>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMBs customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought at home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

>> Hi everyone, my name is Michael Swan and I'm the global director of business development for HPE Financial Services, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak with you today. In this session, I will provide you with an overview of how we help our customers create investment capacity to help fuel their cloud in digital transformation initiatives. I will then share with you three customer use cases to talk about the types of solutions that we've implemented to help our customers move their businesses forward. Now, it wasn't that long ago that businesses were prioritizing their 2020 digital transformation projects. And executives were telling us that they thought 2020 was going to be a year where they were going to see a significant ramp in their spending on digital transformation projects. Businesses were already starting to plan to make investments in cloud and security and AI and machine learning to help improve their customer experience, help to advance employee productivity, and help them to get an overall better competitive edge. Then of course, we were all hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in response to the pandemic, businesses have had to think really hard about how do they enable workforce productivity when they have nearly all of their employee base working from home. They've also had to think about some of the challenges around ensuring connectivity, security, and maintaining a very high degree of customer support and customer experience. And the economic impact of COVID put a lot of pressure on companies to maintain their cash positions and preserve capital. Now Gartner's forecasted that IT spending will increase to about $3.7 trillion in 2021, which is up about a little more than 4% from last year. And investment in cloud-based IT infrastructure in particular is expected to surge to more than 27% this year. So what all this is telling us is that customers are ready to move beyond the pandemic. They're thinking about how can I take my company to the next level? Where are the investments that I need to be making to advance and grow? Now to advance and grow requires investment capacity. Investment capacity is really the lifeblood of any business, and without that, you can't invest in your digital transformation, and you can't invest in the long-term future of your business. So this is where HPE Financial Services can help. We're working with businesses to help create the investment capacity that they need to move their business ahead. And we're doing this in three ways. Firstly, we're creating financial vitality. In the last two years alone, we've injected more than $640 million back into our customers' budgets to help fuel their investments. And we provide a range of investment solutions that help our customers to increase their ability to invest and do so in a way that actually results in better financial outcomes. Secondly, we're able to manage any tech, anytime, anywhere. We are recognized by both IDC and Gartner as a global leader in asset lifecycle supporting the circular economy. And in the last two years alone, we've taken in more than eight million assets into our technology renewal centers with more than 90% of those assets being designated for reuse before recycle. And thirdly, we are your CIFO. With nearly 30 years of IT Asset economic experience in our DNA, we work with you to understand where you want to go, what you need, and to help you put an investment strategy in place to help you get there. Let's now look at some of the solutions that we are delivering to our customers. Now, many of our customers seek to defer or reduce the expense of investing in IT in order to preserve their capital, or to try to do more with their available budgets. So we offer a range of Payment Deferral programs which enable our customers to delay the upfront costs of modernizing their IT. And in response to COVID, in 2020 we introduced the Payment Relief Program which enables customers to keep those critical IT projects moving forward while deferring more than 90% of the cost into the next calendar year. We're also helping customers to create investment capacity by generating cash from assets. And we're doing this based on the value of equipment that they already own. With our Accelerated Migration offer, we're converting existing, client-owned IT into an incremental source of capital, while enabling them to continue to use that equipment for its remaining useful life. And with our Tech Buyback program, we're managing the disposition of older legacy equipment returning value back to our customers and helping them to contribute to their sustainability initiatives. Now in each of our IT investment solutions, we aim to help our customers match their payments with the use of the technology. Our Extended Deployment solution is a phased deployment program that allows our customers to acquire the critical technology that they need today upfront. But we allow them time to get the equipment stood up in place, configured and tested, up and running before they actually have to begin making any payments for that equipment. And then lastly, we help enterprises relieve capacity strain or delivery delays that might be caused by supply chain disruptions or limitations in their capital budget, ar perhaps they're just simply looking to maintain existing legacy systems that