity out. Let us deal with the infrastructure for you. You focus on your time to market, and the best applications for the best users. >> So Mandy, I remember, you know you talked about your category creator Tarkan, and I remember Stu Miniman and I, were in the Wikibon offices. We were just getting started and he said, "Dave you got to come in here." And Dhiraj was on the phone. They were describing this new category and I was blown away. I'm like, wow, that's like the cloud but you know, for on-prem. So what does the, what does the cloud operating model mean to Nutanix Mandy? >> Really, what we're trying to do is become this common cloud platform across Core, Edge and Cloud. We're known for our strength in HCI on premise. We have capability across. So it's really important for us to share this story with the market. Now, also one of the reasons I joined. You know this story needs to be told in a bigger fashion. So I'm here to really help evolve this category. We've won HCI, right? What's next? So stay tuned. >> So we call that super cloud. I call it. >> Yes, I love that name. >> So it, but it needs has meaning, right? >> Right. >> It's a new layer. It's not just, oh, I run on Azure. I run an Aw or running green. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's actually a common infrastructure. >> Yes. >> Common experience across maybe and even out to the edge. >> Mandy: Right. >> Right. So is, is that, do you guys see that or do you think this is just a little buzzword that Dave made up? >> No, I think it has legs. And I think at the core of it, it's simplicity and elegance. And if you look, and, and again, I'm drinking the the champagne, right? We have that we architected for that. We've solved that problem. So we now can extend it to become ubiquitous in the market. So it's, it's an amazing place to be because we've got the the scale, frankly, and the breadth now of the technology platform to be able to go deliver that super cloud. >> And you have to do the work, right? You, you, you have to hide all the complexity- >> Mandy: Yeah. >> Of whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, GreenLake wherever you go on prem. >> Mandy: Right. >> And not only that, as you know Dave, many people think about cloud, they automatically think about public cloud. AWS, Azure, or Google. Guess what? We have customers. Some of the workloads and apps running on a local country. If you're in Singapore, on Singtel, and your, if you're in Switzerland on Swisscom, if you're in Japan on NTT, guess what? Our cloud runs also on those clouds. For those customers who want the data, gravity, local issues with the security and privacy laws in the local country then all this SI you have HCI, Emphasis VIDPro, Accenture, CAPS, JAM, and ITCS. They have also cloud services. What we build as Mandy said as the creator, make the platform run anywhere. So the customers can move data, apps, workloads from cloud to cloud. From private to public and within public, from public to public. From AWS to Singtel. From Singtel to Swisscom to Azure, doesn't matter. We want to make sure one platform one experience, any app, any user. >> And at least a lot of those guys are building on OpenStack. We don't talk about OpenStack anymore. But a lot of the local telcos they actually it's alive and well and actually growing. >> So you, you make it sound simple. So I got to ask you as the chief marketing officer how do you message that simplicity and actually make it tangible for customers? >> That's a great question. It's really about the customer story, right? How do we share that we're able to take something that took months to deploy and have it done in in days, minutes, right? So there's a lot of those kinds of stories that you'll see across the platform coming. We're getting a lot more messaging around that. We're also tightening up the message to be more easily conveyed. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm working on right now and really super excited. You know, we've got leading retailers, financial services institutions, public sector agencies that are running on our platform. So we've got this amazing cadre of customers and their stories just need to be told. >> That voice of the customer is so powerful. >> Mandy: Yep. >> As you well know Tarkan. That's, that's the objective voice right? That is ideally articulating your value proposition. >> Yeah. >> Validating that helping other customers understand this, these are the outcomes we are achieving. >> Mandy: Right? >> You can do the same. >> Mandy: Right. >> And, and different personas. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's not one customer fits all right. You heard Home Depot, Daniel with Antonio on the keynote. The stores, the distribution center, the warehousing and their service department, their mobile app all that data has to move from place to place. And we want to make sure it's cost effective. It's secure. And not only for the system, people like Daniel but also for application developers. Dave, you talked about, you know, Open Source, OpenStack, a lot of new application development is all open source. >> Mandy: Yep. >> And we need to also gear toward them and give them a platform, a hybrid multicloud platform. So they can build applications and then run applications and manage lifecycle applications anywhere in simple ways securely. So this platform is not only for running applications but also build a new set of digital transformation driven applications. >> So what are you doing with GreenLake especially in that context, right? 'Cause that's what we're looking for. Is like are people going to build applications on top. Maybe it's the incumbents. It might not be startups, but what what are you doing there? >> Right. So look, I'll give you the highlights on this. I know you talked to Keith again we had the session earlier. We have about 2000 plus customers. Customers are moving from a CapEx model to an OPEX model. They like the subscription side of the business and basically our strategy and many is leading this globally making cloud on your terms. So you have the control, you move from CapEx to OPEX and we bring the data in cloud to you. So you can manage the data securely, privately build your applications, and then they're ready. You can move applications based on microservices capabilities we deliver to different cloud as, as you wish. >> So then what are you hearing from customers? What are they most excited about right now given the massive potential that you're about to unleash? >> It it's really about best in class, right? So you get these these amazing technologies to come together. We abstract the complexity away for the customer. So HP GreenLake brings economic benefit. Nutanix brings experience. So you couple those two. And all of a sudden they've got time to value. Like they've never had before. Add on top of that the skills gap that we've got in the market, right? The new breed of folks that are deploying and managing these applications just don't have an appetite for complexity like they did in the old world. So we've got elegance, that's underpinning our architecture and simplicity and ease of use that learn that really translates into customer delight. So that's our secret sauce. >> You talk about time to value. Sorry, Dave. Time to value is no joke as a marketer. Talk to me about what does that mean from a translation perspective? Because these days, one of the things we learned in the pandemic, other than everyone had no patience and still probably doesn't is that access to realtime data no longer a, oh, it's awesome. It's Fanta, it's, it's table stakes. It is it's, what's going to help companies succeed. And those not. So from a time to value perspective, talk a little bit more about that as really impactful to every industry. >> Right, And, and, and underpin underpinning, all of it is that simplicity and ease of use, right? So if I can pick up and have portability across all aspects of my platform, guess what? I've got a single pane of glass that's that I'm able to manage my entire infrastructure through. That's really powerful. So I don't have to waste time doing an undifferentiated heavy lifting, all of a sudden there's huge value there in simplicity and ease of use, right? So it translates for things that would take months and you know, hundreds of developers all of a sudden you can vend out infrastructure in a way that's performant, reliable, scalable and all of a sudden, right? Everybody's happy. People are not losing sleep anymore because they know they've got a reliable way of deploying and managing and running their infrastructure. >> Perfect example for you very quick. Just is very exciting. Mandy and I, were in the session, Texas Children's Hospital. >> Yeah. >> Theresa Montag. I mean, Tonthat, she's the head of infrastructure, with Keith, with us you should listen to the patient care Pediatric, you know, oncology, realtime data. Hip regulation, highly regulated industry data. Gravity is super important. State laws, city laws, healthcare laws. The data cannot go to a public cloud service but has to be cloud driven, cloud enabled and data driven and eccentric on the site. But cloud operating model, Nutanix again with GreenLake, delivers a subscription methodology, a you know, OPEX model and delivers desktop service cloud native applications, supporting all these tools like epic all happening in healthcare. >> You guys have a high net promoter score. What, what got you there? And what's going to keep you there in the future. >> It's underpinned by the technology itself and also our outstanding support team right. We hear our competitors' customers call us for support first, before they call our competitors. If you can't take that to the bank, what can you, right. It's crazy. They, our customers tell us this >> Dave: Really? >> Really. >> It's pretty validating. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, help us with has help us with this XYZ stuff. Yeah. >> And it becomes even more important with this new cloud era. >> Yes. >> As you're moving the data, the applications to different places, they want the same experience. And look as a company, we spent the investment. It's not free. >> Mandy: Yeah. >> It costs us a lot of money to make that happen. One of the best support organizations I've been in industry for 30 years, I've never seen this kind of a maniacal focus on customer service. And without that success will not come. >> Yeah, I mean, I've met a lot of Nutanix customers at the various shows over the years. Ridden in taxis bus rides, you know, cocktail parties. They're, they're an interesting bunch, right. They, they were kind of leading edge early on. They saw the light bulb went off, they adopted. >> Right. >> Right, so, and think about thinking about aligning with where they're going where are they going and how is Nutanix aligning with them? >> There's, there's so much complexity in the world, right? So we're abstracting away the complexity. Not all workloads are meant to run in an either or situation. >> Right. >> Right, and we're hearing from IDC as well in, in, by 2026, 75% of workloads are going to be misplaced. How do they have a strategic partner? That's going to help them run their organization effectively and efficiently. We become that open and neutral player in the market. That can be the trusted advisor for them to help with workload placement optimization. They're standardizing, they're consolidating they're modernizing, they're transforming. There's a lot going on right. And so how do they come to somebody? That's voice of reason that also is well networked across the ecosystem. And that interoperability is key and yes, I'm still drinking the Kool-Aid, but it, I see it. It's, it's a tremendous story. >> Switzerland with weapons. (everyone laughing) >> You said it, you said it, Dave. >> And also one other thing it's important competition makes us better not bitter. >> Yeah. >> We have the best best partner network, 10,000 plus partners but more than numbers, quality, constantly working theater. And some of our partners also are competitors. We compete with them and we deliver solutions this way. Customers don't have to forklift out forklift in Nutanix. We leverage their past investment, current investment so they can tie Nutanix in different ways for different workloads, not one size fits all. We have multiple solutions, multiple ways you know, small, medium, large, extra large D in terms of scale and different workloads from the, you know Edge to the Cloud. And to at the end of the day to data as a whole, as you heard from HP today, our strategy, our roadmaps super aligned. That's why we were having a lot of success with GreenLake as well. >> Mandy, can you talk a last question about the partner ecosystem that Tarkan mentioned? How were you leveraging that to, to modify the messaging that you talked about? You've only been here almost 90 days. >> Mandy: Right. >> How is the partner ecosystem going to be a facilitator of the Nutanix brand and messaging and the reach? >> They're, they're tremendous, right? Because we're able to now, like we're doing here, right. Be able to reach into their customer base, and showcase our stories in a purpose built way right. This is, this is reality and solutions that we're driving for the customers with like-minded problems, like-minded people so they can see that. And so we do that across the, the ecosystem and all of a sudden, we've got this rolling thunder if you will. So it's up to us to, to, to really hone in on the right narrative and hand it to them and have them run with it that there's going to be practices built on this, even in a deeper way, moving forward. I see it, you know, we've done, I've done this before in my career. And so I've got conviction that we're on the right track and, you know, watch the space. >> Dot, dot, dot, to be continued. Watch the space. You heard it here on theCUBE. Mandy, Tarkan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about the power of Nutanix with HPE, what you're doing and what you're enabling customers to achieve. It's transformative and, and best of luck. You'll have to come back in the next 90 days so we can see some of those customer stories. >> Absolutely. Absolutely, would love to, thank you. >> Thanks guys. >> Mandy: Yeah. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from the show floor of HPE Discover 22. Day one coverage continues after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. I'm Jeff Corcoran, Worldwide Go To Market Program Manager for the Compute Business Group. And I'm here today to talk to you about enabling and empowering your remote workforce with virtual desktop infrastructure or VDI. The pandemic has changed the way everyone works. And we're unlikely to go back to the way things were before 2020. The entire world has seen a dramatic fore shift to remote working. As you can see on the graphic here, 75% of CEOs say the pandemic has changed and accelerated this transformation. This brings with it a whole host of challenges. There are technical challenges like security and connectivity but there are also important challenges like culture and productivity to be concerned with. Gartner found that around half of employers now see remote work as a go forward motion for them which is opposed to less than a third before the pandemic. Of course there's work that you just can't do remotely. There the question is, how do you ensure maximum employee safety for work that needs to be physically co-located? 60% of CEOs say that their top concern is keeping employees safe and productive. It's becoming quite clear that the future is one of hybrid. It means that you have the flexibility to get work done regardless of your physical location. Because it's better for business continuity, better for employee productivity and better for long-term effectiveness. And employers are demanding it. Gartner reports that around 80% of employees want to work remotely, at least some of the time as opposed to those that want to work remotely all the time which is around 56%. This is because employees report the flexibility to work from home. It's a boost to retention, productivity and work-life balance. It's no coincidence that a JP Morgan CIO Survey found that the single biggest tech spending shift has been for technologies that enable remote working. This is seeing a 15% increase while other technologies in the rest of the market is flat to declining. When we talk about remote and hybrid work, one of the key enabling technologies is VDI. VDI is a client desktop virtualization workload. That's a subset of the more expansive spectrum of end user computing or EUC for short. These are technologies that allow users to access corporate applications and data regardless of where they are. Within this EUC spectrum, there are server-based computing which is sometimes known as application virtualization. These are for users with less complex computing needs. And then you've got the aforementioned VDI which is for task or productivity users. And then we have physical hosted desktops which is for the most demanding end-users. To understand why VDI has become so popular, we need to understand the benefits that it can provide. So you've got ease of access. And again we're talking about remote work, work from home. This is a way of life. So the VDI has the ability to provide that ease of access. Flexibility, so organizations have vastly different needs predicated on their users and their computing needs. So VDI enables organizations to provision right size solutions for their workforce. Less administrative overhead, you can now manage devices in the desktop to updates from a centralized location for VDI which is a tremendous boost. Resource consolidation, for those deployments where the users don't require full capacity all the time, you can see tremendous consolidation ratios. Data security and sovereignty, this is probably the number one reason why people go with VDI. You safely keep your data where it belongs in the data center where you have the ability to build a secure perimeter around it. So in this scenario with VDI, users are accessing the data. It's not on their laptop, it's in the data center. And now what happens is when they access it, the data itself doesn't come across the line. It's just the pixels of what that data represents so that it paints it on their screen. So if somebody were to intercept that stream they wouldn't get the data itself but just the pixels so security is greatly enhanced. And this is also closely predicated to performance. Applications reside close to the data, in the data center. So they're able to operate at data center speed, so think about 10 gigabyte or higher speeds. And so for those engineering workloads, for example that have maybe large models and they have lowered huge dataset with many different parts because this is operating at wire speed in the data center it happens very quickly. And this is a boon to productivity. It's a great way to realize the benefit of VDI. The process of developing your HPE VDI solution starts with identifying the types of users you have and understanding the applications that they use to perform their duties. That way we can size the VDI deployment correctly. If they provide or perform more simple office tasks or just a single function positions, these are what we might call task workers. So they use limited office, Microsoft Office, you know, they're maybe some word processing. But think about customer service, telesales, data entry, healthcare, telemedicine is a good one here. Perhaps they need more performance and they're oriented towards analysis or content creation. These are what we call knowledge workers. And this is probably most of you in the audience. Think about heavy office 365 usage teams and zoom for collaboration, web based SaaS apps. This is office workers, sales and operations, marketing, finance legal. And then lastly for those users that are really dependent on a heavy graphical usage, think about MRIs scans for healthcare, maybe complex graphs for investment bankers, maybe simulations or modeling and engineering, these are power users. So again, you know, CAD engineering design simulation, financial traders, geo-physical analysis for the energy industry, software developers and the media and entertain industry. These are great places for power users. Whatever the right mix is for your organization, we ensure that the solution provides each and every type of worker, the performance they need to perform the tasks they need to have success. Netherlands Cancer Institute is one of the foremost cancer research centers in the world. They were looking to improve IT agility and performance to support demanding research projects and dynamic clinical services. And to do this, we worked with them and deployed HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with VMware Horizon for their VDI infrastructure. And what this did was supported during the day up to 2000 VDI users. And at night, the usage went down to 400 to 600 users and the flexible design of the solution allowed them to take advantage of this infrastructure. And they could allocate capacity at night to some batch jobs that were running to improve image sharpness of imagery that's used to aid in the early research of cancer disease. And what used to take one hour to work on an image, took 10 minutes now in this new environment. So they are able to increase the agility to run diverse clinical and research workloads. They (indistinct) their IT infrastructure to handle consistently and constantly evolving business needs. And it also freed clinicians to focus more time on patient care which is really what they wanted to do. And the quote here says that by spending less time working with technology, the clinicians were able to spend more time focusing on the patients which is what they, you know, what's the most important part of this equation. With the introduction of HPE ProLiant Gen10 Plus, we see a tremendous opportunity to help our customers drive better outcomes. For VDI that means we can leverage the innovation that the 3rd Generation AMD EPYC Processor provides. Improved clock speeds and increased instructions per clock will greatly benefit VDI workloads as well increased memory, so up to four terabytes per CPU. Storage and networking are no longer going to bottlenecks either as there's 128 PCIe Gen4 lanes to support this increased IO. This is twice the bandwidth that was available with Gen3. So with this increased performance envelopes for several sub-systems, we're able to build higher performing VDI solutions that'll help our customers drive the outcomes needed to move their business forward. When we leverage HPE GreenLake for VDI, it brings the simplicity of the cloud experience to VDI. The ability to scale capacity and costs up and down is a key benefit of cloud. But most VDI implementations need to meet certain standards of security, compliance and performance that cannot readily be met with pure public cloud solutions. HPE GreenLake for VDI brings that cloud-like economics and agility together with the performance compliance and control that you expect from your on premises IT. And because it is managed for you and build, use monthly, you can focus your IT teams on other critical aspects of delivering outcomes that help you drive your business forward. We just talked about GreenLake which is a great way for us to help you accelerate your transformation. You can deploy any workload as a service with GreenLake services. You can now bring that cloud speed agility and an as a service model to where your apps and data are today. You can transform the way you do business with one experience and one operating model across your distributed clouds for depths and data at the edge in co-locations and in your data center. 