are running critical business applications. And we do this by sourcing HPE certified pre-owned equipment that can be used to help maintain existing legacy systems. Now, all of the pre-owned equipment that we make available is available with a warranty, and is also eligible for HPE support services. Now, with that, as an overview, I'd like to transition to a brief video, which highlights how we help customers create investment capacity. (bright music) HPE and HPE Financial Services are meeting customer demands across the IT life cycle, while also contributing to the circular economy. And we're doing this in three ways. First HPE designs solutions and sources components with the aim to maximize reuse before recycle, and to minimize environmental impacts. Second, HPE's GreenLake Cloud services helps customers to acquire and consume only the capacity that they need for the period of time that they need to use it, and have the flexibility to refresh technology in an environmentally friendly way. We are committed to taking back 100% of all technology that is deployed within the HPE GreenLake Services contract. And last, HPE has industry leading experience and capabilities to renew IT assets, keeping them in the circular economy longer, and thus minimizing waste. We are committed to helping each one of our customers contribute to the circular economy, and this is one of the more important reasons why customers choose to partner with HPE. So let's now look at three customer use cases to help explain how we have helped customers create the investment capacity that they needed to move their business ahead. This first example involves an agricultural company based in Turkey. Their objective was to prevent COVID from disrupting their operations. They needed to ensure that they could preserve cash while at the same time, they wanted to continue to move ahead with a critical IT modernization project. They sought creative approaches to do more with their IT budget and to keep the project moving on track. HPE Financial Services made it possible for MAY Tohum to continue modernizing their IT estate while deferring the cost of the project into the following fiscal year, by utilizing our Payment Relief program. As a result, the infrastructure transformation project went forward, they were able to preserve their cash position and most importantly, MAY was able to continue to bring its innovative seed products to market without any disruption. The next customer example involved a large bank in New Zealand. Now, it might come as a surprise to you to think about a bank seeking additional investment capacity. Well banks understand well the importance of maximizing the return on their capital, and they also need to comply with regulations requiring certain capital funding commitments. Therefore banks as a whole comprise one of our largest set of customers. Now this bank in particular sought to transform the management of IT for their business to an as-a-service model. They sought additional investment capacity, and they wanted a single approach to managing their IT infrastructure. HPE Financial Services helped the bank to generate cash from their existing assets and transition them into the new GreenLake Services contract. This solution helped ensure not only that the ongoing business operations would not be disrupted, but it also provided an additional source of capital to help fund the project, and it helped to accelerate their move to an as-a-service model. And the last example I would like to share with you involves a hospital based in Austria. Now like most healthcare facilities around the world, this hospital's operations were severely impacted by COVID in the increased demand for their services. They experienced IT system constraints that were created by increased patient workloads, and sought immediate access to additional computing power to ensure they could continue to deliver critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services sourced 14 Gen9 C7000 Blades, pre-owned equipment to match the existing systems that they already had in place. And this enabled the hospital to ensure that they could provide uninterrupted operations and critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services also works closely with partners, whether they be IT solution providers, system integrators, or channel partners to help them create investment capacity for their customers. So now I'd like to share a brief video with a few stories from some of our partners. >> We had a client who needed to roll out a more robust identity and access management solution to support their efforts of enabling their remote workforce. The project wasn't budgeted, but quickly moved to the top of the priority list. And we were able to structure a deal that allowed them to acquire the technology they needed in the timeframe required, while deferring payments over an extended period. >> I think what's really important for the HPE at Tech Data structure shift, it allows us to offer an enterprise class solution as a true partnership, addressing some of their requirements and needs of the enterprise market plus. >> Obviously the customer was very pleased, we were very happy, and it was a way for us to get much closer to that customer, become their trusted advisor, and set us up for the future where we can continue to add value to that customer with HPE. >> Now we do believe that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has a very strong and competitive offering to our customers when it comes to especially asset upcycling services, and also offering certified pre-owned products on the Nordic market. >> We leveraged HPEFS to acquire millions of dollars of hardware to stock up our data center to provide instant on-demand for a virtual desktop environment for remote users for several of our manufacturing and financial clients. (light music) >> As a recap, HPE provides the solutions and services to accelerate your business transformation. With HPE GreenLake, you can deploy any workload as-a-service and achieve cloud-like speed, agility, in the as-a-service model, wherever your apps and your data reside today, whether that be in a co-location facility, or within your own data center. With HPE Pointnext Services, you gain access to more than 15,000 experts, and an ecosystem of partners to help you at every stage of your digital transformation journey. And HPE Financial Services helps you create investment capacity to drive your digital transformation initiatives. We help you overcome financial barriers to your transformation, we help you unlock the value of your entire IT estate, and we are your business and technology partner. Maintaining flexibility and creating financial capacity are key to achieving your digital transformation objectives. I encourage you to reach out to HPE Financial Services to discuss your IT investment strategy and explore ways that we can help you achieve your desired business outcomes. Included here are a few QR codes where you can learn more or even view a virtual tour of one of our technology renewal centers. Thank you again for joining me in this session. I wish you a great rest of the day, and I hope you keep well, bye.

>> 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. With over 11,000 IT projects conducted and 1.4 million customer interactions each and every year, HPE Pointnext 15,000 experts in its vast ecosystem of solution partners and channel partners are uniquely able to help you at every stage of your digital transformation. Because we address some of the biggest areas that can slow you down. We bring together technology and expertise to help you deliver your most strategic outcomes. Flexible investment capacity is a key consideration for businesses to drive digital transformation initiatives. In order to forge a path forward, you need access to flexible payment terms that allow you to match your IT costs to usage. You need help releasing capital from existing infrastructures to deferring payments and providing pre-owned technology to relieve capacity strain. HPE Financial Services or HPE FS, unlocks the value of your entire IT estate from edge to cloud to end user with multi-vendor solutions consistently and sustainably around the world. 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.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover the Virtual Experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. And we are now excited to be able to go beyond the hype of hyper convergence. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars, even though he has a new title, Patrick Osborne is the vice president and general manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HPE HCI as we could abbreviate. Patrick, good to see you. Thanks for much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Absolutely Stu, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> All right. So, you know, HCI, obviously has had a dramatic impact on the storage industry, you know, HPE has, you know, acquisitions like SimpliVity, Nimble has a play there, you've got partnerships with some solutions including with GreenLake. Why don't you give us just kind of the update, you've been with HPE for quite a while, what really, you know, excited you about taking this job and then we'll begin on the latest in the portfolio. >> Well, I think, so what's exciting about this market is it's a growth market. HCI is certainly a great solution for a whole swath of customer segments. So we thought, you know, about these HCI solutions from everyone, from our largest enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest SMB customers, and it really fits the bill not only for what you think about a standard HCI, where you're collapsing workloads and you're collapsing infrastructure, but also I think one of the interesting things that we've been able to deliver, especially with products like the HCI is around delivering dHCI experience for three tiers of architecture. And, you know, I think that's really exciting for customers that you know, certainly are moving more towards generalists, away from specialists and, you know, you're going to get really get that HCI experience in addition to a lot of other things we bring to the table here at HPE, that you know, we've talked about before, especially around AI ops and InfoSight and the ability to do a ton of things around predictive analytics. So it's an exciting space and it serves almost our entire customer base. >> Excellent. Now your group you did some announcements, a little bit ahead of Discover, why don't you give us the latest on the news and lay out how the portfolio fits. >> Yeah, so back in May we made some significant announcements on, in the HCI portfolio. So both on HCI SimpliVity as well as our Nimble dHCI offerings. One of the things we brought to market was around VDI specifically and we launched a new platform called the SimpliVity 325 and based on some new technology with our partner AMD are able to, you know, significantly lower the cost and increase the performance for the number of remote users that were, you know, that we're able to support with the platform and also bring together a solution you know, so, you know, what you also partner with folks like Citrix and CTERA and a whole a number of folks so we can have a full vertically oriented solution stack for customers that are doing, you know, they're significantly expanding their footprint around remote workers. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to cut in half, you can say 50% savings on your, you know per remote worker for desktop. So some significant savings there, and we've seen a huge amount of uptick for that platform in the last two months, even since we announced it. And then secondly, on the dHCI side, we made a number of announcements around simplicity, adding that a platform to our GreenLake consumption model, which is really cool, and then adding a whole set of new building blocks on the compute side based on AMD technology that allows, you know, folks to apply different types of compute per workload for our dHCI solution. So we made a pretty, pretty big announcement back in May around our portfolio for HCI solutions and the customers are definitely impacted super positively for both announcements. >> Yeah, it's funny. I remember a few years back, everybody kind of rolled their eyes a little bit. It was like, Oh, you know, VDI talked about it to death. And of course with the global pandemic, now of course remote work so critically important, I've talked to a number of CIOs that have had HCI solutions and it's like, Hey, I need to dramatically increase my services, I need to be able to scale things up and if I didn't have these solutions, I wouldn't be able to react as fast as I need. You said you you've seen an uptick, any particularly anecdotes or, you know, customer stories as to how they've been able to react fast in today's climate. >> Yeah, so especially for knowledge workers that are working remote, I mean, I can tell you that, almost 98 or 99% of my staff and the folks at HPE are working remotely and they're doing a fantastic job. So, you know, when we're able to service, you know, very small customers that are just, you know, embarking on their journey for remote workers to some of the largest corporations out there that our partners and customers of HPE, we've been able to, you know, produce a, you know, a really good outcome for them in addition to, you know, working with our partners, our reseller partners, to put this is another solution building block in their bag of tricks for their customers. >> All right. The other thing, what I want to talk a bit about is, you know, HCI is a managed service, so GreenLake, I've talked to some of your team, it has about a thousand customers HCI, so you know, one of the main options that they're offering there. Why don't you bring us inside a little bit as to, you know, why customers are choosing choosing GreenLake and you know, what that means for your product set? >> So this, from a strategic perspective, HPE, we've stated this publicly is that we want to offer all of our products and solutions as a service from a consumption perspective over the next couple of years. And so, you know, one of those key things that we want to offer from a workload perspective is certainly HCI as a service, so VMs as a service and as well as, you know, higher level type of applications, like VDI as a service. And so one of the announcements that we made was including both of our portfolios, HCI and dHCI in GreenLake so you can, essentially as a customer, you can start off very small and you are paying for the solution in metered increments, and we have lots of flexibility, you can do it at the workload level, you can do it at the CPU consumption level, you can do it at storage consumption level and so that gives a lot of flexibility and that's great for our larger customers that want to move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. And, but it also really helps a lot of our small and medium sized customers who are, you know, in this environment, they are, you know, one of the top things in their mind is maintaining liquidity and so they can move that to an OPEX model and we actually have some really great offers that we announced with HPE financial services in conjunction with GreenLake on making this a very flexible, very cost effective manner to consume infrastructure and provide solutions for their customers and their end users. >> Excellent. You mentioned before a little bit about AI ops, give us a little bit as to how you see the, really the next generation of HCI taking advantage of, you know, automation intelligence and the like. >> Yes, so you know, as we've a talk on theCUBE before, one of the, I think one of the key solutions that we have and experiences that we bring to our customers in addition to the consumption level is this ability to do AI ops, global learning, predictive analytics for our workloads, for our customers, and essentially really really cut down on the costs in people that it takes to maintain these solutions and then you can, you know, essentially use the global learning and global aspect of, you know, a giant fleet in our entire install base and that gets applied to HCI. So SimpliVity HCI has been plugged into info site for over about a year now. Nimble obviously, Nimble dHCI, it's a core from the product offering and it's the best offering in the market for AI ops. And so our ability to do these things and provide predictive analytics, memory pressure, black listing, and white listing, the install