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HPE FS helps you create the financial capacity to transform your work business. There is a lot of other resources that are available to help you learn about the VDI solutions that we have available to help you. So there's a few links on the screen that talk about some of our VDI solutions, our product portfolio. And there's also some social media engagements that we can do on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. I'd like to thank you for taking some time out of your day to attend this session. Have a great rest of your day.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the virtual experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. I'm really happy to be joined on the program two of our CUBE alumni, we have the Daves from Hewlett Packard labs. Sitting in the screen next to me is Dave Husak he is a fellow and general manager for the Cloudless Initiative. And on the other side of the screen, we have Dave Larson, vice president and CTO of the Cloudless Initiative. Dave and Dave, thank you so much for joining us again. >> Delighted to be here. >> All right, so specifically we're going to be talking a bit about security, obviously, you know, very important in the cloud era. And as we build our native architect, you know, Dave Husak, I guess, why don't you set the stage for us a little bit, of you know, where security fits into, you know, HPE overall and, you know, the mission that you know, last year a lot of buzz and discussion and interest around Cloudless. So just put that as a start and then we'll, get into a lot of discussion about security. >> Right yeah, last year we did, you know, launch the initiative and, you know, we framed it as, it composed of three components, one of which in fact, the most important aspect of which it was the trust fabric Cloudless Trust Fabric, which was you know, built on the idea of intrinsic security for all workload end points, right. And this is a theme that you see playing out, you know, a year later playing out, I think across the industry. You hear that language and that, you know, that kind of idea of being promoted in the context of zero trust, you know, new capabilities being launched by VMware and other kinds of runtime environments, right. And you know, the way I like to say it is that we have entered an era of security first in IT infrastructure. It's no longer going to be practical to build IT infrastructure and then, you know, have products that secure it, right. You know, build perimeters, do micro-segment or anything like that. Workload end points need to be intrinsically secure. And you know, the upshot of that really at this point is that all IT infrastructure companies are security companies now. The you know it, acknowledge it, like it or not, we're all security companies now. And so, you know, a lot of the principles applying in the Cloudless Trust Fabric are those zero trust principles are based on cryptographic, workload, identity, leverage unique aspects of HPs products and infrastructure that we've already been delivering with hardware and Silicon root of trust built into our reliance servers and other capabilities like that. And you know, our mission, my mission is to propel that forward and ensure that HP is, you know, at the forefront of securing everything. >> Yeah, excellent definitely, you know love the security first discussion. Every company we've talked to absolutely security is not only a sea level, but you know, typically board level discussion, I guess my initial feedback, as you would say, if every company today is a security company, many of them might not be living up to the expectation just yet So Dave Larson, let's say, you know, applications are, you know, at the core of what we've look at it in cloud native. It's new architectures, new design principles. So give us some, what is HPE thoughts and stuff, how security fits into that, and what's different from how we might've thought about security in the past the applications? Well, I think Dave touched on it, right? From a trust fabric perspective, we have to think of moving to something where the end points themselves, whether their workloads or services are actually intrinsically secure and that we can instantiate some kind of a zero trust framework that really benefits the applications. It really isn't sufficient to do intermediate inspection. In fact, the real, the primary reason why that's no longer possible is that the world is moving too encryption everywhere. And as soon as all packets are encrypted in flight, not withstanding claims to the contrary, it's virtually impossible to do any kind of inference on the flows to apply any meaningful security. But the way we see it is that the transition is moving to a modality where all services, all workloads, all endpoints can be mutually attested, cryptographically identified in a way that allows a zero trust model to emerge so that all end points can know what they are speaking to on the remote end and by authorization principals determine whether or not they're allowed to speak to those. So from a HPE perspective, the area where we build is from the bottom up, we have a Silicon root of trust in our server platform. It's part of our ILO five Integrated lights out baseboard management controller. We can actually deliver a discreet and measurable identity for the hardware and projected up into the workload, into the software realm. >> Excellent, Ty I heard you mentioned identity makes me think of the Cytel acquisition that the HPE made early this year, people in the cloud native community into CubeCon you know, SPIFFE of course, is a project that had gotten quite a bit of attention. Can give us a little bit as to how that acquisition fits into this overall discussion we were just having? >> Oh yeah, so we acquired Cytel into the initiative, beginning of this year. As you, understand Stu, right. Cryptographic identity is fundamental to zero trust security because we're no longer, like Dave pointed out we're no longer relying, on intermediary devices, firewalls, or other kinds of functions to manage, you know, authorize those communications. So the idea of building cryptographic identity into all workload endpoints, devices and data is sort of a cornerstone of any zero trust security strategy. We were delighted to bring the team on board. Not only from the standpoint that they are the world's experts, original contributors, and moderators and committers in the stewardship of SPIFFE and SPIRE the two projects in the CNCF. But you know, the impact they're going to have on the HPs product development, hardware and software is going to be outsized. And it also, you know, as a, I'll have to point this out as well, you know, It is the, this is the most prominent open source project that HP is now stewarding, right. In terms of its acceptance, of SPIFFE and SPIRE, or both poised to be I have an announcement here shortly, probably. But we expect they're going to be promoted to the incubating phase of CNCF maturity from the Sandbox is actually one of the first Sandbox projects in the CNCF. And so it's going to join that Pantheon of know, you know, top few dozen out of I think 1,390 projects in the CNCF. So like you pointed out Stu you know, SPIFFE and SPIRE are right now, you know, the world's leading candidate as, you know, sort of the certificate standard for cryptographic workload endpoint identity. And we're looking at that as a very fundamental enabling technology for this transformation, that the industry is going to go through. >> Yeah, it's really interesting if we pull on that open source thread a little bit more, you know, I think back to earlier in my career, you know, 15, 20 years ago, and if you talk to a CIO, you know, security might be important to them, but they keep what they're building and how their IT infrastructure, is something that they keep very understood. And if you were a vendor supplying to them, you had to be under NDA to understand, because that was a differentiation. Now we're talking about lifting cloud, we're talking about open source, you know, even when I talked to the financial institutions, they're all talking amongst themselves the how do we share best practices because it's not, am I secure? It's we all need to be secure. I wonder if you can comment a little bit on that trend, you know, how the role of open source. Yeah, this is an extension of Kerckhoffs's principle, right? The idea that a security system has to be secure, even if you know the system, right. That's it's only the contents of the ease in the communication letter, that are important. And that is playing out, at the highest level in our industry now, right. So it is, like I said, cryptographic identity and identity based encryption are the cornerstones of building a zero trust fabric. You know, one of the other things is, cause you mentioned that, we also observed is that the CNCF, the Apache foundation. The other thing that's, I think a contrast to 15 years ago, right back 15, 20 years ago, open source was a software development phenomenon, right. Where, you know, the usual idea, you know, there's repositories of code, you pull them down, you modify them for your own particular purposes and you upstream this, the changes and such, right. It's less about that now. It is much more a model for open source operations than it is a model for open source development. Most of the people that are pulling down those repositories unless they are using them, they're not modifying them, right. And as you also, I think understand, right. The framework of the CNCF landscape comprehensive, right? You can build an entire IT infrastructure operations environment by you know, taking storage technologies, security technologies, monitoring management, you know, it's complete, right. And it is, you know, becoming really, you know, a major operational discipline out there in the world to harness all of that development harness, the open source communities. Not only in the software, not only in the security space, but I think you know comprehensively and that engine of growth and development is I think probably the largest, you know manpower and brainpower, and you know, operational kind of active daily users model out there now, right. And, it's going to be critical. I think for the decade, this decade that's coming. That the successful IT infrastructure companies have to be very tightly engaged with those communities in that process, because open source operations is the new thing. It's like, you know DevOps became OpsDev or something like that is the trend. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up you know I think about the DevOps movement, really fused security, it can't be a bolt on it can't be an afterthought. The mantra I've heard over the last few years, is security is everyone's responsibility. Dave Larson, you know, the question I have for you is, how do we make sure, you know, policy is enforced you know, even I think about an organization everyone's responsible for it, you know, who's actually making sure that things happen because, you know, if everybody's looking after it, it should be okay. But, you know, bring us down a little bit from the application standpoint. >> Well, I would say, you know, first of all, you have to narrow the problem down, right? The more we try to centralize security with discreet appliances, that's some kind of a choke point, the explosion, the common editorial explosion of policy declaratives that are necessary in order to achieve that problem to achieve the solution becomes untenable, right? There is no way to achieve the right kind of policy enforcement unless we get as close to the actual workloads themselves, unless we implement a zero trust model where only known and authorized end points are allowed to communicate with each other, you know. We've lived with a really unfortunate situation in the internet at large, for the last couple of decades where an IP address is both a location and an identifier. This is problem because that can be abused. it's something that can be changed. It's something that is easily spoofed, and frankly the nature of that element of the way we connect applications together is the way that almost virtually all exploits, get into the environment and cause problems. If we move to a zero trust model where the individual end points will only speak with only respond to something that is authorized and only things that are authorized and they trust nothing else, we eliminate 95 to 99% of them problem. And we are in an automated stance that will allow us to have much better assurance of the security of the connections between the various endpoints and services. >> Excellent, so, you know, one of the questions that always comes up, some of the pieces we're talking about here are open source. You talk about security and trust across multiple environments. How does HPE differentiate from, you know, everything else out there and, you know, how are you taking the leadership position? I'd love to hear both of your commentary on that. >> Yeah, well, like I said, initially, the real differentiation for us is that HPE was the market leader for industry standard servers, from a security perspective. Three years ago in our ProLiant gen 10 servers, when we announced them, they had the Silicon root of trust and we've shipped more than a million and a half servers into the market with this capability that is unique in the market. And we've been actively extending that capability so that we can project the identity, not just to the actual hardware itself, but that we can bind it in a multi-factor sense, the individual software components that are hosted on that server, whether it's the operating system, a hypervisor, a VM, a container framework, or an actual container, or a piece of it code from a serverless perspective. All of those things need to be able to be identified and we can bring a multi-factor identity capability to individual workloads that can be the underpinning for this zero across connection capability. >> Great and David, anything you'd like to add there? >> No, like what he said I think HP is uniquely positioned you know, the depth and the breadth of our installed base of platforms that are already zero trust ready, if you will, right. Coupled with the identity technology that we're developing in the context of the Cytel acquisition and David, my work in a building, the cloudless trust fabric, you know, are the, like I said, the cornerstones of these architectures, right? And HP has a couple of unfair advantages here you know, okay breadth and depth of our, the customer base and the installed base of the system is already put out there. While the world is transitioning, you know, inevitably to these, you know, these kinds of security architectures, these kinds of IT infrastructure architectures, HP has a, you know, a leadership team position by default here that we can take advantage of. And our customers can reap the benefits of without, well, you know, without you know, rebuilding forklift upgrading, or otherwise, you know, it is, yeah as Dave talked about, you know, a lot will change, right. There's more to do, right? As we move from, you know, IP addresses and port numbers, as identities for security, because we know that perimeter security, network security like that is busted, right. It is, you know, every headline making, you know, kind of advanced persistent threat kind of vulnerabilities it's all at the root of all those problems, right. There are technologies like OPA, right you know, policy has to be reframed in the context of workload identity, not in network identity know. Like call this legal sort of the microsegmentation fallacy, right. You know that, you know, perimeters are broken, not a valid security strategy anymore. So the answer can't be, let's just draw smaller perimeters, especially since we're now filling them up with evermore, you know, dynamic evanescent kind of workload endpoints, you know, containers coming and going at a certain pace. And serverless instances, right. All of those things springing up and, and being torn down, you know, on, you know, very short life cycle that's right. It is inconceivable that traditional, you know perimeter based micro-segmentation based security frameworks can keep up with the competent tutorial explosion and the pace with which we are going to be where, you know, orchestration frameworks are going to be deploying these end points. There are, you know, there's a lot more to do, you know, but this is, the transformation story. This is of the 2020s, you know, infrastructure, IT infrastructure school is very different in two, five, 10 years from now than it does today. And you know that's you know we believe HP has, like I said, a few unfair advantages to lead the world in terms of those transformations. >> Excellent, well, appreciate the look towards the future as well as where we are today. Dave and Dave, thanks so much for joining. Thank you, Stu. >> Thanks, dude, pleasure. >> All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage. HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the global its theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE, discover the virtual experience for 2020, getting to talk to Hp executives, their partners, the ecosystem, where they are around the globe, this session we're going to be digging in about artificial intelligence, obviously a super important topic these days. And to help me do that, I've got two guests from Nvidia, sitting in the window next to me, we have Paresh Kharya, he's director of product marketing and sitting next to him in the virtual environment is Kevin Deierling, who is this senior vice president of marketing as I mentioned both with Nvidia. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, so great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> All right, so Paresh when you set the stage for us? AI, obviously, one of those mega trends to talk about but just, give us the stages, where Nvidia sits, where the market is, and your customers today, that they think about AI. >> Yeah, so we are basically witnessing a massive changes that are happening across every industry. And it's basically the confluence of three things. One is of course, AI, the second is 5G and IOT, and the third is the ability to process all of the data that we have, that's now possible. For AI we are now seeing really advanced models, from computer vision, to understanding natural language, to the ability to speak in conversational terms. In terms of IOT and 5G, there are billions of devices that are sensing and inferring information. And now we have the ability to act, make decisions in various industries, and finally all of the processing capabilities that we have today, at the data center, and in the cloud, as well as at the edge with the GPUs as well as advanced networking that's available, we can now make sense all of this data to help industrial transformation. >> Yeah, Kevin, you know it's interesting when you look at some of these waves of technology and we say, "Okay, there's a lot of new pieces here." You talk about 5G, it's the next generation but architecturally some of these things remind us of the past. So when I look at some of these architectures, I think about, what we've done for high performance computing for a long time, obviously, you know, Mellanox, where you came from through NVIDIA's acquisition, strong play in that environment. So, maybe give us a little bit compare, contrast, what's the same, and what's different about this highly distributed, edge compute AI, IOT environment and what's the same with what we were doing with HPC in the past. >> Yeah, so we've--Mellanox has now been a part of Nvidia for a little over a month and it's great to be part of that. We were both focused on accelerated computing and high performance computing. And to do that, what it means is the scale and the type of problems that we're trying to solve are just simply too large to fit into a single computer. So if that's the case, then you connect a lot of computers. And Jensen talked about this recently at the GTC keynote where he said that the new unit computing, it's really the data center. So it's no longer the box that sits on your desk or even in Iraq, it's the entire data center because that's the scale of the types of problems that we're solving. And so the notion of scale up and scale out, the network becomes really, really critical. And we're doing high-performance networking for a long time. When you move to the edge, instead of having, a single data center with 10,000 computers, you have 10,000 data centers, each of which as a small number of servers that is processing all of that information that's coming in. But in a sense, the problems are very, very similar, whether you're at the edge or you're doing massive HPC, scientific computing or cloud computing. And so we're excited to be part of bringing together the AI and the networking because they are really optimizing at the data center scale across the entire stack. >> All right, so it's interesting. You mentioned, Nvidia CEO, Jensen. I believe if I saw right in there, he actually could, wrote a term which I had not run across, it was the data processing unit or DPU in that, data center, as you talked about. Help us wrap our heads around this a little bit. I know my CPU, when I think about GPUs, I obviously think of Nvidia. TPUs, in the cloud and everything we're doing. So, what is DPUs? Is this just some new AI thing or, is this kind of a new architectural model? >> Yeah. I think what Jensen highlighted is that there's three key elements of this accelerated disaggregated infrastructure that the data center has becoming. And so that's the CPU, which is doing traditional single threaded workloads but for all of the accelerated workloads, you need the GPU. And that does massive parallelism deals with massive amounts of data, but to get that data into the GPU and also into the CPU, you need really an intelligent data processing because the scale and scope of GPUs and CPUs today, these are not single core entities. These are hundreds or even thousands of cores in a big system. And you need to steer the traffic exactly to the right place. You need to do it securely. You need to do it virtualized. You need to do it with containers and to do all of that, you need a programmable data processing unit. So we have something called our BlueField, which combines our latest, greatest, 100 gig and 200 gig network connectivity with Arm processors and a whole bunch of accelerators for security, for virtualization, for storage. And all of those things then feed these giant parallel engines which are the GPU. And of course the CPU, which is really the workload at the application layer for non-accelerated outs. >> Great, so Paresh, Kevin talked about, needing similar types of services, wherever the data is. I was wondering if you could really help expand for us a little bit, the implications of it AI at the edge. >> Sure, yeah, so AI is basically not just one workload. AI is many different types of models and AI also means training as well as inferences, which are very different workloads or AI printing, for example, we are seeing the models growing exponentially, think of any AI model, like a brain of a computer or like a brain, solving a particular use case a for simple models like computer vision, we have models that are smaller, bugs have computer vision but advanced models like natural language processing, they require larger brains or larger models, so on one hand we are seeing the size of the AI models increasing tremendously and in order to train these models, you need to look at computing at the scale of data center, many processors, many different servers working together to train a single model, on the other hand because of these AI models, they are so accurate today from understanding languages to speaking languages, to providing the right recommendations whether it's for products or for content that you may want to consume or advertisements and so on. These models are so effective and efficient that they are being powered by AI today. These applications are being powered by AI and each application requires a small amount of acceleration, so you need the ability to scale out or, and support many different applications. So with our newly launched MPR architecture, just couple of weeks to go that Jensen announced, in the virtual keynote for the first time, we are now able to provide both, scale up and scale out both training data analytics as well as imprints on the single architecture and that's very exciting. >> Yeah, so look at that. The other thing that's interesting is you're talking about at the edge and scale out versus scale up, the networking is critical for both of those. And there's a lot of different workloads. And as Paresh was describing, you've got different workloads that require different amounts of GPU or storage or networking. And so part of that vision of this data center as the computer is that, the DPU lets you scale independently, everything. So you can compose, you desegregate into DPUs and storage and CPUs, and then you compose exactly the computer that you need on the fly container, right, to solve the problem that you're solving right now. So these new way of programming is programming the entire data center at once and you'll go grab all of it and it'll run for a few hundred milliseconds even and then it'll come back down and recompose itself onsite. And to do that, you need this very highly efficient networking infrastructure. And the good news is we're here at HPE Discover. We've got a great partner with HPE. You know, they have our M series switches that uses the Mellanox hundred gig and now even 200 and 400 gig ethernet switches, we have all of our adapters and they have great platforms. The Apollo platform for example, is break for HPC and they have other great platforms that we're looking at with the new telco that we're doing or 5G and accelerating that. >> Yeah, and on the edge computing side, there's the edge line set of products which are very interesting, the other sort of aspect that I wanted to touch upon, is the whole software stack that's needed for the edge. So edge is different in the sense that it's not centrally managed, the edge computing devices are distributed remote locations. And so managing the workflow of running and updating software on it is important and needs to be done in a very secure manner. The second thing that's, that's very different again, for the edges, these devices are going to require connectivity. As Kevin was pointing out, the importance of networking so we also announced, a couple of weeks ago at our GTC, our EGX product that combines the Mellanox NIC and our GPUs into a single a processor, Mellanox NIC provides a fast connectivity, security, as well as the encryption and decryption capabilities, GPUs provide acceleration to run the advanced DI models, that are required for applications at the edge. >> Okay, and if I understood that, right. So, you've got these throughout the HPE the product line, HPE's got long history of making, flexible configurations, I remember when they first came out with a Blade server it was, different form factors, different connectivity options, they pushed heavily into composable infrastructure. So it sounds like this is just a kind of extending, you know, what HP has been doing for a couple of decades. >> Yeah, I think HP is a great partner there and these new platforms, the EGX, for example that was just announced, a great workload there is a 5G telco. So we'll be working with our friends at HPE to take that to market as well. And, you know, really, there's a lot of different workloads and they've got a great portfolio of products across the spectrum from regular servers. And 1U, 2U, and then all the way up to their big Apollo platform. >> Well I'm glad you brought up telco, I'm curious, are there any specific, applications or workloads that, where the low hanging fruit or the kind of the first targets that you use for AI acceleration? >> Yeah, so you know, the 5G workload is just awesome. We're introduced with the EGX, a new platform called Ariel which is a programming framework and there were lots of partners there that were part of that, including, folks like Ericsson. And the idea there is that you have a software defined hardware accelerated radio area network, so a cloud RAM and it really has all of the right attributes of the cloud and what's nice there is now you can change on the fly, the algorithms that you're using for the baseband codex without having to go climb a radio tower and change the actual physical infrastructure. So that's a critical part. Our role in that, on the networking side, we introduced the technology that's part of EGX then are connected, It's like the DX adapter, it's called 5T for 5G. And one of the things that happens is you need this time triggered transport or a telco technology. That's the 5T's for 5G. And the reason is because you're doing distributed baseband unit, distributed radio processing and the timing between each of those server nodes needs to be super precise, 20 nanosecond. It's something that simply can't be done in software. And so we did that in hardware. So instead of having an expensive FPGA, I try to synchronize all of these boxes together. We put it into our NIC and now we put that into industry standard servers HP has some fantastic servers. And then with the EGX platform, with that we can build, really scale out software to client cloud RAM. >> Awesome, Paresh, anything else on the application side you'd like to add in just about what Kevin spoke about. >> Oh yeah, so from application perspective, every industry has applications that touch on edge. If you take a look at the retail, for example, there is, you know, all the way from supply chain to inventory management, to keeping the right stock units in the shelves, making sure there is a there is no slippage or shrinkage. So to telecom, to healthcare, we are re-looking at constantly monitoring patients and taking actions for the best outcomes to manufacturing. We are looking to automate production detecting failures much early on in the production cycle and so on every industry has different applications but they all use AI. They can all leverage the computing capabilities and high-speed networking at the edge to transform their business processes. >> All right, well, it's interesting almost every time we've talked about AI, networking has come up. So, you know, Kevin, I think that probably ease up a little bit why, Nvidia, spent around $7 billion for the acquisition of Mellanox and not only was it the Mellanox acquisition, Cumulus Networks, very known in the network space for software defined really, operating system for networking but give us strategically, does this change the direction of Nvidia, how should we be thinking about Nvidia in the overall network? >> Yeah, I think the way to think about it is going back to that data center as the computer. And if you're thinking about the data center as computer then networking becomes the back plane, if you will of that data center computer and having a high performance network is really critical. And Mellanox has been a leader in that for 20 years now with our InfiniBand and our Ethernet product. But beyond that, you need a programmatic interface because one of the things that's really important in the cloud is that everything is software defined and it's containerized now and there is no better company in the world then Cumulus, really the pioneer and building Cumulus clinics, taking the Linux operating system and running that on multiple homes. So not just hardware from Mellanox but hardware from other people as well. And so that whole notion of an open networking platform more committed to, you need to support that and now you have a programmatic interface that you can drop containers on top of, Cumulus has been the leader in the Linux FRR, it's Free Range Routing, which is the core routing algorithm. And that really is at the heart of other open source network operating systems like Sonic and DENT so we see a lot of synergy here, all the analytics that Cumulus is bringing to bear with NetQ. So it's really great that they're going to be part here of the Nvidia team. >> Excellent, well thank you both much. Want to give you the final word, what should they do, HPE customers in their ecosystem know about the Nvidia and HPE partnership? >> Yeah, so I'll start you know, I think HPE has been a longtime partner and a customer of ours. If you have accelerated workloads, you need to connect those together. The HPE server portfolio is an ideal place. We can combine some of the work we're doing with our new amp years and existing GPUs and then also to connect those together with the M series, which is their internet switches that are based on our spectrum switch platforms and then all of the HPC related activities on InfiniBand, they're a great partner there. And so all of that, pulling it together, and now as at the edge, as edge becomes more and more important, security becomes more and more important and you have to go to this zero trust model, if you plug in a camera that's somebody has at the edge, even if it's on a car, you can't trust it. So everything has to become, validated authenticated, all the data needs to be encrypted. And so they're going to be a great partner because they've been a leader and building the most secure platforms in the world. >> Yeah and on the data center, server, portfolio side, we really work very closely with HP on various different lines of products and really fantastic servers from the Apollo line of a scale up servers to synergy and ProLiant line, as well as the Edgeline for the edge and on the super computing side with the pre side of things. So we really work to the fullest spectram of solutions with HP. We also work on the software side, wehere a lot of these servers, are also certified to run a full stack under a program that we call NGC-Ready so customers get phenomenal value right off the bat, they're guaranteed, to have accelerated workloads work well when they choose these servers. >> Awesome, well, thank you both for giving us the updates, lots happening, obviously in the AI space. Appreciate all the updates. >> Thanks Stu, great to talk to you, stay well. >> Thanks Stu, take care. >> All right, stay with us for lots more from HPE Discover Virtual Experience 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me, Stephen Laaper principal at Deloitte consulting and Brenna Sniderman the Executive Director for the Center of Integrated Research at Deloitte Services, Stephen and Brenna, nice to have you on the program today. >> Thank you, >> (mumbles) >> So we're going to be talking about The Smart Factory. I'd love for you to start Brenna, we'll start with you. Give our audience an overview of Deloitte's definition of The Smart Factory then we can dig into some of the very interesting research that Deloitte has been doing the last few years. >> Sure, absolutely. So the way we think about The Smart Factory is it is a system that's quite flexible that uses data and information from throughout, physical assets to optimized performance, to enable the facility to be more agile, to be proactive, to optimize its assets and to react and change as quickly as possible to shifts going on. It overall enables organizations to just be more intelligent about the way they use their assets to use data, to make more informed decisions and to drive a more optimized process. >> And Stephen for you, one of the things that I found interesting looking at some of Deloitte's research is that the last few years or so, there's been net zero growth in manufacturing labor productivity and labor productivity being an indicator of economic impact. Why in Deloitte's perspective, has that manufacturing labor productivity growth been flat? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting observation. And what we've seen is really decades and decades of management principles, companies using things like Lean, like Six Sigma, taking advantage of labor arbitrage in many cases. And the reality is that a lot of that low hanging fruit is gone. Those projects have been executed well and we're now seeing what we would consider to be diminishing returns as it relates to the investments in those same types of tools. And that is really what's leading many organizations now towards things like the capabilities that you'd find in a Smart Factory. Adding additional technologies to the capability set to really bring companies to that new productivity frontier. >> One of the things that I saw too, is that Smart Factory adoption in one of your studies, can result in a threefold productivity increase. So talk to me about in the last few years, some of the early adopters, Brenna we'll start with you, what are some of the trends that you've seen with those early adopters? any industries in particular that are leading in that respect? >> Well, that's a good question. I think when we recently published a study on lessons from early adopters in the Smart Factory and what we found was that a lot of the organizations that have adopted the Smart Factory have learned lessons that are not necessarily new but some that are new as well. Really I think the biggest challenge has been to figure out how to gather data from a lot of assets that maybe haven't had to produce data before to find out where all the information is from throughout the facility to bring together different groups and different cultures within the organization, whether it's IT and OT and have them figure out how to share information and data and really just to figure out what to do with that information once we've gotten it. Some of the organizations that we spoke with for our research really ran the gamut from aerospace to automotive, to consumer products, to industrial manufacturing. It really has been an interesting spread that we've looked at. >> Stephen walk us through the last three years or so of research that Deloitte has been doing into the Smart Factory from the 2017 study to the 2019 study, to the one that was just released, what's some of the progress that you've seen over the last three years? Is it what you anticipated it would be? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, three years ago, I think a lot of people were talking about Industry 4.0, they were talking about the industrial internet of things, they were talking about The Smart Factory, but we saw relatively few very concentrated efforts to advance those. Now as we fast forward three years, we're seeing that the specific capabilities that each one of those topic areas can enable for organizations, has become much clearer. So correspondingly companies have been planning for these types of investments and they're taking action on much of the capability build and quite frankly, starting to see the value. One of the underlying kind of architectural elements that I think are critical as part of the modern Smart Factory is exactly what Brenna touched on. And that was as it relates to the data. Many assets out there even if they're several decades old likely have a wealth of data associated with them. The challenge is that data is either not readily accessible or it's not well understood. And much of the effort that organizations have now undertaken is not only how do they connect, extract and use that information many times on a real time or near real time basis, but now also combining that information with other assets, other parts of the manufacturing facility, or even their manufacturing network to generate that value. >> So Stephen follow on question, how does an organization, a company start that process, if as you said, there's myriad assets of varying age, some really advanced, some really old as well as even from, I guess, a generational perspective in the workforce, you've got multiple generations, for organizations that know we've got data that's hidden, where do they start? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think a really important element of your question is how do you determine where to start? And the reality is that not all of these solutions are created equal. Not all of the assets have data that's interesting enough to be equal. And so really going through a very concerted effort to understand what are the capabilities we're trying to build And what value does it create for our organization? Aligning that to the objectives and the goals of the organization is critical right from the outset. And we see companies that are being most successful in their implementation of the Smart Factory, following that value orientation. And that might not mean that that value comes tomorrow, It might not come next month, but there's a very clear guidance in terms of how the particular capabilities that are being built will lead to value. Organizations that are not doing that, we tend to see random X visual. We see a lot of different efforts underway with very little tied value and correspondingly many of those efforts don't continue because the executive team, the shareholders aren't going to continue those investments in that space without showing them (mumbles). >> So Brenna walk us through, along what Stephen was just saying. I was reading in your 2020 study that positioning a Smart Factory initiative for value starts with human-centered design and I thought this was really interesting that Deloitte research demonstrated successful teams generally focus on the user first, not the technology. >> Well, yeah. And I think to follow on a little bit to what Stephen said about understanding the value and the goal of what you're trying to do before thinking about the technology you need to rush out and implement goes along with this as well. You want to think about what the user is actually going to be using that data for, what is their job, what information are they going to need and think about from their perspective, what is going to be most helpful and effective for them. And I think the value of this is twofold. One is if talent within your organization and folks on the shop floor, see the value of this data and information, they're going to be more inclined to adopt it because it makes their job easier. But also if you have a tremendous amount of data and information from all the different assets and parts of your facility, if an individual has to sift through all of that, to find what's going to be valuable to them, it's not really going to make their job easier. So human-centered design is really thinking about what that individual needs to do their role, and in a lot of the work that we've done, we've almost thought about it as personas where this particular persona or job needs this information, needs to go through these steps and here's the data information we need to show them to enable them to do that. It's just a way for people to leverage information, to make smarter decisions more quickly. >> How does a manufacturing company do that, Brenna, excuse me, without being siloed, like in business units, so I'm thinking, getting cross-functional support all the way up to the top level. >> Mhhh, that's something that we saw quite a bit in our research that many of the groups or organizations that have successfully enacted a Smart Factory have done so because it's not just coming down from the top, it's also coming up from the bottom. You know, although that may sound like a pejorative term, but coming from all angles of the organization. So we see from the strategic level, this is what we need to do to change the way our organization operates in a more effective way. But from the line of business individuals that are using this information and data every day, we need to think about sort of having a groundswell of support work there as well, so that our team members are using this information. So I think it has to be something that comes from throughout the organization. What we've also found your point about silos is bringing in diverse teams and individuals from throughout the organization who have different types of expertise, different perspectives, different things that they're looking at in different ways that they need to use this technology to do their job, will enable us to make sure that, what we're producing is something that's going to be of value to them. >> And along those lines, Stephen question for you, this must need to be looked at, not as what can we do today or the next six months, but over the long-term. So that ongoing enablement and education is going to be critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right. And you know, the reality is that some of these investments that organizations are making into Smart Factory, do take quite a bit of thought, research and assessment and those aren't investments that they're making for the short-term, many of them are long-term. The important part about those investments that organizations are making is that they're creating platforms by which teams can continue to evolve the persona-based type solutions that Brenna referred to, so critical. And so, the flexibility, the adaptability, the agility of those platforms and the investments that are being made, really is one of their critical factors. I did want to just revisit the user adoption of these types of solutions. And, I'm a engineer by education. And I could look up back to early in my career and say, "Hey, look, I built solutions, "using data for manufacturing shop floor equipment. "And I created those solutions for others." But the reality was that I created it in a way that an engineer would you consume that data. And the reality is the persona-based approach really lets us focus on how is a particular individual in their job going to consume that data in a way that enables them to make the best next decision which ultimately has a positive outcome for the company. And in some cases that might mean not exposing them to all the complexities that happen underneath the surface. The modern smartphone, for example, enormously complex device, yet intuitive to use, easy to pick up, easy to interact with. The modern Smart Factory is also very similar in that frame. >> Along those lines of agility, but also designing with certain mindset, culturally IT and OT are different. Brenna, one of the things that I found interesting in the research was the marriage of IT and OT, how do you advise or let's go to clients that were part of that 2020 study, what lessons can the next wave of adopters learn where it comes to bridging those two IT OT mentalities and different cultures? >> Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the different cultures is sort of, key insight that is helpful. With respect to IT, they work on different timeframes, they think about investments in a different way, they think about technology in a different way than individuals who are in OT, who are on the shop floor, who are using these tools every day. and what we found was that bridging that divide and bringing them together, is a challenge that many overlook and something that really the importance of it, can't be overstated. I think to get back to Stephen's point about adoption, if those within the OT space have an understanding of what IT is doing and why, they're just likelier to adopt and to use. And conversely, if those in IT have a deeper understanding of what those in OT are doing and what types of tools they need, they're likelier to come up with solutions that are going to be effective. I think the cultural divide is something that's practically important to understand, to address and not to overlook because I think the last thing that anyone implementing any sort of Smart Factory solution wants is to roll out a solution that was sort of baked in one area, but not taking into account the other as well. >> Great point. Stephen, I want to go back to you for a second. Just understanding along the lines of the cultural differences and the design principles that need to be factored in. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, for clients that you were talking to that were in whatever stage process of rolling out Smart Factory initiatives, where are they now? And what are some of the advantages that you see that organizations that aren't yet adopting Smart Factory initiatives should be doing to prepare to thrive in this new normal? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me start with some of those advantages right at the outset. So many organizations now have been looking at advanced solutions, perhaps, to enforce social distancing within the manufacturing environment or perhaps contact tracing within the manufacturing environment and the advantages organizations are seeing that are already on that Smart Factory journey is they're finding they have largely a lot of the infrastructure required to be able to do that already in place. So that has been an enormous accelerant for companies that are already on the journey. The reality is that many organizations, are unable to have their experts, their engineers, their vendors, many of the people that are supporting the equipment and the people in their manufacturing plants around the world, they're not able to get them there. And companies that have been on the Smart Factory journey, specifically as it relates to creating what we would call the digital twin of many of their assets, where they can now see not only visual representations of those assets, but can also see that the data flowing off those assets and in the most advanced solutions, being able to see those together, they'd be able to unlock remote support, in a way that organizations that have not been on this journey simply can't. And we're starting to see some very distinct results, as it relates to those who are able to continue running at scale, and those who are struggling in the COVID environment. >> And Stephen, last question for you. I know you've got a session or a demo on Smart Factory an AI that you're doing at Discover 2020. Tell us a little bit about that and what the participants can anticipate. >> Yeah. So we're really excited to be able to bring Factory AI as we call it, in a live virtualized session. That session is going to cover what we have built around we'll call it a mini manufacturing line. And usually we'd have that with you at the conference, or we take that around the country, to many of our manufacturing clients to really show them, the power of adopting many of these different types of capabilities in the manufacturing environment. So what we're going to be showing and what viewers can expect to see is a demonstration of edge capabilities, of computer vision, of advanced internet of things, all wrapped into several high-impact use cases. So we're looking forward to you're doing that. >> Excellent. Well, Stephen, Brenna, thank you so much for your time discussing The Smart Factor. This is such an interesting provocative topic. I wish we had more time, but appreciate you speaking with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> You're watching the cube, Lisa Martin for HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe its the Cube, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience the Cube. The Cube has been virtualized We like to say Am very happy to welcome in Neil McDonalds, he's the General Manager for Compute at HPE. Great to see you again Neil, wish we were face to face, but this will have to do. >> Very well, it's great to see you Dave. Next time we'll do this face to face. >> Next time we have hopefully next year. We'll see how things are going, but I hope you're safe and your family's all good and I say it's good to talk to you, you know we've talked before many times you know, it's interesting just to know the whole parlance in our industry is changing even you know Compute in your title, and no longer do we think about it as just sort of servers or a box you guys are moving to this as a service notion, really it's kind of fundamental or, poignant that we see this really entering this next decade. It's not going to be the same as last decade, is it? >> No, I think our customers are increasingly looking at delivering outcomes to their customers in their lines of business, and Compute can take many forms to do that and it's exciting to see the evolution and the technologies that we're delivering and the consumption models that our customers are increasingly taking advantage of such as GreenLake. >> Yes so Antonio obviously in his Keynote made a big deal in housing previous Keynotes about GreenLake, a lot of themes on you know, the cloud economy and as a service, I wonder if you could share with our audience, you know what are the critical aspects that we should know really around GreenLake? >> Well, GreenLake is growing tremendously for us we have around a thousand customers, delivering infrastructure through the GreenLake offerings and that's backed by 5,000 people in the company around the world who are tuning an optimizing and taking care of that infrastructure for those customers. There's billions of dollars of total contract value under GreenLake right now, and it's accelerating in the current climate because really what GreenLake is all about is flexibility. The flexibility to scale up, to scale down, the ability to pay as you use the infrastructure, which in the current environment, is incredibly helpful for conserving cash and boosting both operational flexibility with the technology, but also financial flexibility, in our customer's operations. The other big advantage of course at GreenLake is it frees up talent most companies are in the world of challenges in freeing up their talent to work on really impactful business transformation initiatives, we've seen in the last couple of quarters, an even greater acceleration of digital transformation work for example and if all of your talent is tied up in managing the existing infrastructure, then that's a drain on your ability to transform and in some industries even survive right now, so GreenLake can help with all of those elements and, with all of the pressure from COVID, it's actually becoming even more consumed, by more and more customers around the world it's- >> Yeah right I mean that definitely ties into the whole as a service conversation as well I mean to your point, you know, digital transformation you know, the last couple of years has really accelerated, but I feel yeah, I feel like in the last 90 days, it's accelerated more than it has in the last three years, because if you weren't digital, you really had no way to do business and as a service has really played into that so I wonder if you could talk about yours as a service, you know, posture and thinking. >> Well you're absolutely right Dave organizations that had not already embarked on a digital transformation, have rapidly learned in our current situation that it's not an optional activity. Those that were already on that path are having to move faster, and those that weren't are having to develop those strategies very rapidly in order to transform their business and to survive. And the really new thing about GreenLake and the other service offerings that we provide in that context is how it can accelerate the deployment. Many companies for example, have had to deal with VDI deployments in order to enable many more of their workforce to be productive when they can't be in the office or in the facility and a solution like GreenLake can really help enable very rapid deployment and build up but not just VDI many other workloads in high performance Compute or in SAP HANA for example, are all areas that we're bringing value to customers through that kind of as a service offering. Yeah, a couple of examples Nokia software is using GreenLake to accelerate their research and development as they drive the leadership and the 5G revolution, and they're doing that at a fraction of the cost of the public cloud. We've got Zanotti, which has built a private cloud for artificial intelligence and HPC is being used to develop the next generation of autonomous software for cars. And finally, we've got also Portion from Arctic who have built a fully managed hybrid cloud environment to accelerate all the application development without having to bear the traditional costs of an over-provisioned complex infrastructure. So all of our customers are relying on that because Compute and Innovation is just at the core of the digital transformations that everybody is embarked on as they modernize their businesses right now and it's exciting to be able to be part of that and to be able to do there, to help. >> So of course in the tech business innovation is the you know the main spring of growth and change, which is constant in our industry and I have a panel this week with Doctor Go talking about swarm learning in AI, and that's some organic innovation that HPE is doing, but as well, you've done some, M&A as well. Recently, you guys announced and we covered it a pretty major investment in Pensando Systems. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what, that means to the Compute business specifically in, HPE customers generally. >> So that partnership with Pensando was really exciting, and it's great to see the momentum that its building in delivering value to our customers, at the end of the day we've been successful with Pensando in building that momentum in very highly regulated industries and the value that is really intrinsic to Pensando is the simplifying of the network architecture. Traditionally, when you would manage an enterprise network environment, you would create centralized devices for services like load balancing or firewalls and other security functionality and all the traffic in the data center would be going back and forth, tromboning across the infrastructure as you sought to secure your underlying Compute. The beauty of the Pensando technology is that we actually push that functionality all the way out to the edge at the server so whether those servers are in a data center, whether they're in a colocation facility, whether they're on the edge, we can deliver all of that security service that would traditionally be required in centralized expensive, complex, unique devices that were specific to each individual purpose, and essentially make that a software defined set of services running in each node of your infrastructure, which means that as you scale your infrastructure, you don't have a bottleneck. You're just scaling that security capability with the scaling of your computer infrastructure. It takes traffic off your core networks, which gives you some benefits there, but fundamentally it's about a much more scalable, responsive cost-efficient approach to managing the security of the traffic in your networks and securing the Compute end points within your infrastructure. And it's really exciting to see that being picked up, in financial services and healthcare, and other segments that have you know, very high standards, with respect to security and infrastructure management, which is a great complement to the technology from Pensando and the partnership that we have with Pensando and HPE. >> And it's compact too we should share with our audience it's basically a card, that you stick inside of a server correct Neil? >> That's exactly right. Pensando's PCIe card together with HPE servers, puts that security functionality in the server, exactly where your data is being processed and the power of that is several fold, it avoids the tromboning that we talked about back across the whole network every time you've got to go to a centralized security appliance, it eliminates those complex single purpose appliances from the infrastructure, and that of course means that the failure domain is much smaller cause your failure demands a single server, but it also means that as you scale your infrastructure, your security infrastructure scales with the servers. So you have a much simpler network architecture, and as I say, that's being delivered in environments with very high standards for security, which is a really a great endorsement of the Pensando technology and the partnership that HPE and Pensando will have in bringing that technology to market for our customers. >> So if I understand it correctly, the Pensando is qualified for Pro-Lite, Appollo and in Edgelines. My question is, so if I'm one of those customers today, what's in it for me? Are they sort of hopping on this for existing infrastructure, or is it part of, sort of new digital initiatives, I wonder if you could explain. >> So if you were looking to build out infrastructure for the future, then you would ask yourself, why would you continue to carry forward legacy architectures in your network with these very expensive custom appliances for each security function? Why not embrace a software defined approach that pushes that to the edge of your network whether the edge are in course or are actually out on the edge or in your data centers, you can have that security functionality embedded within your Compute infrastructure, taking advantage of Pensandos technologies. >> So obviously things have changed is specifically in the security space, people are talking about this work from home, and this remote access being a permanent or even a quasi-permanent situation. So I wonder if we could talk about the edge and specifically where Aruba fits in the edge, how Pensando compliments. What's HPE's vision with regard to how this evolves and maybe how it's been supercharged with the COVID pandemic. >> So we're very fortunate to have the Aruba intelligent edge technology in the HPE portfolio. And the power of that technology is its focus on the analysis of data and the development of solutions at the site of the data generated. Increasingly the data volumes are such that they're going to have to be dealt with at the edge and given that, you need to be building edge infrastructure that is capable enough and secure enough for that to be the case. And so we've got a great compliment between the, intelligent edge technology within the Aruba portfolio, with all of the incredible management capabilities that are in those platforms combined with technologies like Pensando and our HPE Compute platforms, bring the ability to build a very cohesive, secure, scalable infrastructure that tackles the challenges of having to do this computer at the edge, but still being able to do it in both a secure and easily managed way and that's the power of the combination of Aruba, HPE Compute and Pensando. >> Well, with the expanded threat surface with people working from home organizations are obviously very concerned about compliance, and being able to enforce consistent policies across this sort of new network, so I think what you're talking about is it's very important that you have a cohesive system from a security standpoint you're not just bolting on some solution at the tail end, your comments. >> Well security, always depends on all the links in the chain and one of the most critical links in the chain is the security of the actual Compute itself. And within the HPE compliant platforms, we've done a lot of work to build very differentiated and exclusive capability with our hardware, a Silicon Root of Trust, which is built directly into Silicon. And that enables us to ensure the integrity of the entire boot chain on the security of the platform, drones up in ways that can't be done with some of the other hardware approaches that are prevalent in the industry, and that's actually brought some benefit, in financial terms to our customers because of the certifications that are enabled in the, Cyber Catalyst designations that we've earned for the platforms. >> So we also know from listening to your announcements with Pensando just observing security in general, that this notion of micro-segmentation is very important being able to have increased granularity as opposed to kind of a blob, maybe you could explain why that's important you know, the so what behind