base for problems, being able to reach out to customers before issues happen, noisy neighbors, VM consumption, storage consumption, all these things, you know, really cut down and provide a really awesome support automation experience for customers and essentially have a seamless experience for managing all of our systems. And when you think about HCI 2.O being able to do that, not only on a compressed infrastructure like HCI, but being able to do it on dHCI, which is desegregated hyperconverged so you can scale storage and networking and compute separately and you provide that same HCI experience from a management perspective and the AI ops around it is a game changer for, you know, some of the most, you know, business and mission critical applications that our customers are running. >> Alright. Well, one of the big themes that we're hearing across HPE Discover this year is about it's solutions. Traditionally I think of HCI really as helping collapse and simplify the data center, really that cloud operating model almost in the data center, where do these things connect? How does the edge fit in to this whole discussion? >> Yeah, so one of the beauties of HCI and specifically SimpliVity is our ability to be hyper efficient not only in the just the storage of the data. So, you know, from day one, everything is de-duped, everything is compressed and that's across both your on prem copies, as well as your DR copies, as well as your backup copies. And one of the things that we're seeing is that, sure HCI is great to collapse workloads in the data center and, but what we're seeing now is the ability to go serve as workloads that are running outside of the data center and when we talk about edge, we have some fantastic assets and a lot of customers, you know, running our edge compute solutions, our edge networking solution, specifically wireless and Aruba and what we're able to do is we're bringing those services, so compute, networking, and storage closer to the end user, but outside the data center and so there are some challenges to that like, so how do you federate the management of hundreds, if not thousands of clusters of these workloads running that could be anywhere from, you can think about a small, like a micro data center to a closet to even just, you know, small form factor that could be in a half of a rack and being able to manage those effectively but then also be able to pull the workloads and the data back. So being able to do edge, to core to cloud from a data mobility perspective. It's something that we provide and our customers are certainly deploying our solutions because of that. So a lot of stuff going on in the edge and I think one of the other things too that we see is people are running virtualized workloads, so VMs, and then also starting to incorporate containers. So microservices for, you know, industry specific things like vision and video and, you know, a whole bunch of things that happen around AI and ML at the edge. So it's very exciting place. >> Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, obviously one of the things that we're hearing a lot of interest from the community when it comes to virtualization is, you know, what is happening with that, really application modernization and containerization a big piece of that, of course, VMware with vSphere 7 are really helping to bring Kubernetes together to the virtualization environment. How do you see all of these playing together? You know, being a bare mental virtualization, containers, you know, edge, core, cloud, it's a complicated environment and, you know, the goal of HCI was always to help simplify this but we know IT is a bit messy and additive. >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, there are some basic services that customers want to run at the end of the day. They want to be able to deploy a workload on infrastructure that can be managed remotely, that could be managed at scale that provides, resiliency, it provides performance and it provides data mobility and HCI provides all of those capabilities whether it's, you know, through the HPE SimpliVity portfolio or Nimble dHCI and so you have a number of different building blocks that you can build. But on top of that is a set of data services in cloud consumption like experience that allows you to place those workloads on the infrastructure that you need and where you need it. And so if it's running at the edge, this commingling of VMs and containers, you know, we have a pretty unique platform out there, especially for things like AI and ML workloads in our HPE container platform and so you can run that for example, on something like HPE SimpliVity or dHCI, whether that's in the data center or whether you're running that on the edge and being able to service those customers, that's not an all or nothing proposition. At this point, you know, a number of our customers are running workloads that are virtualized and that are side by side to provide essentially good to customers, their customers at the end of the day. >> Excellent. Patrick, I'll give you the final word, takeaways if you want, that your customers want to have from HPE Discovery's week. >> Yeah, HPE Discover Virtual Experience has been great and you know, I think everyone participating in this, you know, we'd love to provide you as (mumble) as possible. There are a number of announcements around HCI, both our HCI platform was SimpliVity, to dHCI, we made some really great announcements recently around our primary storage and then we're going to continue