micro-segmentation if you will. >> Well it's all about minimizing the threat perimeter on any given device and if you can minimize the vectors through which your infrastructure will interact on the network, then you can provide additional layers of security and that's the power of having your security functionality right down at the edge, because you can have a security processor sitting right in the server and providing great security of the node level you're no longer relying on the network management and getting all of that right and you also have much greater flexibility because you can easily in a software defined environment, push the policies that are relevant for the individual pieces of infrastructure in an automated policy driven way, rather than having to rely on someone in network security, getting the manual configuration of that infrastructure, correct to protect the individual notes. And if you take that kind of approach, and you embed that kind of technology in servers, which are fundamentally robust in terms of security because of the Silicon Root of Trust that we've embedded across our platform portfolio whether that's Pro-line or Synergy or BladeSystem or Edgeline, you get a tremendous combination, as a result of these technologies, and as I mentioned, the being Cyber Catalyst designation is a proof point of that. Last year there we're over 150 security products, put forward for the Sovereign Capitalist designation, and the only a handful were actually awarded I think 17, of which two were HPE Compute and Aruba. And the power of is that many organizations are not having to deal with insurance for Cybersecurity events. And the Catalyst designation can actually lead to lower premiums for the choice of the infrastructure that you've made to such as HPE Compute, has actually enabled you to have a lower cost of insuring your organization against cybersecurity issues, because infrastructure matters and the choice of infrastructure with the right innovation in it is a really critical choice for organizations moving forward in security and in so many other ways. >> Yeah, you mentioned a lot of things there software defined, that's going to enable automation and scale, you talked about the perimeter you know, the perimeter of the traditional moat around the castle that's gone the perimeter, there is no perimeter anymore, it's everywhere so that whole you know, weakest link in the chain and the chain of events. And then the other thing you talked about was the layers you know very important when you're talking to security practitioners you know, building layers in so all of this really is factoring in security in particular, is factoring into customer buying decisions. Isn't it? >> Well security is incredibly important for so many of our customers across many industries. And having the ability to meet those security needs head on is really critical. We've been very successful in leveraging these technologies for many customers in many different industries, you know, one example is we've recently won multiple deals with the Defense Intelligence Systems Agency, who you will imagine have very high standards for security, worth hundreds of millions of dollars of that infrastructure so there's a great endorsement, from the customer set who are taking advantage of these technologies and finding that they deliver great benefits for them in the operational security of their infrastructure. >> Yeah what if I could ask you a question on the edge. I mean, as somebody who is you know, with a company that is really at the heart of technology, and I'm sure you're constantly looking at new companies, M&A you know et cetera, you know inventing tech, but I want to ask you about the architectures for the edge and just in thinking about a lot of data at the edge, not all the data is going to come back to the data center or the cloud, there's going to be a lot of AI influencing going on in real time or near real time. Do you guys see different architectures emerging to support that edge? I mean from a Compute standpoint or is it going to be traditional architectures that support that. >> It's clearly an evolving architectural approach because for the longest time, infrastructure was built with some kind of hub you know, whether or not some data center or in the cloud, around all of the devices at the edge would be essentially calling home, so edge devices historically have been very focused on connectivity on acquisition of data, and then sending that data back for some kind of processing and action at some centralized location. And the reality is that given the amount of data being generated at the edge now given the capability even of the most modern networks, it's simply not possible to be moving those kinds of data volumes all the way back to some remote processing environment, and then communicating a decision for action all the way back up to the edge. First of all, the networks kind of handle the volume data's involved if every device in the world was doing that, and secondly, the latencies are too slow. They're not fast enough in order to be able to take the action needed at the edge. So that means that you have to countenance systems at the edge that are not actually storing data, that are not actually computing upon data, and in a lot of edge systems historically, they would evolve from very proprietary, very vertically integrated systems to Brax PC controller based systems with some form of IP connectivity back to, some central processing environment. And the reality is that if you build your infrastructure that way, you finish up with a very unmanageable fleet, you finish up with a very fragmented, disjointed infrastructure and our perspective is that companies that are going to be successful in the future have to think themselves as an edge to cloud approach. They have to be pursuing this in a way that views, the edge, the data center, and the cloud as part of an integrated continuum, which enables the movement of data when needed you heard about the swarm learning that you talked about with my colleague Doctor Go, where there's a balance of what is computed, where in the infrastructure, and so many other examples, but you need to be able to move Compute to where the data is, and you need to be able to do that efficiently with a unified approach to the architecture. And that's where assets like the HPE Data Fabric come into play, which enable that kind of unification across the different locations of equipment. It also means you need to think differently about the actual building blocks themselves, in a lot of edge environments, if you take a Classic 19 interact mode Compute device, that was originally designed for the data center it's simply not the right kind of infrastructure. So that's why we have offerings like the Edgeline portfolio and the HPE products there, because they're designed to operate in those environments with different environmentals than you find the data center with different interfaces to systems of action and systems of control, than you'd typically find in a data center environment yet still bringing many of the security benefits and the manageability benefits that we've talked about earlier in our conversation today Dave. So it's definitely going to be an evolving, a new architectural approach at the edge, and companies that are thoughtful about their choice of infrastructure, are going to be much more successful than those that take a more incremental approach, and we were excited to be there to help our customers on that journey. >> Yeah Neil it's a very exciting time I mean you know, much of the innovation in the last decade was found inside the data center and in your world a lot of times you know, inside the server itself but what you're describing is this, end-to-end system across the network and that systems view, and then there's going to be a ton of innovation there and we're very excited for you thanks so much for coming on the Cube it was great to see you again. >> It is great to be here and we're just excited to be here to help our customers, and giving them the best volume for the workloads whether that's taking advantage of GreenLake, taking advantage of the innovative security technologies that we've talked about, or being the edge to cloud platform as a service company that can help our customers transform in this distributed world from the edge to the data center to the cloud. Thanks for having me Dave. >> You very welcome, awesome summary and its always good to see you Neil. Thank you for watching everybody this David Vellante, for the Cube our coverage of the HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, will be right back to the short break. (soft upbeat music)

>> Male Voice: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody, you're watching theCUBE. And this is Dave Vellante in our continuous coverage of the Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, HPE's virtual event, theCUBE is here, theCUBE virtual. We're really excited, we got a great session here. We're going to dig deep into machine intelligence and artificial intelligence. Dr. Arti Garg is here. She's the Head of Advanced AI Solutions and Technologies at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And she's joined by Dr. Sorin Cheran, who is the Vice President of AI Strategy and Solutions Group at HPE. Folks, great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you, hello! >> Dr. Cheran, let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your role. You've had a variety of roles and maybe what's your current situation at HPE? >> Hello! Hi, so currently at HPE, I'm driving the Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Solution group who is currently looking at how do we bring solutions across the HPE portfolio, looking at every business unit, but also on the various geos. At the same time, the team is responsible for building the strategy around the AI for the entire company. We're working closely with the field, we're working closely with the things that are facing the customers every day. And we're also working very closely with the various groups in order to make sure that whatever we build holds water for the entire company. >> Dr. Garg, maybe you could share with us your focus these days? >> Yeah, sure, so I'm also part of the AI Strategy and Solutions team under Sorin as our new vice president in that role, and what I'm focused on is really trying to understand, what are some of the emerging technologies, whether those be things like new processor architectures, or advanced software technologies that could really enhance what we can offer to our customers in terms of AI and exploring what makes sense and how do we bring them to our customers? What are the right ways to package them into solutions? >> So everybody's talking about how digital transformation has been accelerated. If you're not digital, you can't transact business. AI infused into every application. And now people are realizing, "Hey, we can't solve all the world's problems with labor." What are you seeing just in terms of AI being accelerated throughout the portfolio and your customers? >> So that's a very good idea, because we've been talking about digital transformation for some time now. And I believe most of our customers believed initially that the one thing they have is time thinking that, "Oh yes I'm going to somehow at one point apply AI "and somehow at one point "I'm going to figure out how to build the data strategy, "or how to use AI in my different line of businesses." What happened with COVID-19 and in this area is that we lost one thing: time. So I think discussed what they see in our customers is the idea of accelerating their data strategy accelerating, moving from let's say an environment where they would compute center models per data center models trying to understand how do they capture data, how they accelerate the adoption of AI within the various business units, why? Because they understand that currently the way they are actually going to the business changed completely, they need to understand how to adapt a new business model, they need to understand how to look for value pools where there are none as well. So most of our customers today, while initially they spend a lot of time in an never ending POC trying to investigate where do they want to go. Currently they do want to accelerate the application of AI models, the build of data strategies, how then they use all of this data? How do they capture the data to make sure that they look at new business models, new value pools, new customer experience and so on and so forth. So I think what they've seen in the past, let's say three to six months is that we lost time. But the shift towards an adoption of analytics, AI and data strategy is accelerated a lot, simply because customers realize that they need to get ahead of the game. >> So Dr. Garg, what if you could talk about how HPE is utilizing machine intelligence during this pandemic, maybe helping some of your customers, get ahead of it, or at least trying to track it. How are you applying AI in this context? >> So I think that Sorin sort of spoke to one of the things with adopting AI is, it's very transformational for a business so it changes how you do things. You need to actually adopt new processes to take advantage of it. So what I would say is right now we're hearing from customers who recognize that the context in which they are doing their work is completely different. And they're exploring how AI can help them really meet the challenges of those context. So one example might be how can AI and computer vision be coupled together in a way that makes it easier to reopen stores, or ensures that people are distancing appropriately in factories. So I would say that it's the beginning of these conversations as customers as businesses try to figure out how do we operate in the new reality that we have? And I think it's a pretty exciting time. And I think just to the point that Sorin just made, there's a lot of openness to new technologies that there wasn't before, because there's this willingness to change the business processes to really take advantage of any technologies. >> So Dr. Cheran, I probably should have started here but help us understand HPE's overall strategy with regard to AI. I would certainly know that you're using AI to improve IT, the InfoSite product and capability via the Nimble acquisition, et cetera, and bringing that across the portfolio. But what's the strategy for HPE? >> So, yeah, thank you. That's (laughs) a good question. So obviously you started with a couple of our acquisition in the past because obviously Nimble and then we talked a lot about our efforts to bring InfoSite across the portfolio. But currently, in the past couple of months, let's say close to a year, we've been announcing a lot of other acquisitions and we've been talking about Tuteybens, we've been talking about Scytale we've been talking about Cray, and so on, so forth, and now what we're doing at HPE is to bring all of this IP together into one place and try to help our customers within their region out. If you're looking at what, for example, what did they actually get when Cray play was not only the receiver, but we also acquire and they also have a lot of software and a lot of IP around optimization and so on and so forth. Also within our own labs, we've been investigating AI around like, for example, some learning or accelerators or a lot of other activity. So right now what we're trying to help our customers with is to understand how do they lead from the production stage, from the POC stage to the production stage. So (mumbles) what we are trying to do is we are trying to accelerate their adoption of AI. So simply starting from an optimized platform infrastructure up to the solution they are actually going to apply or to use to solve their business problems and wrapping all of that around with services either consumed on-prem as a service and so on. So practically what we want to do is we want to help our customers optimize, orchestrate and operationalize AI. Because the problem of our customers is not to start in our PLC, the problem is how do I then take everything that I've been developing or working on and then put it in production at the edge, right? And then keep it, maintaining production in order to get insights and then actually take actions that are helping the enterprise. So basically, we want to be data driven assets in cloud enable, and we want to help our customers move from POC into production. >> Or do you work with obviously a lot of data folks, companies or data driven data scientists, you are hands on practitioners in this regard. One of the challenges that I hear a lot from customers is they're trying to operationalize AI put AI into production, they have data in silos, they spend all their time, munging data, you guys have made a number of acquisitions. Not a list of which is prey, obviously map of, data specialist, my friend Kumar's company Blue Data. So what do you see as HPE's role in terms of helping companies operationalize AI. >> So I think that a big part of operationalizing AI moving away from the PLC to really integrate AI into the business processes you have and also the sort of pre existing IT infrastructure you talked about, you might already have siloed data. That's sort of something we know very well at HPE, we understand a lot of the IT that enterprises already have the incumbent IT and those systems. We also understand how to put together systems and integrated systems that include a lot of different types of computing infrastructure. So whether that being different types of servers and different types of storage, we have the ability to bring all of that together. And then we also have the software that allows you to talk to all of these different components and build applications that can be deployed in the real world in a way that's easy to maintain, and scale and grow as your AI applications will almost invariably get more complex involved, more outputs involved and more input. So one of the important things as customers try to operationalize AI is think is knowing that it's not just solving the problem you're currently solving. It's not just operationalizing the solution you have today, it's ensuring that you can continue to operationalize new things or additional capabilities in the future. >> I want to talk a little bit about AI for good. We talked about AI taking away jobs, but the reality is, when you look at the productivity data, for instance, in the United States, in Europe, it's declining and it has for the last several decades and so I guess my point is that we're not going to be able to solve some of the world problems in the coming decades without machine intelligence. I mean you think about health care, you think about feeding populations, you think about obviously paying things like pandemics, climate change, energy alternatives, et cetera, productivity is coming down. Machines are potential opportunity. So there's an automation imperative. And you feel, Dr. Cheran, the people who are sort of beyond that machines replacing human's issue? Is that's still an item or has the pandemic sort of changed that? >> So I believe it is, so it used to be a very big item, you're right. And every time we were speaking at a conference and every time you're actually looking at the features of AI, right? Two scenarios are coming to plays, right? The first one where machines are here, actually take a walk, and then the second one as you know even a darker version where terminator is coming, yes and so forth, right? So basically these are the two, is the lesser evil in the greater evil and so on and so forth. And we still see that regular thing coming over and over again. And I believe that 2019 was the year of reckoning, where people are trying to realize that not only we can actually take responsible AI, but we can actually create an AI that is trustworthy, an AI that is fair and so on and so forth. And that we also understood in 2019 it was highly debated everywhere, which part of our jobs are going to be replaced like the parts that are mundane, or that can actually be easily automated and so on and so forth. With the COVID-19 what happened is that people are starting to look at AI differently, why? Because people are starting to look at data differently. And looking at data differently, how do I actually create this core of data which is trusted, secure and so on and so forth, and they are trying to understand that if the data is trusted and secure somehow, AI will be trusted and secure as well. Now, if I actually shifted forward, as you said, and then I try to understand, for example on the manufacturing floor, how do I add more machines? Or how do I replace humans with machines simply because, I need to make sure that I am able to stay in production and so on and so forth. From their perspective, I don't believe that the view of all people are actually looking at AI from the job marketplace perspective changed a lot. The view that actually changes how AI is helping us better certain prices, how AI is helping us, for example, in health care, but the idea of AI actually taking part of the jobs or automating parts of the jobs, we are not actually past yet, even if 2018 and even more so in 2019, it was the year also where actually AI through automation replaced the number of jobs but at the same time because as I was saying the first year where AI created more jobs it's because once you're displacing in one place, they're actually creating more work more opportunities in other places as well. But still, I don't believe the feeling changed. But we realize that AI is a lot more valuable and it can actually help us through some of our darkest hours, but also allow us to get better and faster insights as well. >> Well, machines have always replaced humans and now for the first time in history doing so in a really cognitive functions in a big way. But I