at HPE Discover around some of our cloud data services. So when you think about someone who's going to provide, you know, you're going to partner with, from a costumer perspective on your most valuable workloads, whether it's workloads that exist today, or workloads that are fuel your digital transformation, HPE really is a partner that's providing, you know the infrastructure, the workloads and the cloud like experience both from a management perspective as well as from a consumption perspective that's going to service as these workloads from edge to core to cloud. So we're pretty excited about HPE discover now. >> Excellent. Thanks so much, Patrick and we'll be right back with lots more coverage from HPE Discover, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home this week of Commvault GO with Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program a regular on our program, Patrick Osborne, who's the vice president and general manager of Big Data and secondary storage at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to you see. >> Great, thanks for having me. Love to be on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, so we've had you on theCUBE in lots of places, but a first in Nashville 'cause it's the first time we've been here. Keith's second time at the show, my first. What's your impression so far? >> Yeah, so this is our first major presence here at Commvault GO. I think it's going pretty well so far, certainly a great venue. We actually, we do a couple things here for our own presales folks. So first impressions, love the fact that we have a whole conference dedicated to secondary storage, certainly getting a lot of importance lately within customer conversations as well overall investment in the industry, so I'm pretty impressed, pretty lively crowd here. >> Yeah, I really liked, we started off the morning talking to Chris Powell, the CMO of Commvault, talking about how Commvault is a 20-year-old company, and therefore there were certain things that a 20-year-old company has. If you think about their pricing, you think about how people's perception of them are, you work at a company with plenty of history. HPE can partner with whomever they'd like to. >> Yep. >> Stu: Why's it important for HPE to partner with Commvault? >> Yeah, 20 years for Commvault, 78 for HPE, right, so we got a lot of chops there. For us, secondary storage is certainly becoming very important for customers, and it's being driven by new user stories, new capabilities centered around data. So what we look for is, as a technology company, we want to provide an entire solution, vertically oriented, that not only includes our compute networking, storage, secondary storage, cloud, but as well as a very vibrant ecosystem. So we've been working, certainly, with our customers and in the partner ecosystem with Commvault for a number of years, and now we've formalized that and codified it with a couple technology announcements, certainly on the go-to market side, and then some offerings we've done as a service, so backup as a service. >> So let's talk about some of these technology announcements. Talk to us about the significance of the store wants, Commvault integration. Got a great deduplication appliance the store wants, now you're bringing Commvault to the scene, to the solution. What advantage does that bring the customer, first off? >> Yeah, so we have a couple specific integrations we've done. We have our primary all-flash arrays, Nimble and 3PAR, certainly within the Intellus Map umbrella. We've worked with them in the past. We've worked with Commvault recently to deliver some support for our deduplication algorithms. We have our, what we call catalysts. It's the ability to dedupe anywhere, right, within the data center and even outside the data center. So they support that. It really helps out with, certainly, high-speed performance for backup so you can meet those aggressive SLAs. We feel like we've got pretty differentiated technology on the dedupe side, so it helps our customers save in terms of the storage that they have on disk. And then the other big thing is that they've also integrated with Cloudbank, right, so it's our ability to store archived backup data for very, very long periods of time in either Azure or out in Amazon, and essentially using Commvault as the workflow and the catalog, and being able to plug into the ability for us to federate primary, secondary in the cloud is a pretty powerful integration for customers who might already have HPE, might already have Commvault, so it definitely brings a lot of value into that. >> Yeah, Patrick, we've seen a real maturation of that, really, the multi-cloud model in the last couple of years. It seems like that's a foundational piece of the partnership between Commvault and HP. What are you hearing from customers, and what differentiates this solution from others in the market? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think that secondary storage is one that's always rife for having a multi-cloud storage, whether it's people just wanting to do something like I don't want a secondary data center, I want to use the cloud. I want to replace tape. There's a number of different reasons why. I think the differentiation part comes in the technology that I talked about before and making that very seamless for customers and being able to move workloads out to the public cloud for the purposes of long-term data retention. The other key thing is that we're providing this to customers in completely as a service style. So not only from a technology perspective, but the way you consume it now. So we're able to provide primary, secondary, your Commvault solution, the Azure capacity, for example, advisory services, and we're all able to package that up on a per-terabyte or a per-metric basis that customers consume in an elastic manner, like you would the cloud. >> Yeah, HP was one of the first, forgive me if I say legacy, 78-year-old company, people automatically assume companies like AWS and even Azure move that way, but where have you seen customers and their readiness, both from a people standpoint as well as a procurement model for that model, and as I've said, HPE's one of the first ones, the big traditional players, that helped push that model. >> Yeah, so the desire's there. We pitched this every day, ever week, and it's got a lot of legs from a customer interest perspective. We are transacting, and we'll start to build our business and it helps us financially as well, too, right? 'Cause for us to offer those as a service, that's a reoccurring revenue, it's bookings, it's not just your traditional CAPEX hardware acquisition. So it helps us. And a little known fact is that HPE Financial Services, when you talk about an established company, we have a very, very high Net Promoter Score for HPEFS, and that's one of the capabilities that allows us to provide these really, really granular, flexible services for our customers. We've got a lot of things going at HPE. Being a more established, mature company with a very large install base. Not only technology piece, but the financial aspects of it is something we can offer as well. >> Patrick, talk to me about some of the advantages as a service, from an agility perspective. When I think of consuming HPE physical hardware on-prem through HP Financial Services, and I'm consuming this as a service, how does that enable agility for your customers? >> Well, it enables agility in the financial model, number one, so a lot of customers are asking us for as a service, subscription models, moving from CAPEX to OPEX. And not just an OPEX lease, right, 'cause that doesn't count anymore. The rules are changing. So what we're able to do is we provide an actual service. The customer hands over the architecture reins to us, so we have an established methodology of how we implement this, so no snowflakes. We can build on a wealth of experience we have with a number of other customers to be able to essentially deliver a number of outcomes. So it comes very agile in the fact that at the end of the day, secondary storage, some of the user stories are pretty mundane. They're very repeatable, right? And so if you hand that over to us, we're able to help you with that, not only financially but architecturally, and from our operations perspective, and you can focus your talent that you have in your organization on differentiation for your business, right? 'Cause backups, maybe at the end of the day that's not where you're going to hang your hat on your digital transformation as a customer, but it's certainly something you need. So we could both partner together on making that a better experience. >> Stu: All right, go ahead. >> What I was going to ask, what's the interface? How do customers consume these as a service solutions, whether it's the secondary storage or if it's a service living in the cloud? >> Mm, so we have a number of examples of these. So you take a look at a service that we have, for example HPE Cloud Volumes, right? It has a portal, you log in, you can put your credit card in, you can add, let's say, your cloud credentials into that as well, and then you are essentially off and running on dollars per terabyte, and you can scale that up, you can scale that down. So at the end of the day, we're really trying to provide an experience for customers that's very similar to the public cloud. And I think the other area that we've done, we've made some acquisitions in the space, Cloud Technology Partners, RedPixie, Cloud Cruiser, so not only on the being able to use the consumption methodology and the metering that we provide, but also the advisory services, is something that you get from HPE. You actually get to talk to people that know how to do this and have done it before and can help you arbitrate and make you very successful. >> All right, so Patrick, the last 18 to 24 months, the secondary storage space has just been buzzing, almost frothy if you will. >> Yes. >> Commvault's been around for 20 years. Five years ago, there wasn't the excitement in the space. There's the startups, there's companies like Commvault and Veritas and Veen who have established a customer base in there. Why do you see so much excitement there? Is it the new AI of availability? I've got plenty of background in the storage industry, where just data is so critically important that it's right there. What do you see? >> I see it as a massive shift in thinking from TCO to ROI, right? Five years ago, you were having conversation as how can I do this as cheaply as possible, right? It's a non-differentiation life insurance policy at the end of the day. Now it's all about what can I do to maximize the return on that data? And it could be things that are not super sexy, but test verification, sandbox labs, being able to provide copies of data for your developers to get a better experience and a better quality experience for their customers at the end of the day. There's a number of things that we've been able to unlock in the secondary storage area, and some people call it copy data management, hyperconverged for secondary storage, I mean, there's lots of different names and nomenclatures applied to it. But it's essentially, from what I see, people unlocking the value of that data where it used to be captured, siloed, untouchable, but now you've unlocked a number of possibilities for this data, and it's multi-use, right? It's the new currency. >> Yeah, we always argue, at the show, Commvault's saying that data is the new water, but Dave Alante, well water often is a scarce resource and something we all have to fight for. Data, the ability to unlock the data, is we can use it multiple times in lots of different ways, and the more I use the data, the more valuable it is, not like traditional resources. >> Yeah, and also, too, some of the big bats you've seen from HPE, certainly big investment on edge-centric computing as well, too. So our Edgeline, the build out of 5G, certainly the ubiquitous wireless networks that we provide with Aruba. So there's a huge amount of capability of either moving the process outside the data center, but that data's still data. It needs to be protected, you need to be able to use it, so I think we're just getting started in some of these areas, certainly around secondary storage. >> So, let's talk about value that DotNext brings to the mix. We're talking about some pretty advanced use cases, the edge, the data center, the cloud. Stitching this together isn't quite simple. Tell us about the DotNext story and how they helped extend the capability beyond just throwing zeros and ones. >> I think there's a lot of our folks that cover customers, account teams, sales folks that really ensure our customer success, they view this area as very rife for certainly advisory services. I think one of the things is that having the capability of doing this, you guys have seen in the past couple years, people have scaled back dedicated storage admins, right? Dedicated backup admins, unless you're in a very large shop, really don't exist. You've moved towards essentially hypervisor admins, generalist, right? So I think that our capability is we have those services, we have that expertise in-house, and for us to be able to provide very good reference architectures that touch all parts of the stack, because secondary storage is, it's not just selling an all-flash array, or some capacity-optimized disk. It touches everything. It's questions around what's your SLA, what are the apps, what are you trying to do? So for us, we have a wealth of resources and knowledge in this space, and bringing in companies like Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie into our services organization, that gives us the ability to help customers make that move to hybrid cloud as well, too, which is very important. >> Yeah, Patrick, the other message we're hearing loud and clear from Commvault is the roadmap. There's a lot of automation. There's the intelligence. You talk about all those admins. It was funny, they put up all these roles up on the board in the keynote this morning, and all of them, really, were bots (laughs) underneath. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Automation can do that. Have us look forward. How does the HPE roadmap and the Commvault roadmap, how much synergy with those visions? >> Yeah, so right now we're definitely running along some parallel lines. They'd probably fire me if I didn't get off-stage here without talking about InfoSight, because it's a huge investment for us. We think it's a huge opportunity. You guys have seen the proof in the pudding from that in terms of automated support, we've got predictive analytics now. So for us, the more that you can build in from an AI and ML perspective, we think the value is in a couple area. Certainly cross stack, so going all the way from the app down through the infrastructure, and we're providing that through InfoSight. And then we're also expanding some of the use cases to include things like secondary storage, right? So if you see, let's say we have a signature that we can see, right? A certain IO pattern, right? We'll make some predictive calls to the infrastructure to say hm, that looks like Ransomware. Maybe you should take a full clone of that and then encrypt it and shove it up in the cloud. Or the change rate on your database just elevated two orders of magnitude. Maybe I should think about moving some workloads that are adjacent to that off that system. So as we expand those and then allow that type of workflow to enable our partners as well, too, you can see where that value would head as well, too, where you start to integrate some of the telemetry from HPE, telemetry from a vendor and ISV partner like Commvault. You could do some really powerful things across the stack. >> All right, last thing for you, Patrick. You're going to be on the keynote tomorrow. Show us a little bit for our audience here what to expect from HPE. >> We talked a little bit about today, we're going to focus our talk tomorrow on some of the new consumption models, as as a service, and we're certainly going to highlight some of the things that we've done so far in AI and ML, certainly making the lives of our storage and data customers a lot easier, and a little bit of a vision as to where we're going with both of those two. >> All right, well Patrick, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us, and look forward to catching up at the next event. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault GO here in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)