want to ask you guys, I'll start with Dr. Arti, a series of questions that I think underscore the impact of AI and the central role that it plays in companies digital transformations, we talk about that a lot. But the questions that I'm going to ask you, I think will hit home just in terms of some hardcore examples, and if you have others I'd love to hear them but I'm going to start with Arti. So when do you think Dr. or machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? We're actually there today already? >> So I think it depends a little bit on how you define that. And I'm just going to preface this by saying both of my parents are physicians. So I have a little bit of bias in this space. But I think that humans can bring creativity in a certain type of intelligence that it's not clear to me. We even know how to model with the computer. And so diagnoses have sometimes two components. One is recognizing patterns and being able to say, "I'm going to diagnose this disease that I've seen before." I think that we are getting to the place where there are certain examples. It's just starting to happen where you might be able to take the data that you need to make a diagnosis as well understood. A machine may be able to sort of recognize those subtle patterns better. But there's another component of doing diagnosis is when it's not obvious what you're looking for. You're trying to figure out what is the actual sort of setup diseases I might be looking at. And I think that's where we don't really know how to model that type of inspiration and creativity that humans still bring to things that they do, including medical diagnoses. >> So Dr. Cheran my next question is, when do you think that owning and driving your own vehicle will become largely obsolete? >> (laughs) Well, I believe my son is six year old now. And I believe, I'm working with a lot of companies to make sure that he will not get his driving license with his ID, right? So depending who you're asking and depending the level of autonomy that you're looking at, but you just mentioned the level five most likely. So there are a lot of dates out there so some people actually say 2030. I believe that my son in most of the cities in US but also most of the cities in Europe, by the time he's 18 in let's say 2035, I'll try to make sure that I'm working with the right companies not to allow them to get the driving license. >> I'll let my next question is from maybe both of you can answer. Do you take the traditional banks will lose control of payment system? >> So that's an interesting question, because I think it's broader than an AI question, right? I think that it goes into some other emerging technologies, including distributed ledgers and sort of the more secure forms of blockchain. I think that's a challenging question to my mind, because it's bigger than the technology. It's got Economic and Policy implications that I'm not sure I can answer. >> Well, that's a great answer, 'cause I agree with you already. I think that governments and banks have a partnership. It's important partnership for social stability. But similar we've seen now, Dr. Cheran in retail, obviously the COVID-19 has affected retail in a major way, especially physical retail, do you think that large retail stores are going to go away? I mean, we've seen many in chapter 11. At this point, how much of that is machine intelligence versus just social change versus digital transformation? It's an interesting question, isn't it? >> So I think most of the... Right now the retailers are here to stay I guess for the next couple of years. But moving forward, I think their capacity of adapting to stores like to walk in stores or to stores where basically we just go in and there are no shop assistants and just you don't even need the credit card to pay you're actually being able to pay either with your face or with your phone or with your small chips and so on and so forth. So I believe currently in the next couple of years, obviously they are here to stay. Moving forward then we'll get artificial intelligence, or robotics applied everywhere in the store and so on and so forth. Most likely their capacity of adapting to the new normal, which is placing AI everywhere and optimizing the walk in through predicting when and how to guide the customers to the shop, and so on and so forth, would allow them to actually survive. I don't believe that everything is actually going to be done online, especially from the retailer perspective. Most of the... We've seen a big shift at COVID-19. But what I was reading the other day, especially in France that the counter has opened again, we've seen a very quick pickup in the retailers of people that actually visiting the stores as well. So it's going to be some very interesting five to 10 years, and then most of the companies that have adapted to the digital transformation and to the new normal I think they are here to stay. Some of them obviously are going to take sometime. >> I mean, I think it's an interesting question too that you really sort of triggering in my mind is when you think about the framework for how companies are going to come back and come out of this, it's not just digital, that's a big piece of it, like how digital businesses, can they physically distance? I mean, I don't know how sports arenas are going to be able to physically distance that's going to be interesting to see how essential is the business and if you think about the different industries that it really is quite different across those industries. And obviously, digital plays a big factor there, but maybe we could end on that your final thoughts and maybe any other other things you'd like to share with our audience? >> So I think one of the things that's interesting anytime you talk about adopting a new technology, and right now we're happening to see this sort of huge uptick in AI adoption happening right at the same time but this sort of massive shift in how we live our lives is happening and sort of an acceptance, I think that can't just go back to the way things work as you mentioned, they'll probably be continued sort of desire to maintain social distancing. I think that it's going to force us to sort of rethink why we do things the way we do now, a lot, the retail, environments that we have the transportation solutions that we have, they were adapted in many cases in a very different context, in terms of what people need to do on a day-to-day basis within their life. And then what were the sort of state of technologies available. We're sort of being thrust and forced to reckon with like, what is it I really need to do to live my life and then what are the technologies I have available to meet to answer that and I think, it's really difficult to predict right now what people will think is important about a retail experience, I wouldn't be surprised if you start to find in person retail actually be much less, technologically aided, and much more about having the ability to talk to a human being and get their opinion and maybe the tactile sense of being able to like touch new clothes, or whatever it is. And so it's really difficult I think right now to predict what things are going to look like maybe even a year or two from now from that perspective. I think that what I feel fairly confident is that people are really starting to understand and engage with new technologies, and they're going to be really open to thinking about what those new technologies enable them to do in this sort of new way of living that we're going to probably be entering pretty soon. >> Excellent! All right, Sorin, bring us home. We'll give you the last word on this topic. >> Now, so I wanted to... I agree with Arti because what these three months of staying at home and of busy shutting down allowed us to do was to actually have a very big reset. So let's say a great reset but basically we realize that all the things we've taken from granted like our freedom of movement, our technology, our interactions with each other, and also for suddenly we realize that everything needs to change. And the only one thing that we actually kept doing is interacting with each other remotely, interacting with each other with our peers in the house, and so on and so forth. But the one thing that stayed was generating data, and data was here to stay because we actually leave traces of data everywhere we go, we leave traces of data when we put our watch on where we are actually playing with our phone, or to consume digital and so on and so forth. So what these three months reinforced for me personally, but also for some of our customers was that the data is here to stay. And even if the world shut down for three months, we did not generate less data. Data was there on the contrary, in some cases, more data. So the data is the main enabler for the new normal, which is going to pick up and the data will actually allow us to understand how to increase customer experience in the new normal, most likely using AI. As I was saying at the beginning, how do I actually operate new business model? How do I find, who do I partner with? How do I actually go to market together? How do I make collaborations more secure, and so on and so forth. And finally, where do I actually find new value pools? For example, how do I actually still enjoy for having a beer in a pub, right? Because suddenly during the COVID-19, that wasn't possible. I have a very nice place around the corner, but it's actually cheaply stuff. I'm not talking about beer but in general, I mean, so the finance is different the pools of data, the pools (mumbles) actually, getting values are different as well. So data is here to stay, and the AI definitely is going to be accelerated because it needs to use data to allow us to adopt the new normal in the digital transformation. >> A lot of unknowns but certainly machines and data are going to play a big role in the coming decade. I want to thank Dr. Arti Garg and Dr. Sorin Cheran for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and the HPE 2020 Virtual Experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, we're from HPE Discover Virtual Experience conference, HPE Discover, physical event, a gathering that happens every year. This year we're doing it virtually with HPE as everyone is kind of sheltering in place. And of course, we've got the best guests, the executives from HPE, their customers, practitioners, developers, we're talking to them all. I'm John for the host with theCUBE. We're here with John Schultz, the Chief Legal and Administrative Officer for HPE. Thank you for joining me today. Great to have you. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> So you're in a unique position, I see you oversee the legal and administrative office of HPE. You've been there from when it was one big company and then two. >> Yep. >> You've seen some transformations over the years, (laughs) and you've seen in many different use cases right now, we're living in one that's pretty significantly historic, a lot of unrest of recent, but the pandemic itself is upon us. And the reality of what's happening cannot be ignored anymore. The disruption that's happened, no one forecasted this. They forecasted hurricanes and tsunamis, but not, pandemics. So these outages, is it issues? Now they have to come out of this. Your customers have to come out of this with a restructuring, a reinvention and a growth strategy. This is truly a forced transformation. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, clearly unprecedented times, but at the same time, I think our perspective is that this is only accelerating the underlying trends that were already in the market. It starts with the fact that more and more people were working from home, and more and more data is going to live on the edge. And therefore, you need systems that can essentially handle that data and make that data into actual insights to fuel your business. And so clearly that trend we think is only accelerating. We also think the trend is accelerating with respect to the fact that people want to get out of the business of buying and operating IT infrastructure in a traditional sense. They want to move to the consumption of IT as a service. They want to focus less on operations and again, more on taking the data and driving those insights for their business. So all of these trends that have been out there for the last 12, 24, 36 months, I think are just accelerating. And this confluence of events is, therefore, making what we're doing at HPE and the transformation that we're leading all the more critical. >> So I want to get your thoughts, and I want to unpack the impact of how your role at HPE kind of reflects into the real marketplace with your customers. And I bring that up because we're have been covering the DevOps movement for over a decade, and it's been always on the fringe and with the cloud native and all the app development has been great, but network operations, IT operations, security operations, these are operational functions that don't have the cavalier fast and loose kind of approach. And legal usually is involved. Administration involve policies, and some say blockers, but it's not anymore. You're the Chief Legal and Administrative of HPE. Talk about what your role is and how that role relates to these transformational decisions that have to go faster, not slower. >> Well, the biggest part of my role right now, that's touching on this is leading the transformation office that Antonio set up. And that is really focused on leading our transformation to being the Edge to Cloud as a platform company. And so I'm spending a tremendous amount of my time on that transformation. But in addition, IT has moved into my organization, and I have a number of other administrative organizations. And so I see what is needed in terms of simplifying operations, whether it's ITOps or other parts of the organization and how we need to use data and insights. So combining my role now as head of the transformation office and moving this pivot to as a service focused on our own IT transformation, and then looking at how it impacts all the other pieces of our operations has been incredibly valuable. We just launched our data office, the first-ever data office inside HPE which is also part of my organization, all intended to tie these pieces together because as companies continue to grow, develop, and in fact, try to become more agile and act with a greater sense of urgency. It really is that combination of transforming your own IT, understanding what those new services are that are out there that will allow you to do that. And then putting data at the center of everything you do in terms of driving those actionable insights. And so that's where I've been focused, and I expect to spend a lot more of my time over the next year or two. >> I can only imagine, love that mission. Also, just for the folks watching you guys did indicate that. And as Antonio said publicly that everything will be sold as a service by HPE by 2022. Certainly, we'll be tracking that and want to ask more about that later. But you mentioned data, and this is where I think you're starting to see the biggest impact. Data and data silos as the real blocker for the new operating model. And sometimes there's compliance involved, certainly outside the United States it's regulations, privacy, all kinds of checkboxes is on the apps. So if you're an app developer, nevermind a business leader, you're dealing with the role of data, and more data makes machine learning smarter. So we know that. So this is a challenge. Can you share your thoughts on that? Because you want to have a bottoms up organic growth of data availability, but yet manage some of the top-down policies that might be needed in place from a protection whether its privacy or whatever. So it's really balancing that innovation formula of data everywhere, certainly at the edge for processing. This is now changing everything. This is a big deal. Could you share your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I think there's certainly some challenges around privacy. Although we're seeing efforts made in a lot of different forums to realize or take into recognition what's actually happening in terms of the needs of companies and so forth. Honestly, in the position I'm in, I don't see regulation as being the primary stumbling block at the moment. The primary stumbling block inside companies like HPE is that siloed aspect with which we keep data. And ultimately we have to recognize that data isn't just sort of an asset. It is, in fact, ultimately the key to unlocking the greatest insight inside the company. And it has to be in movement. We need an active data, not just a data lake that everyone else can sort of access, but we need data flows that allow us to drive that cross-silo collaboration, and most importantly, to fuel AI and ML. That's certainly what we're focused on. That's why we launched our data office. And obviously, it ties in incredibly well to the transformation office and then what we're trying to do with our own IT. >> So the role of work is critical right now. The word work now has multiple meanings workforce, people, workplace, offices, now home. Workflows and workloads cloud and supply chain or any kind of value chain. These things are upside down. It's where all the energy is being spent. And so you said earlier, take away that the burden and make it easier for businesses to focus on this. Could you share your observation of things that executives and business leaders or practitioners should pay attention to as they start to reimagine work? 'Cause it's not just the "future of work" and collaboration. That's one thing, but what I just laid out is across the board end to end challenge. What's your observation? >> Well, certainly, you can think about it across the three traditional directions of people, process, and technology. And as you mentioned, look, the people element, especially by virtue of what's happened with COVID-19, is completely changed. And at HPE, we were focused on the workplace experience and in particular thinking about our sites and the like, and we were very quickly transformed into recognizing that the workplace experience now isn't just going to be in the office and candidly may not just be in the home, but it's a more fluid and dynamic workplace experience and how you enable that, create the right amount of productivity, but also the right amount of collaboration and camaraderie, it is critically important. On the process side, the opportunity with ML and AIOps, the ability to use data, and drive those actionable insights is really changing the game around processes. And folks have to rethink their end to end processes. Many of which are manual or people who operate through intuition versus data-driven and actual insight-driven sort of basis. So we're very focused on that piece as well. And I don't think everyone else is seeing the same thing on the technology side, which is as I said, people want to get out of spending time and investing dollars in operations. They now expect that to be happening for them. And what they want is someone who's delivering them an outcome or a solution that they can then drive through their business. And so whether it's the work that Kumar's doing with the element, whether it's the work that we're doing with respect to ours, as a service solution that we're going to be introducing here at Virtual Discover, their workplace, excuse me, their workflow focused right their workload-optimized, and it's less around selling a particular piece of infrastructure. It's now selling a solution that's intended to solve a real customer problem. That's what everyone wants to hear us talk about. And that's obviously where we're putting our focus. >> And that's where everyone's energy is on. And also, there's also the reinvention piece that I'd love to get your personal perspective on this job because of your background, your experience, and your current position. This kind of conversation I was just having with a CEO of a big company we've been talking we were like, "Well the new stuff is either the old stuff "at the same as the old stuff." Or, "It's either a little bit better than the old way," or, "It does something completely different and better "than the old way." And so people are trying to figure out as they bring in this world and these new apps are going to be refactored and modernized that it can't just be the same thing in a new box or a new solution. >> Absolutely. >> It has to be either significantly better, lower-cost, or completely different and completely better. And so, as we are embarking on a first time challenge globally around virtual first or remote first, whatever want to call it, I call it virtual first. You're dealing with policies, legal precedents that aren't their formulation of things have to be taken into account. All of this legacy business model value is going to be reshifted. And that's going to be an opportunity, for someone to build software for HR, for HR virtual, that environment. So all new things will be built around virtual first. As someone has an expert in that area, how do you think about that? What advice would you give folks out there? Whether it's a business or a developer who's going to make, might build the best HR app for virtual companies that no one's ever done before. It's not workday for virtual to users virtual first it's coming. >> No, I agree. Look, I think one of the things that we often see in the technology world is people build technology out. They have a mindset around the technology. They think about what that technology can do, and then they take it to market in a way that's really kind of technology first. And look, having been in a technology company for the last dozen years, I certainly understand the power of technology and the fuel that it provides. But I think what's changing, and I think it happened really when you think about sort of the mobile phone and then the apps and services that came with it is really that customer-first focus and that driving what happens on the technology side, whether it's a virtual HR delivery, or whether it's something happening in the legal space or supply chain or anywhere else. And that's really where we have changed our focus. It's not about being customer friendly, it's about being customer experience-oriented. And that really starts to drill in on what are the solutions, excuse me, what are the problems our customers are trying to solve? How are we going to solve them, and how are we going to do that better than everyone else. And that is a full shift in terms of how we develop our technology, how we go to market with our technology. And it really requires you to have a broader understanding of what your customers are really trying to achieve. Whether that's through an application, whether that's through the infrastructure services it's across the board. It sounds very simple, and on one level it is. But in terms of trying to change an entire organization to become customer experience led is more difficult and more challenging. And like I said, I think many companies are trying to do the same thing right now. And they realize that is a challenge. >> The good news is you have technology scale that's helping get a tailwind on the technology scale side, data, planes, or, however, that's going to evolve is rapidly changing as well. That's an opportunity. And the environment's forcing everyone to have new ways of doing things. So I think if you're going to make a change it a good time now. >> We also have... The thing about HPE is, we have some tremendously deep and rich customer relationships. And there's no substitute for that. And the second thing is, we have a phenomenal partner ecosystem. And our partners are been a key to the success of HPE for a long time. It's not just the ability to service customers, but it's the insight we get about customers do our partner network. And so I think we've got some real advantages there, in terms of driving the right kind of customer experience. It's that deep relationships that we already have, whether it's through Pointnext, which has an unbelievable net promoter score because of the quality of what they do and the deepness of that relationship. And again, the phenomenal partner ecosystem that we have, which just fuels the customer focus of our organization. >> I came up with point out, but also you can also offering HPE has financial services as well. That's now front and center. That's now not just a bolt-on option, it's fundamental now, could you just comment quickly on important to that. >> Oh, it's such a differentiator. It's such a differentiator for us. Clearly, it fuels our as a service and our consumption offerings. But when you get into life cycle management and especially sort of the upcycling capacity of HPFS with two of the world's largest up-cycling facilities, one in Scotland, one here in the US, we're able to provide a set of services to customers that really are unique. And what's great about it is, it's changing the game around sustainability and the circular economy. Most of the equipment we take back and run through our up-cycling service centers, either get refurbished and put back into use or get recycled. I mean, that is what people want to talk about today. Not just, "Hey, what's the newest thing in your technology?" But are you being responsible from a climate perspective? And we can say, absolutely, we are a leader in that space and HPFS is a huge part of that solution. So it continues to be a differentiator for us. And we see the opportunities on the HPFS side only growing. >> And not just for the large enterprise, either for the SMEs, for instance, that are dealing with COVID, they have to make their dollars work for the return on investment, and with the consumption model, which is proven in the cloud model, you get the value faster, you don't want to take on that front end costs, you guys, and that's not just an option, that's part of the value that people need right now. >> It's absolutely part of the value. And it comes up in big ways with respect to a greenlight deal or the light, but it comes up in other ways. We've had companies reach out who needed laptops to service their work from home workers. And HPFS has a inventory of refurbished PCs that they were able to deploy in a very short period of time to a customer. You can imagine the goodwill with that in genders in a situation like this with crisis is tremendous. So we do have a tremendous asset in HPFS. It's not just about financing. It's about the entire array of services that they provide that really sort of sync well with the rest of our business. And I think, again, gives us the ability to deliver a customer experience that is unlike any other company in the market. >> And I'm going to say now go out on a limb and say this, but I think business value right now, post-COVID is a social impact initiative. Business is needed now more than ever to get back to work. It's not just impact investing for societal benefits, although it's a lot to do there, the business issue is impact. So I think that's a very good for you guys to do that, I appreciate that. Okay, closing it out, John, we'll get your final question. I've been asking everyone to finish this sentence. HPE is competitive advantage to our clients is, blank. How would you answer that question? >> I think it's our ability to provide a genuine cloud experience, On-Premise, at the Edge, and a Colo. We really sort of pioneered, I think the concept of Hybrid Cloud. Now, if you want to talk about it in the context of distributed cloud or multi-cloud, I think we're the leader, there, the thought leader there, but we're also aiming to be the execution leader there in delivering those solutions that will drive the next wave of innovation inside HPE and continue to establish us on as the Edge to cloud platform as a service company. I'm so super excited about it, and thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. >> Well, thank you for spending your valuable time. And congratulations on the transformation initiative that you're heading up. And I agree with all the things you said I would add the data piece is going to be a super valuable component. I think you're right on the money on that point. Thanks for your time. John Schultz, Chief Legal and Administrative Officer at HPE, joining me here inside theCUBE Studios, Palo Alto. I'm John, for your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Mountain View, California It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2019, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage, day one at CISCO DEVNET CREATE 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, we are at The Computer History Museum at Mountain View. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Ash Seddeek, strategic business consultant and story telling coach. >> Yes. >> This is an interesting combination, story telling coach with a bunch of developers. So first of all, talk to us about what it is that you, who do you help learn how to tell stories and then what your work is with Cisco. >> Fantastic. So, primarily at Cisco, I work with a lot of leaders in a coaching environment where we are looking at what they are trying to achieve with the organization and how they can articulate that message in an energetic and inspiring way. And we find stories are the best way to engage the audience. I'm working with one leader, he keeps telling me, the last talk he gave, the one thing people remember is the story. So, everyone is sort of realizing that if I want to tell them something about how we're transitioning from one technology platform to another, if I can find a metaphor, an analogy, a story, I have much better luck connecting with them and giving them something that they can remember. >> Is this like a personal story that they need to share and kind of open up some some vulnerability? Or just some other metaphor that everybody would understand? >> Yes, we actually sometimes use one or the other. Like in one case, we're using the car racing metaphor to talk about how teams come together to create amazing results. So then in that case, it's not about just the driver of that car or the team at the pit changing the tires and how fast they do that, but how they collectively then, have that success at the end of the race. Or, maybe to your point, maybe it's a personal story that then shows them, hey, I went through a lot of challenges and I know as engineers, you're going through a lot of challenges, and I can see us getting past it. So we also try to tap into what they've been able to achieve in the past. So then he can actually call on their memory, we've been able to produce these products for Cisco. Now, the customer expectations are changing and we need to get them to the market sooner, therefore, we need to figure ways where we can build some high preforming teams and get these products to the market much sooner. >> You know Ash, since hearing about your story telling here on theCUBE, as we do a lot of story telling, is that in the tech world, designed thinking has been a big part of the discipline around building products. >> Yes. >> How has some of the things that you're bringing to this kind of design story telling, >> Yes. >> Kind of ethos and thinking, >> Yes. >> Into the story telling creation process, not just, like hey I created this thing, now let's go bolt a story onto it. Is there an integration point inside the construction of the creative process, >> Yes. >> That might feed that. Can you take us through your state of the art thinking around this? >> Absolutely. It's actually, it was very comforting to find that the very first step in designed thinking is empathize, which essentially means, you have a particular target audience that you're trying to serve with a particular solution. We actually use the word hero to think about that audience and then we basically say, if she's a mom walking into the hospital lobby with her baby, what is the experience for that mother? Can we really empathize? Can we find out what the story is? What's been happening at home? The way she's going into the hospital, now she's driving into the lobby, how is she being received in that lobby, in the service level. And then we basically describe the story again of where things are today, which we can call experience number one. And then we basically talk to them about how can we envision a beautiful, delightful, experience for that mom? That becomes experience number two, and we use these stories between one and two to really energize us, to really help people understand we need to come up with a much better solution. >> I want to get your thoughts on Steve Jobs always said story telling was critical. It was his mantra before he passed away. I had a chance to interview John Chambers at his house recently. >> Yes. >> He's got a new book coming out and he's always been about trends and being on the right wave, so between the two, you had one product leader with Steve Jobs, you have a trend seer with John Chambers. How much of the DNA of the person you are coaching, that their natural talent shapes how you engage with how they could be a better story teller? >> Yeah, what I'm finding a lot, especially also with technical leaders, a lot of the time they are very sort of reserved. They sort of walk in the building a all of a sudden have this sort of character where I am not as, you know, charging ahead as I should be and a lot of the time I basically say, hey, can we get this voice to have a little bit of character? Can we get some vocal variety in here? Can we actually tell a story? Can you actually get up, stand up, and open up and really you know, tell us something about who you are and why you want to do this project to lead this team forward. So to your point, I really help them find out that they're actually like any other average citizen, they have so much energy and power within them, they just come into the corporate office and think, oh, I need to have a corporate character, then I come back and say, you know what, I actually need you, I need John to be here, in person, with all the stories that you can tell. And I tell them, go back into your old child and let's figure out some of those stories so that when you're talking about those stories, you remember the excitement, you remember the people that were there. And then all of a sudden, there's a bit of life in them, you know, so that's sort of, what I help them discover is that actually they have these stories. And they are engaging, they are inspiring, if they actually let them come out. >> I imagine that's got to be easier with some guys and girls than others. Some of those who really, maybe don't like public speaking or having to explain something that can be quite (inaudible) to certain audiences. >> Yes. >> What are some of the things that you've learned about working with some of these technologists that have helped kind of refine your methodology for cracking that surface and unleashing this energy and this sort of, natural passion. >> Yes. >> That's hidden inside. >> Absolutely and you know what's happening here at Cisco, especially at Cisco, where you see technology being used to do a lot of communication, a lot of them are realizing, if I don't articulate my message, I'm not going to get the funding. I'm not going to get the best resources. So they realize that communication became part of how do I influence up and make sure that my stakeholders understand that we have a critical project, so there is part of it where they know that there is a lot on the line if they don't speak up. And then they come to someone like me and say, Ash, how can we do this? So we then talk through what are you trying to accomplish with this team? What's that vision and how can we build it, a case for change and that becomes the thing that energizes them first and then we energize their teams and we think about, how do you take this message to executives that can give you the funding that you're looking for. >> So you talked about, before we went live, this program at Cisco, this sort of shark tank-like program, >> Yes. >> Where you're working with very technical men and women. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Who might have a brilliant idea, but in terms of articulating that to be able to get, like you said for, get funding or sponsorship for programs, Can you give us, maybe, one of your favorite examples of a, when you started with experience one or phase one, where it took you about a half an hour to figure out, that's the goal. To getting to the ah, there's the story. >> Yes, that's a good question. >> Tell us something that really sticks with you. >> YGreat question, so the program is called Hack It IT and it's an incubator program, as I mentioned. And one example, a team in China actually, was working on the idea of how do we reduce the number of customers that could be thinking about walking away from Cisco? So the technical term for that is customer churn. So I got on the phone with them, and of course, there are some challenges when it comes to speaking English by a lot of our Chinese colleagues. But then I listened in and I paid attention and then I started asking them, what got you interested in this idea? But we started to really kind of break down the fact that they have figured out that there is a way to listen into the data within Cisco and figure out that once they actually identify certain signals, they can help the sales teams realize they need to go talk to John, because John, if he doesn't have someone talking to him very soon, he or she might actually shift and go to another company, and then I said, well, what percentage do you think that churn is right now? And we found out that maybe like about 7% and with the technology they are building, we could bring it down to three 3%. I was like ding, ding, ding, ding! Earnings per share, number of customers, dollars per quarter, it was just an amazing opportunity and once they came out and communicated clearly, it was the winning idea at the end of the day. >> So you're helping take these technical folks, start to understand the business impact, >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And communicate-- >> And how big it is. >> Right. >> And how big it is. >> That can be pretty transformative for I think anybody in any field, right? >> And I remember on the call, I said, guys did we take a look at the industry averages on the churn? You know, what's the situation at Juniper? What's the situation at HPE? How does Cisco compare? How can we make sure that Cisco is much better off? Phenomenal opportunity for Cisco to listen in and catch things before they happen. >> What would be your advice to folks watching around? How to be a better story teller? Because you can really reel people in, get their attention and then deliver the pay load, whether it's venture funding, >> Yes. >> Or getting a project funded inside a corporation. There's always people interested in how they could be better story tellers, what's your playbook? >> Absolutely. So, the reason I talk about what I do is, I help people become chief excitement officers, which means we need to find the excitement, once we find the excitement, it's like finding gold in a very, very tough mountain and once we find the gold, then we can extract it out and then we can showcase it, right? So I think a lot of the time we're having difficulty finding out where the gold is. And that's one of the things that I help them with, but if they sit with their teams and really brainstorm what opportunities do we have? What are the sizes? How can we get some of these ideas out? Then all of a sudden that idea, that gold starts to show up and they are much more equipped to talk about it. And I have on the executivegreatness.com/storytelling, there is a nice cheat sheet that people can download and use to start really crafting these stories by first using a template in the beginning and then once they do it once, twice, three times it gets easier and better and if they can build a culture around story telling, it makes life so much easier. >> So you've got the, I think you mentioned it, but I want to make sure our viewers heard it. The executive greatness institute is something that you've created. >> Yes. >> And that people could go to that and find that template that you were just mentioning. >> Exactly, so executivegreatness.com/storytelling and they can download that template, it should be a very easy fill-in process in the beginning and it's a fantastic experience to really get that visual story. >> Find that gold, make some fine jewelry make some bars. >> Yes. Its amazing, there's so much potential because-- >> So this must be for anybody, and sorry to interrupt, in any industry. >> Absolutely yes. >> Anybody who can learn to find a way to connect with whomever, whatever, but it sounds like a lot of, kind of, horizontal benefits for anybody. >> Absolutely. >> And any level of their career. >> Totally because what we're finding is the clarity of the message once people get it, then you can actually ask them to do things for you or with you, but until then, there's a huge divide. People sit in these, in all hands meetings, the executive speaks, he or she speaks, they're not really catching on, you know, it's not so clear. >> It's about connecting. >> It's about connecting and clarity is the passage and story becomes the fantastic bridge. >> Yeah. >> To really do that connection. >> And really making it about being part of the same story, >> Yes, exactly. >> That connection creates more retention, success, one proposal versus the other. >> Exactly. >> Could be a swing, the swing could be the story. >> Yes, exactly, 'cause what, when we're working with these teams, we found out that if they can't communicate it, we could be losing out on a multi billion dollar idea. >> You know one thing I want to hear your thoughts on while your here because, >> Sure. >> It's as if I feel like I'm in a counseling session 'cause all we have to try to do is figure out how to tell our story better and our customers who come on theCUBE, they have social media channels, they have more channels. >> Yes. >> The story is broken down into little highlights and small video clips, so companies are challenged, not just individuals, to have a brand. >> Exactly. >> In social media. >> Absolutely. >> How do you take the gold, that excitement, and break it up, >> Yes, into a branding story-- >> Share the story in all channels possible. >> Absolutely. >> Do you have any opinion on that, or? >> It's a lot of tough work, but to your point, we need to find what that brand story is and make sure that everybody's actually clear on it 'cause a lot of times to your point, when you bring them together, each one has a different story. >> Absolutely. >> You know, so I think part of it is to really come together and say, let's get the story, let's honor it, by then, spreading it across the organization, >> And in a consistent way. >> And then we use it on the website, we use it in our marketing and our sales conversations. And if you started with that story with customers, you have something that's a whole lot more engaging, >> Get that story out there in a digital footprint. >> Exactly, yeah, exactly. >> Awesome. >> And I wonder if even what you're talking about in terms of you're right, it's about connection, is even more important as the world gets more and more and more connective with devices, and we get so focused on talking to a device, we've got to kind of come back to your sort of, bringing people back to the basic communication. >> With the human connection, so yeah. >> Exactly, which is, thankfully still needed and to your point, I think, what you were able to show your customers is a tremendous business impact, >> Yes. >> That this connection, this basic human connection in story telling can make. >> Absolutely. And the fact that you are really talking about human beings at the end, those experiences at the very end are touching somebody and we need to get excited, we basically, one of the executives from GE basically said, we need people who can go to the future and then get so excited and then come back, kind of keep that excitement on their face and walk around the organization, keep telling them, you know, when we get to Yosemite, you're going to see these waterfalls, the fresh air is amazing, I've been there, I saw it. I can't wait to get you guys there. And that's what they do on a daily basis, they're just walking around with that bug inside of them, they can see what it's like, and they can't wait to get everybody there. >> This is also somebody that can really breed and foster cultural transformation within a GE, an organization that has been around and has so many moving parts. >> Yes. >> Cultural transformation is essential for any company to transform digitally and that's a hard thing to do. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But it sounds like if, you know, you can, I like-- >> It's a big part of it. >> I like chief excitement officer, I think my dog is my chief excitement officer. But being able to maintain that and sustain it from a cultural transformation perspective is huge. >> Absolutely, 'cause all the digital transformation efforts are about that vision of the future, whether it's healthcare, to your point, or automotive industry or any other industry. It's about what kind of experience, much better experience are we going to create? >> Ash, great talking with you, exciting topic. >> Yes. >> Thank you for giving some time to John and me today at DevNet. >> Absolutely, thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. >> Thank, John, thank you so much. For John Furrier, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at Cisco DevNet Create 2019. Thanks for watching. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everyone. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, this is Day Two of of HPE Discover 2017. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week Peter Burris. Ana Pinczuk is here, she's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Group. >> That's right, that's right. >> Welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Many time Cube alum. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pre-HPE and second time since, when did you start, in February? >> Yes, I know it's been nine months, I'm a veteran. >> You're a vet, right. (laughs) How's the gig going, you hitting your groove swing? >> Yes. >> Dave: Looked great up on stage yesterday. >> Thank you so much, yeah I appreciate it. Yeah I think we are, I came on board in February and it's been a run ever since. We launched a brand in February, so that's when I think when we sort of talked last. And then since then, we've just launched another brand which is HPE GreenLake for flexible consumption model stuff. And we've been doing a lot of great things, we've been doing partnerships with folks, I've been going out to each one of the regions talking to different customers, it's been going really well. >> Well so Pointnext has become a linchpin of HPE strategy. After the spin-merges, things became more clear when you talk about making hybrid IT simple, getting to the intelligent edge, services is now front and center. Meg talks about it, Antonio talks about it. >> That's right. >> Why is services so important and how do you see that scaling in the organization? >> So first of all, I definitely believe the world is turning to be a services-led world and I tell folks that it's really two things, it's services-led and then advisory-led, really advisory. And particularly because our customers want to really undergo these new digital journeys. I was just on stage talking to one of our customers, the Tottenham Hotspurs, and they're redoing their whole stadium and they're trying to increase the interaction and the engagement that they have with fans. So that's where services come in, and so we're really services-led that way and the second thing that's a phenomenon is really the cloud has really helped us learn to want everything instantaneously and to want things when we need them and when we think we need them. And so a lot of services is really about enabling those experiences in a consumption model. So that's the transformation I think that HPE is going through right now, just being a product company, but really moving to being services-led to deliver these digital experiences. >> Well one of the things that we've observed over the years, as folks who work with customers in thinking about their technology, is that there's a co-mingling, a bringing together of the idea of invention. And one of the things that's most attractive to me about a services-led, or acknowledging the role of services, is it really, innovation, is a two-part process. There's an invention, which is the engineering element, and enters the innovation, which is the social, the change. And one of the beauties of taking a services as opposed to a product approach, is that you end up focusing on the social change. >> That's right. >> You end up focusing on what does it mean to use this, apply it, make it happen, and it accelerates the innovation process. I'm wondering if by having a more services-approach, HP's able to look at this significant new range of problems you're going to try to address, but address them as a social innovation challenge as opposed to just getting product into market. >> Yeah, no and that's absolutely right. I'll give you another cool example, we have a customer Yoox Net-A-Porter, and they're a digital sort of online experience provider. They support brands like all of the expensive luxury brands that we know and love. And they're trying to help stores innovate, so let's say you're Prada or Marni or Louis Vuitton, they're helping provide a social experience to their luxury brand consumer. And being able to do that, not just mirroring what you would get in a store, but really innovating in how do you engage with that kind of a consumer online. And so for example, they allow you to shop online but then they'll bring the product to you, it'll be all wrapped really nice, they wait for you to try it on to make sure it's okay. So that's an example of social innovation, not just thinking about how to provide product to enable a website, but how do you actually then help a customer innovate in that whole engagement model? >> It's innovation that is made possible by a whole lot of technology combined with simple ways of introduce change, not just to consumers, but also the people who are ultimately responsible for providing that service. >> Ana: That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. >> Peter: Is that one of the basis then for thinking about Pointnext? >> It is, yeah, it is because people ask me, you know we've always done services and a lot of our services were product-attached services, you do support services, operational services, data center care, those sorts of things. And then we decided to sort of launch Pointnext, and the idea is that this is more than just what we've traditionally done as product-attached. This is really coming at it from a completely different angle, which is recognizing that there is an element of social and management of change that comes through digital. And that's why we talk about advisory-led. Part of that advisory-led is really helping companies figure out what is that new phenomenon, how do I actually shift the experience that I want to enable and how do I bring social innovation with a set of partners, too, because experiences really require us to work not just with our own products, but with software providers, with inside and others. >> Peter: And your customer's partners too. >> And our customer's partners as well, I mean who the customer is is shifting as we put this together. I'll give you an example, when we work with automotive companies, we've gotta think not just about, let's say, the car company and their connected car, but we also have to think about how the consumer of the car is going to interact with the IT environment in the car. >> How the dealers are going to sell it, >> Ana: And how the dealers are gonna sell it. >> how they're gonna make money, the whole thing. >> How they're gonna do predictive maintenance on it >> Exactly. >> So you start to think not just about one experience, but all the elements that come from that single experience. >> Well we just had Deloitte on talking about retail experiences and transforming brick and mortar stores, so that's a key part of it. So partnerships is also something critical, 'cause you can't do everything. >> Ana: That's right. >> So I want to come back to some of the invention piece. When you were up on stage talking about flexible consumption models, you know, cloud, when we went into the downturn it was kinda a tap on the shoulder. Coming out of the downturn it became a kick in the butt to a lot of tradtional IT players. So you've had to respond to that. And you have, flexible consumption models, pay-as-you-go models. So I started to make a list because we've been talking all week about two ends of the spectrum. We've got here at HPE Discover, AWS re:Invent's going on this week, completely different philosophies about what customers want and how to serve those customers. And so you've got to a great degree mimic the cloud experience. And you can't do it 100%. At the same time, the cloud can't mimic what you guys can do. So I kinda wanted to go through a list and think about where have you closed those gaps, where do you still have advantages for customers. So things like pay-as-you-go, flexible capacity, you've done a lot of work there. Can you give us the update on that and how big is that gap when you talk to customers? >> So first of all, it's interesting because when some of our competitors talk about pay-as-you-go, they start by talking about just a leasing arrangement. They say "Okay, it's a lease." And this is far beyond a lease. I think I can eliminate quite a few of our competitors, (laughs) not cloud competitors, just by saying we've gone beyond that, right. And we provide a full service. So it's the hardware, the software, the data center care, the operational management. And then we turn that service into a pay-as-you-go model. So that's the first sort of innovation and differentiation. And we do that on-prem or in a hosted environment, that's the first thing. The second thing is that part of what we do is we help to manage that environment for the customer. So in a flexible capacity model, we over-provision in a sense and we have a buffer and we understand where the customer's going, how much their utilization is, and then we automatically sort of manage that whole thing for them, up or down depending on what happens. I think the third thing, which is part of the innovation, which is a little different, is we also do the integration of other technologies into the offer. So yesterday I was talking about private backup as a service. There we've got the hardware, the software, it could be Commvault let's say backup software, all the management associated with that, including the support that you need for that, offered in an outcome-based service. So what we're doing there is we're also innovating in the metering, what we're saying is we're going to really provide you an outcome, and that outcome is a successful backup. So you don't actually have to worry about the equipment, you don't have to worry about is it infrastructure-as-a-service? You know, AWS, whatever, we're actually providing a full solution in an outcome-based. And I think that's a little bit of what differentiates us from maybe some of the solutions that are out there, from others. That said, I view this as providing the right mix to our customers, so although, yes, you can say that we're competing with the public cloud, because customers have choice, at the same time part of what we're trying to do also is bring those two together, which I think is unique for us. >> Makes more same philosophy, different approaches. >> Different approaches, and by the way, if you're customer-centric, then what you wanna do is provide customer choice and do the right thing for the customer, and to say where does it make sense to be on the public cloud, or in a private environment, and optimize for the customer benefits that you're going after. >> Well I think it's fair to say that the world has learned a lot from what AWS has done, and said "Hey, we can take that "and we can apply it to our customers' businesses "on-prem or in a hybrid environment." >> And by the way, AWS, especially with our CTP acquisition, they've been a long-term AWS partner and we're having conversations with AWS that say okay, if we're going to really focus on customers, and we're really customer-centric, then how do we work together? Not just AWS, but Microsoft and Google and others, how do we work together and look at where we can optimize our solutions to be able to do the right thing for the customer. >> So our clients are sick and tired of hearing me say this, or us say this, but we believe that where we're going is the cloud experience for your data demands. >> That's right. >> So the way we think about it and I'm wondering if you would agree, is that the first conversation we have with a customer is what's the outcome, what data is required to serve that outcome, how're you gonna package it up as a workload, and where do you naturally need to run that based on latency, other types of issues. Is that kind of how Pointnext is working with customers as well? >> Yeah absolutely right, so we wanna come in, customer in, so you wanna be able to say "What is it that you're trying to do from an outcome?" I described a backup outcome, another outcome might be I'm trying to accelerate my ability to roll out new agile solutions, or microservices-based applications. So we have that conversation with a customer, we then say okay, for that kind of workload, what are you requirements? What are you trying to do? We might also come in and actually, 'cause sometimes what people think they do and what they actually do in their environment is different. So we can come in and say okay, let me actually measure what you're doing and see what you're doing and then bring that information back to them. And then have a conversation about what to do with your workload and what makes sense. So I think it's a very close engagement with the customer, it's based on real data about what the customer's trying to do. And frankly that was one of the reasons that we made the CTP acquisition, as well, because it started to complement our portfolio. A lot of the capabilities that we had were very robust, in particular around private cloud, but just having the public cloud angle there and sort of strengthening that piece was super important to be able to have that conversation and truly enable the right mix. >> Well now that brings up the topic of multi-cloud, which kinda, to use a sports analogy, it's jump ball. It's kind of a free-for-all, everybody wants that business. I guess with the exception of some of the big cloud guys aren't interested. But certainly, Hewlett-Packard >> Peter: Well don't believe it, want to avoid it. >> Yeah well, but that's the reality is there's gonna be multiple clouds, we know this. Particularly with SaaS. So a company like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously has to play in that space. So I wonder if you could talk about the strategy there, why you feel confident that HPE is in a good position. >> Yeah well a couple things, first of all I think it's really good to be, we're somewhat independent, we're not totally independent because we've got a whole set of products, but we're somewhat independent in the sense that if we wanna be truly hybrid and enable other public and private solutions, we wanna be able to give customers choice in terms of the public domains that they can work with. And so we're sort of in a great position as a large provider and with the relations that we have in the enterprise in particular, with our customer base, to be a little bit of Switzerland and be able to say, okay, let's have that conversation about the right mix and enable these multi-cloud solutions, that's the first thing. The second thing is we have relationships and great partnerships with many of these providers. So take Microsoft, we've got an Azure relationship, an Azure stack opportunity, so we've got the ability and by the way, we do many of their applications as well. So we've got the ability to help have that conversation with our customers to say okay, do you wanna be on-prem or do you wanna be in the cloud? Even with one provider, and to do that, and so we have the opportunity to provide robust solutions even with one private and public provider. And on top of that, we've got a consultancy with our professional services. We wanna be responsive to our customers, we've got now HPE OneSphere. And with HPE OneSphere we can be data-driven and actually provide our customers a view of their environment and help to be a little bit of that Switzerland to say look, here's what would be best for you and help to have workload mobility together with OneSphere. So I think we're well-positioned, I tend to call it my stairway to Heaven. In a sense we start out at the bottom talking about infrastructure and support, and we've got great relationships there with our customers. If I launch the flexible capacity offers, we're starting to deliver outcome-based solutions. When I bring in CTP, we'd go up the stack and we now provide advisory and the consumption solutions. And with OneSphere now you go up the stacks just a little bit more and say not only are we gonna advise you and provide you those executables with consumption models, but we now have capabilities that allow you to sort of optimally choose what's the right thing for you. So I think we're well-positioned, by the way, with CTP we've got sort of a managed, sort of cloud sort of capability as well. We manage compliance and other elements. So we're able to have in our portfolio sort of value-added services above and beyond that help with multi-cloud and making sure that customers can be compliant, secure, and have the right experience on a multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah I think a lot of people that don't know CTP don't understand how deep their expertise is. They're only a few hundred people, if that. But they're rockstars. >> They're over 200 people. >> Serious thought leaders with real deep connections. I've gotta change subjects to the last topic area. As you know, The Cube from day one has always been a fan of having women on, and promoting women in tech. We first met you at the Anita Borg Institute of the Grace Hopper Conference. Meg Whitman is obviously a woman leader in tech and she's leaving HP. We've got Meg and we've got Ginni. And Ginni's coming to the end, I don't know, she's getting to the age where typically IBM retires its CEOs. You've got two prominent women in tech now leaving. Now maybe IMB will replace Ginni with a woman. HPE has chosen Antonio, great choice. But your thoughts on a leader like Meg, obviously has done some great work. But we're losing one. >> I know, and so >> How do you feel about that? >> I mean, you know, I'm very conflicted if I've gotta be honest. One one hand, as I joined HPE I had never worked for a female CEO so I've really enjoyed watching. You know it's always great to have mentors and to have people that are advocating for women, so I really enjoyed being part of Meg's organization, I'm really sorry to see her go. And she's an icon as well, so she does a lot, in fact this afternoon we're gonna be doing a session for women just here at the conference. So very sad to see her go, at the same time I think we as women, and men by the way, have a responsibility to build the next generation of leaders. And I think that's where I focus my energy and I know that I'm gonna be sort of a high profile female in the HPE environment so I feel that sense of responsibility, not just within HPE, but within the industry, to help to cultivate an environment that takes advantage of half of the population and enables innovation through them as well. So I think we've gotta get more women up there. I think part of it is really bringing up the next generation and frankly this next generation, they don't have tolerance for waiting for things, whatever, and they feel like they're super entitled to have the right and the choice >> Peter: They are. >> And they are, right. But that seems like an easy thing to say, but in some sense we come from a generation, many women as well, which have had challenges especially in the tech world, in terms of really breaking that glass ceiling. And I think we've got some amazing women and some amazing leaders as well. I'm part of the Anita Borg Board of Trustees as well, and we were at Grace Hopper and we had Debbie Sterling, some really great women that are coming up the ranks that are CEOs, that are CTOs, that are really leading the way and so I'm very hopeful that the conversation, by the way, about women in tech is really prominent right now. And that I think it'll open up opportunities for women to shine going forward and I think that should happen for HPE as well. In fact right now its me and then Archie Deskus is the CIO for HPE. So we're trying to do our part to sort of make sure that there's other women in leadership as well. >> Well you're a great example of a current and future leader. >> Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate you coming onto The Cube, Ana. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, great to see you, thank you so much. >> Alright keep it right there everyone. This is The Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid, we'll be right back. 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